Latest news with #PeterRahal
New York Times
27-07-2025
- Health
- New York Times
The Protein Bar Arms Race
In late August 2024, the physician and longevity guru Peter Attia posted a new reel for his 1.3 million Instagram followers, featuring a close-up of a stack of golden boxes, each about the size of a hardcover book, piled up on a marble countertop. The image stood out; Mr. Attia's grid consists mostly of snippets from his popular podcast, The Drive, and straight-to-camera clips of him sharing advice on topics like zone 2 cardio training or the importance of getting regular colonoscopies. 'Pretty awesome day in the Attia household,' he said from behind the camera. 'Just received, yesterday, the first official shipment of the new David bar.' These protein bars would become available to the public in a few weeks, Mr. Attia explained, and the teenagers in his home — a demographic not known to be obsessed with optimal nutrition — had been devouring his supply. 'I think these are just awesome, and I am really excited for people to start trying these things,' he said. The David bar, created by the RXBar co-founder Peter Rahal and a Keto cookie entrepreneur named Zach Ranen, was diving into a marketplace already up to its eyeballs in protein. In recent years, protein supplementation has crossed the species barrier from fitness-coded products like bars into everyday foods. Today's supermarkets offer high-protein frozen waffles, breakfast cereals, popcorn, pastas, ice cream — even protein-enhanced soda and candy. According to the market research firm Mintel, the number of food and beverage products coming to market with a high protein claim quadrupled between 2013 and 2024. The protein maximizer can now begin her day with a Legendary Foods Brown Sugar Cinnamon Breakfast Pastry (20 grams of protein), move on to Immi's pea protein-based instant ramen for lunch (24 grams), snack on Wilde chips made from chicken and egg white (10 grams), and microwave a Vital Pursuit high-protein frozen pepperoni pizza (22 grams) for dinner — all, to borrow Michael Pollan's aphorism, without eating anything her great-grandmother would have recognized as food. But for the protein-obsessed, the bar still reigns supreme. The category-leading protein bar, Quest, tops out at 21 grams of protein for 180 calories: almost as much protein as a McDonald's Big Mac, for less than half the calories. 'We knew we could do more,' Mr. Rahal said recently, during a visit to the brand's offices in Manhattan. 'The question is, what's the upper limit?' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Entrepreneur
24-07-2025
- Business
- Entrepreneur
David Protein Is Now Selling Frozen Cod Fillets
David Protein is now selling frozen cod fillets. Is it a marketing ploy or the start of a new trend? Gen Z is obsessed with eating more protein (at least on TikTok), and now brands from Pepsi to Starbucks are adding it to foods and changing packaging to cash in on the trend. Some are even adding a whole new product. David Protein, which sells a line of popular high-protein snack bars (and claims it has more protein per calorie than any bar on the market), now sells something with even more protein — cod. Related: Starbucks Is Looking to Remove Seed Oils From Some of Its Food Products After hearing feedback from customers who were trying to avoid processed foods, David Protein CEO and co-founder Peter Rahal told the Wall Street Journal that the company was looking to do "something bold that sparks the conversation" while finding a new product. Rahal, who previously founded Rxbar, which sold to Kellogg for $600 million, said they found it with cod. The 6-ounce frozen fillets have 23 grams of protein. David Protein's wild-caught Pacific cod is sourced from a sustainable fishing company, according to the company. It sells in a four-pack for $55 online and is marketed as having "slightly more protein per calorie than a David bar." The fillets need to be boiled before consuming. Keagan Tigges, chief of staff at David, told National Fisherman that the price "reflects direct, traceable sourcing and peak freshness." Related: Coca-Cola Is Releasing Coke Made with Cane Sugar. Here's When It's Expected in Stores. "Most of our customers are in the continental U.S., where high-quality cod is harder to find and often more expensive and expensive to ship from Alaska," Tigges said. "This is a premium, ultra-lean protein source for people serious about building muscle and reducing fat." How much protein you actually need depends on your weight and lifestyle factors, according to the Mayo Clinic. On average, protein should account for 10% to 35% of your calories. If taking in 2,000 calories a day, it averages to around 200 to 700 calories from protein, or approximately 50 to 175 grams. Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success.
L'Orient-Le Jour
24-07-2025
- Business
- L'Orient-Le Jour
Peter Rahal's protein bar business now valued at $725 million
At the end of May, Lebanese-American entrepreneur Peter Rahal's company David — named after Michelangelo's masterpiece — which specializes in protein bar production, announced it had raised $75 million, valuing the business at $725 million after only nine months on the brings the total funding since its September 2024 launch to $85 million, as the New York-based company is poised to reach $100 million in revenue during its first year of years after making a joint investment of $10,000 with a childhood friend, the Chicago-born American of Lebanese origin now finds himself at the helm of a company he hopes soon to take public and value at several billion dollars. Lebanese entrepreneurs Naya raises $195 million to expand Lebanese food chain across the US This is just another step in an...
