KIND Bars: Daniel Lubetzky — From Peace in the Middle East to a $5 Billion Snack Bar

Daniel Lubetzky set out to build a business that would foster peace between Israelis and Arabs, but he learned a painful lesson: consumers don't buy a mission, they buy a product they love. This episode of *How I Built This* traces Lubetzky's journey from founding PeaceWorks—a company built on sourcing ingredients from conflict-zone partners—to accidentally discovering a snack bar that would become KIND, a $5 billion brand. The conversation is intimate and reflective, with Lubetzky openly discussing his Holocaust-survivor father's influence, the near-collapse of his first business, and the brutal choice he faced when his only reliable revenue stream vanished overnight.

06:18A Father's Holocaust Survival and Its Lasting Imprint

Daniel Lubetzky was born in 1968 in Mexico City to a family of Eastern European Jewish immigrants. His father, Roman Lubetzky, was a Holocaust survivor who endured three years in the Dachau concentration camp as a teenager. Roman was one of only 1% of children his age to survive—his grandfather had lied to guards about his age, claiming he was 15½ when he was actually 12½, allowing him to work in a labor camp that built machines for the Nazi operation. After the war, Roman spent six months in a refugee camp before eventually settling in Mexico.

Lubetzky describes his father as a rare type of survivor: neither the kind who shut out the trauma nor the kind who became embittered. "He talked about it, and when he talked about it, it consumed them. But then he lived his life with kindness," Lubetzky recalls. Roman educated himself by watching movies with subtitles and reading borrowed encyclopedias cover to cover while working multiple factory shifts. He eventually partnered with four other Holocaust survivors to build a duty-free business on the U.S.-Mexico border, selling watches, liquor, cosmetics, and electronics.

This background shaped Lubetzky's worldview profoundly. "Even with epigenetics, there's a lot of studies about children of Holocaust survivors. We see the world differently," he says. "Part of my brain that worries is hyperactive about everything. I worry about democracy, about rule of law, about humanity, about how to fight injustice. It's just in my DNA."

17:40From Law School to the Oslo Accords: The Birth of PeaceWorks

Lubetzky attended Stanford Law School with the intention of becoming a diplomat focused on resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. He briefly practiced law at Sullivan & Cromwell, but when the Oslo Accords brought Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat together for the famous Rose Garden handshake in 1993, he was watching from Mexico and felt an urgent call to action. He took a leave of absence from the law firm and moved to Israel with a fellowship to pursue his theory: that economic cooperation between Israelis and Arabs could build meaningful pathways to peace.

The idea crystallized when Lubetzky discovered a sun-dried tomato spread in an Israeli supermarket. It was delicious, but the company had gone bankrupt. He tracked down the founder, Yoel Benesh, and proposed restarting the business—but this time sourcing ingredients from across the Middle East: sun-dried tomatoes from Turkey, olives from Palestinian farmers, glass jars from Egypt. Benesh agreed, and PeaceWorks was born.

The timing seemed perfect. "This was after 1993, after the Oslo peace process. It's hard to appreciate and remember how magical that time was," Lubetzky says. "You would go to Arab capitals and Arab towns and they wanted to do business with Israelis. I can't recall a single incident when somebody said, 'No, I don't want to deal with Israelis.'"

24:29The Hard Lesson: Why Mission Alone Doesn't Sell

PeaceWorks' first products—sun-dried tomato spread, basil pesto, and olive spread—were high quality, but the branding was a disaster. The jars were labeled "Moshe Pupik and Ali Mishmumkin's World Famous Gourmet Foods," complete with a fable about rival armies being pacified by the aroma of the spread. At the top of the lid, a tagline read: "Cooperation never tasted so good."

Lubetzky discovered a brutal truth about consumer behavior. "If you're too mission forward, consumers will give you one shot, but then they think they're doing you a favor," he explains. At street fairs in New York City, he would pitch the social mission and people would smile and keep walking. But when he started talking about the product's features—the taste, the quality—people would stop and try it. "The mission cannot be what drives the sale. It can be an added reason to believe, but it cannot be what drives the sale."

He also learned about distribution the hard way. After spending two hours convincing a Korean grocery store owner named Mr. Lee to buy 12 jars for $33, Lubetzky returned a week later to find none had sold. A month later, the jars were covered in dust. "That's when I started learning to think more long term and to think about where should this product fit and only be there for them," he says.

Despite these struggles, PeaceWorks was profitable every year except one—but only because Lubetzky paid himself a $24,000 salary. The business plateaued at around $1 million in annual revenue. He was so enamored with the social mission that he became his own worst enemy, starting ventures in multiple conflict zones instead of focusing on one product line and winning.

30:59The Overnight Collapse: Finding Revenue, Then Losing It

At a Natural Products Expo, Lubetzky tried an apricot yogurt almond bar called "Be Natural" and loved it. The Australian owner, Peter Sudarma, eventually convinced him to distribute the product in the U.S. as a separate division of PeaceWorks. It was a lifeline—suddenly, PeaceWorks was selling $500,000 to $1 million of this bar annually.

