Daniel Lubetzky

From San Antonio Express News on the business of peace:

Yvan Cournoyer, business development manager for H-E-B, said the South Texas grocer had known of Kind bars for some time and began selling them in select stores in 2002. “The bar became more prominent in the energy bar segment,” Cournoyer said. “Last year, it was one of the best sellers for the H-E-B stores that had it. So at the beginning of 2008, we made a strategic decision to bring it to the vast majority.”

…

“So in a few short years, it went from being this obscure product to mainstream,” Cournoyer said. “It’s a very sought after energy bar that tastes great and is very healthy for you. At the same time, there’s a great story behind the Kind company.”

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Rachael Ray, host of the second highest rated daytime show behind Oprah with an average daily audience of 2.6 million people, discovered KIND bars and passionately praised them:

These are DE-LI-CIOUS… …Yum. They are sooo good… …And they are delicious and very nutritious.

- Rachael Ray

In fifteen years since founding PeaceWorks I’ve never seen a line get such swift wide acceptance.

KIND PLUS is gaining such traction because it’s the only line in the functional and nutritional bar category made of all wholesome ingredients you can see and pronounce.(TM) 

What does this mean?  All other lines in the category are "slab bars" – made of emulsions of hodge-podges of blends of undetectable ingredients.  Why? Well, it’s much less expensive and easier to make a bar from emulsions – from date paste (in the more noble cases) down to chemical compounds and artificial ingredients like high fructose corn syrup. But you lose integrity, nutritional value, texture and taste.

It seems deceptively simple to provide functional properties – like Omega-3, Anti-Oxidants, Protein, B-Complex, or Calcium – in a bar made of all natural fruits and nuts, without adulteration or emulsion.  But it was a challenging effort.  After several years of development, we achieved it.

You can learn more about KIND PLUS here.

Suzanne Vita Palazzo of Grocery Headquarters wrote an article surveying some of the leading food companies with a social mission and mentioned KIND and PeaceWorks as a pioneer "revolutionizing the business model for an ethical brand."

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A new site just launched that analyzes food product labels for ingredients that may or may not be good for you.  Too many items pose as "healthy" while containing ingredients like high fructose corn syrup which labelwatch exposes here as not healthful.

The site is not perfect yet; it’s search engine is clunky; and it still is missing KIND Fruit & Nut bars, which are the #1 Healthy Snack bar line (in terms of market share growth of entire space over each of the last 3 years, and #3 in overall size already in natural industry, according to SPINS, IRI and Nielsen).  But it is a good start.

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Thanks to Stacy Perman for a profile about PeaceWorks, KIND, and OneVoice in BusinessWeek yesterday.

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I like these quotes from our very own Phil Walotsky on this week’s issue of Food Business News:

"Healthy snacking is very hot," said Phil Walotsky, spokesperson for KIND Fruit + Nut bars, PeaceWorks Holdings, New York. "Where we see a great deal of our growth is adoption by casual consumers who look for a healthy option with emphasis on taste and natural ingredients. We’re finding that nutrition bars are being used less as an activity-specific food — for example, something you only eat after a workout — and more people are adding them as a staple of their diet."

And:

"We also believe consumers will continue to become more educated about the food they purchase, and will reward companies that produce healthy snacks that reflect their more discerning desires, tastes and values," Mr. Walotsky said. "Consumers will continue to look for products that are less processed and foods that don’t contain suspect ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oils, and instead turn to foods with integrity that taste great and provide real nutritional value."

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Pom Wonderful did something, err, wonderful for the food industry by fighting to uphold the standards of the category in which it leads, pomegranate juice, to the point of successfully suing unscrupulous new entrants who tried to ride on its coattails by marketing lower grade products as if they were the real thing:

"Consumers buy the products to gain the health benefit – if that is not present then there are problems for the category. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be more active in this area but we all know how under resourced they are. We are trying to protect the integrity of the category." Rob Six, spokesperson for Pom Wonderful

"Purely Juice", a company that claimed to sell purely pomegranate juice that was in fact primarily cane sugar and corn sweetener was ordered to pay $1.5mm to Pom.

The category for healthful snacks where KIND leads gets similarly hurt when consumers are duped into buying "natural" "nutritional" and "energy" bars whose ingredients contain refined sugars like high fructose corn syrup and refined flowers and hydrogenated oils, contributing to the diabetes and obesity epidemics overtaking America.  Similar enforcement action should follow for companies – big or small – that manipulate what it means to be "all natural" and "healthful."

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Two articles recently posted on PeaceWorks and OneVoice and our efforts…

JEWCY.COM: Peace Through Pesto: Daniel Lubetzky Schools Us on Building Bridges and Empowering Moderates,  by Helen Jupiter, July 11, 2008

and

JERUSALEM POST, Don Quixote comes to Israel, Jul 24, 2008, by Heather Robinson

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Today we received some samples of interesting products from Turkey: fruits stuffed with nuts.  I thought they were great possible additions to our healthy snacks family – minimally processed, all natural, flavorful, just sun dried.  But it was funny (and sad) that in informal focus groups, most consumers were turned off by the look of the dried figs and encrusted walnuts.  Ok, dried figs and walnuts may well look like coarse mummy brains as some of my team members were saying.

  But it seems like some people are getting too used to over-processed artificially created surfaces that are smooth, brightly bleached and homogenous.  It is interesting that, while there is a huge backlash against these overly-processed products, some consumers have almost gotten hypnotized into expecting factory-bland looks, without recognizing the health implications.  It is almost as if we are being conditioned to expect the factory look, rather than the natural.