Mint
24-07-2025
- Business
- Mint
A hot protein bar company has added a wild new product: frozen cod fillets
David Protein has begun selling frozen fillets of raw cod alongside its fudge brownie and blueberry pie bars. The company since introducing its bars last September has won a large following of customers, but at times has heard criticism from some critics of processed food. It is now selling four pieces of wild-caught Pacific cod sourced from a sustainable fishing company at $55 online, where it also charges $39 for a box of 12 protein bars. Its fish also recently became available at Happier Grocery in New York City. Billboards promoting the product say 'Boiled cod. Slightly more protein per calorie than our bars." David co-founder and Chief Executive Peter Rahal, who previously co-founded RXBAR and sold it to Kellogg for $600 million, spoke to The Wall Street Journal about the marketing message behind its push. The interview has been edited and condensed. WSJ: What led up to launching cod on your website? Peter Rahal: Ultimately, people want an easy way to get protein, because it turns out it's quite hard. In our product, 75% of our calories are coming from protein. To contextualize that product performance against the broader food landscape, processed or unprocessed, we put a comparison table on our website. Our chief science officer was like, 'Well, what has a better protein-to-calorie ratio than our bar?" We started searching, and he found boiled cod. Obviously it had to be boiled. If you sauté it in butter, it doesn't work. So we placed it there. It was kind of an Easter egg. David's fish recently began being offered at New York's Happier Grocery. WSJ: When did you decide to actually sell it? Rahal: I felt we were getting stale a bit. I was like, 'We've gotta do something bold that sparks the conversation.' That was around April. Then we mobilized. We needed to find the good, high-quality raw material. We needed to figure out the planning. We needed to figure out frozen logistics. We ended up putting them up for sale in mid-July. It's not a gimmick—it is a gimmick, but we're actually seriously selling cod. Time will tell if the market likes it or not. WSJ: You've weighed in online responding to critics who point at David being a processed food. How does the cod fit into that? Rahal: Most of the conversations on nutrition are often really emotional, and we think it's important to have an intellectual view. People use buzzwords and binary thinking: 'Processed is bad, natural is good," and that frame is just outdated or unhelpful. Nearly everything we eat is processed anyway, and you need it for food safety, so it's just not helpful. What actually matters is what's in the food. When we launched the protein bar, some of our critics were from the ancestral nutrition crowd. Selling cod allowed us to address and respond to the criticism in a clever way. It's our tongue-in-cheek innovation that reinforces the same three principles that really matter in protein bars—convenience, price and taste. WSJ: I imagine shipping cod to consumers is not a simple feat. Rahal: We worked with Fisherman Kyle and sourced high-quality wild-caught cod, and then we branded it too. Insulation is super important to keep temperature, and then you pack it with dry ice, and you do it overnight. WSJ: How are you marketing this push? Rahal: What I really love about the campaign is that it's like a giant riddle. The big push was literally just making a product, and then the photo shoot. As a marketer, I think it's important to not overdo it. Internally, some ideas are like, 'Let's get some merch and…" and it's like, no, no, no, too much. WSJ: What are you hoping people take away from this? Rahal: If you're sitting at home all day and have all the time to prepare fresh foods, great—that should be the way to eat. No one's arguing that. But it turns out it's really hard to do that, and it turns out it's really expensive, and it's hard to get that amount of protein. On a fundamental level, it's ultimately a clever way to communicate to consumers the surplus that the brand creates. What would you actually pay in the market for 20 grams of protein?
Forbes
22-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Special Education To $600M Exit: How RXBAR's Dyslexic Founder Outsmarted The Protein Industry
In 2013, while food corporations were pouring millions into marketing campaigns, Peter Rahal was in his parents' basement with just $10,000, three ingredients, and an insight that would disrupt a billion-dollar industry. Just four years later, he sold RXBAR to Kellogg's for $600 million. What few knew was that Rahal had spent his early school years in special education classes, struggling with a system that—back in the '90s—wasn't prepared to support and understand dyslexic children. 'It was sort of like, He's not putting in effort,' Rahal shared of his teachers during our conversation on The Failure Factor podcast. 'I was in a class with like, actually disabled people. And so I was labeled 'disabled.' The whole system was not designed for my brain or my sort of neuro[divergence]," That misinterpretation had deep emotional consequences for Rahal, but instead of leaning into the limiting label, he lit a fire: 'F the system. I'll show the system's wrong'. And prove the system wrong he did. His heroic journey from educational outcast to entrepreneurial icon left Rahal among a category of notable dyslexic entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, and Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran (all of whom have publicly discussed their dyslexia). This isn't coincidental—up to 35% of entrepreneurs identify as dyslexic, compared to just 10% of the general population. That early educational experience formed the bedrock of what would later become Rahal's entrepreneurial edge. Instead of trying to conform to a system that marginalized him, he developed a deep skepticism of established norms. "I think some of my contrarian nature is rooted in that I just question and am skeptical of things. That was the way to protect myself," he explained. This psychological adaptation echoes why many dyslexics gravitate toward entrepreneurship. Dyslexic individuals often struggle in traditional employment environments, where they may face discrimination or restrictive structures. Starting their own businesses allows them to create environments tailored to their strengths, control their work processes, and bypass gatekeepers who might underestimate their abilities. The RXBAR origin story illustrates how Rahal's heightened pattern recognition capabilities—a strength often associated with dyslexia—enabled him to identify an overlooked market opportunity: "I remember a very specific moment. I'd go to my CrossFit gym, and there was a box of Clif Bars. Some sales rep had dropped them off, and it just sat there. Like it was almost like it was poison," he recalled. 'Everyone had this aversion towards it, and no one touched it.' The standard protein bars of the time were antithetical to paleo principles—packed with processed ingredients, artificial sweeteners, soy proteins, and chemical preservatives. Rahal recognized that this growing community had nutritional needs that weren't being met by mainstream options. This wasn't just a niche observation—at the time, CrossFit was growing rapidly, creating an exponentially expanding market of nutrition-conscious consumers that traditional protein bar makers were completely overlooking. With just $10,000 split between himself and childhood friend Jared Smith, they began crafting paleo-friendly protein bars in Rahal's parents' basement. Rather than following the conventional playbook of seeking venture capital and spending heavily on marketing, they bootstrapped their way to success by doubling down on product quality over promotion. When I asked him when they ultimately decided to put money toward marketing, Rahal response shocked me: 'We never did," he said, maintaining the company did not allocate significant marketing budget until after its acquisition. In a world where mediocre products are launched with multi-million-dollar campaigns, Rahal's approach conveys the most basic—yet often forgotten—entrepreneurial principles: Make something people need, make it well, and put it in a place they can find it. Success will follow. RX Bar Current Packaging RX Bar Perhaps Rahal's most recognizable strategic move came through RXBAR's minimalist packaging redesign. Whereas competitors relied on flashy packaging and brand positioning, RXBAR stripped everything away to list their clean ingredients on the front in bold type, followed by 'No B.S.' Rahal's transparency-focused strategy wasn't entirely without precedent. Companies like Patagonia had pioneered radical transparency in the apparel industry while Tony's Chocolonely built their chocolate brand around exposing and addressing slave labor in cocoa production. But RXBAR's execution in the protein bar space represented something revolutionary in packaged food. While other brands spent millions trying to convince consumers their products were healthy, RXBAR simply showed them the truth. This strategy proved devastatingly effective to competitors, with the company growing from $2 million in sales in 2014 to $160 million in 2017 and capturing 14% of all online health bar sales, making it the second-largest brand in the category only to Quest Nutrition. Rahal's pursuit of perfection became legendary in the protein bar industry. He insisted on exhaustive testing and refinement until every detail met his exacting standards. This uncompromising commitment extended to every aspect of the business. Early in RXBAR's history, Rahal famously fired his own mother when she couldn't align label stickers properly on the packaging. "Bless her heart, she's an amazing woman, but our customers don't want to buy a product with a label that's not centered," he told CNBC Make It in a 2018 interview. This seemingly harsh decision represented his refusal to compromise on quality, even when it was uncomfortable. "I don't really celebrate," he admitted when I asked about acknowledging successes. "I just keep charging forward." But was this perfectionism purely productive, or did it serve another purpose? When I gently probed whether there might be something protective in his inability to celebrate, he acknowledged: 'When things are going well, I get paranoid, you know…Celebrating doesn't do anything to move you forward.' Sound familiar? It's a common pattern among high-achievers who've been made to feel "Not good enough" early in life: success never feels secure enough to relax into. And for someone driven by proving doubters wrong, a $600 million exit wasn't an ending—it was validation to go bigger. Thus, after selling RXBAR to Kellogg's for $600 million, Rahal didn't cash out and retire. Today, with David Protein, he's taking on the entire category again—this time with a scientific approach designed to create the most efficient protein bar possible. "The market's at twenty grams of protein. We're at twenty-eight. The market's at 200 calories. We're at 150 calories. Those are meaningful differentiations," he explained with characteristic directness. This approach illustrates Rahal's consistent strategy: identify the key metrics consumers care about, then objectively outperform on those metrics without the marketing fluff. "I think my work ethic is more from just trying to prove that I'm not disabled, really," Rahal explains with rare and refreshing candor. This determination to show what he was capable of—despite being labeled and underestimated—became the engine behind his success. The boy once relegated to special education demonstrated that his different way of seeing patterns and questioning established systems was precisely what allowed him to revolutionize an industry that desperately needed fresh thinking. Sometimes the very traits that initially make success seem unlikely become the precursors to the advantages that make it inevitable. That's worth celebrating, even if he won't. Megan Bruneau, M.A. Psych is a therapist, executive coach, and the founder of Off The Field Executive & Personal Coaching. She hosts The Failure Factor podcast featuring conversations with entrepreneurs about the setbacks that led to their success. Listen to her episode with The RXBAR cofounder Peter Rahal on Apple and Spotify.