But then disaster struck. A company bought Be Natural and reformulated it, adding ingredients that were not approved by Whole Foods' strict standards. "We pleaded to them not to do so, but they didn't care," Lubetzky says. "In Australia, they sell predominantly to convenience stores. We explained that in the United States, it's going to kill our market. They said, 'Sorry, Daniel, but we have to do this.'" Whole Foods dropped the product, and all that revenue vanished overnight.

This was one of the darkest periods of Lubetzky's life. His father had recently passed away. The Second Intifada had broken out, bringing violence to the region he was trying to help. He had been at PeaceWorks for ten years and was exhausted. The team gathered—16 people around a table—and voted unanimously to give it one last shot. "A few months later, we designed it, and we launched what became KIND," he says.

36:47The Creation of the KIND Bar

The experience of losing control over Be Natural's manufacturing taught Lubetzky a critical lesson: he had to control his own destiny. "Up until that moment, I don't have control of the manufacturing ever. After I get my ass kicked here, I said, 'All right, I have to control the manufacturing. I control the formulas, I control the recipes.'"

The product concept was deceptively simple: whole nuts and fruit bound together in a bar. But manufacturing it was extraordinarily difficult. Most snack bars are made from an emulsion or paste that flows easily through production lines. KIND bars, with their whole almonds, required proprietary technology to preserve the integrity of the nuts without them oxidizing or going rancid. No U.S. manufacturer would take on the challenge, so Lubetzky returned to his Australian connections to produce the bars initially.

The packaging was equally revolutionary. KIND introduced a transparent wrapper that let consumers see the whole nuts and fruit inside—a bold move, since clear packaging is harder to engineer for product preservation and leaves less space for branding. "We wanted people to look at the product themselves and know, 'Oh, this is real. This is not like everything else. This is clearly high quality,'" Lubetzky explains. The name KIND was chosen to honor his father, with three pillars: kind to your body (healthful ingredients), kind to your taste buds (delicious), and kind to your world (ethical production).

47:36The Walmart Mistake and the Starbucks Breakthrough

In 2007, Walmart approached KIND directly. The buyer loved the product, but KIND wasn't ready. "One of the most significant dangers is when a buyer loves you because sometimes you're not ready," Lubetzky says. "You couldn't say no to Walmart." The company had no salespeople or systems to track whether product was actually selling through stores. Lubetzky learned a counterintuitive lesson: if a store reports zero sales, it might mean the product isn't selling—or it might mean the product never made it from the back room to the shelf. At Walmart, it was the latter. KIND failed miserably and was dropped.

The real breakthrough came from an unexpected source: Whole Foods didn't know where to merchandise KIND bars. They didn't fit in the nutritional bar set, so stores started putting them on checkout counter displays. "That was a huge, huge advantage," Lubetzky says. The small, compact displays turned over quickly—a $2 bar in a tiny rack could generate $500 in sales in minimal space. Retailers loved it.

But Lubetzky's obsession was Starbucks. For three or four years, he pursued a deal with the coffee giant, which at the time had 11,000 stores and sold no healthy snacks. "Unbeknownst to me, they liked us too much. They were trying to make their own versions," he says. Fortunately for KIND, Starbucks' internal efforts didn't pan out, and in 2009, KIND landed the account. That same year, KIND's sampling budget exploded from $800 to $800,000, and within a few years reached $20 million. "Anytime somebody tried a KIND bar, 9 out of 10 would fall in love with the brand, tell others about it, and within a month it would pay for itself," Lubetzky says.

55:43Scaling, Selling, and the Builders vs. Destroyers Framework

By 2012, KIND was doing $120 million in annual sales. Lubetzky brought in John Leahy as president and COO—a yin-yang partnership where Leahy handled operations while Lubetzky focused on creativity and marketing. "All of us are deeply insecure," Lubetzky reflects. "When you win is when you find people that are different from you and they're better than you."

The decision to sell to Mars was agonizing. Lubetzky hesitated until the last minute. The trigger was a trade show encounter: a Chinese businessman told him he was already selling KIND bars in China—millions of dollars worth—through a practice called cross-docking, where Costco sold container loads to a third party who shipped them overseas. KIND had no control over its own brand internationally. "If we didn't move fast enough, we were going to lose control over the brand globally," Lubetzky says. Mars bought a minority stake in 2017, a controlling stake in 2020, and the remaining shares in December 2024. Lubetzky is now fully divested financially but consults informally three times a year.

When asked about the state of Middle East peace—the original passion that started everything—Lubetzky acknowledges things are worse than ever. But he rejects both optimism and pessimism, calling himself an "actionist." He has evolved his framework from "moderates versus extremists" to "builders versus destroyers." "An extremist that wakes up in the morning thinking, 'How can I deny somebody else's humanity? How can I divide, demolish and diminish?' That's a destroyer. A person that wakes up in the morning saying, 'How can I build? How can I unite?' That's a builder." His current work focuses on this builder-versus-destroyer framework globally, and he hopes it will be his primary legacy—greater even than KIND.

Conclusion

This episode matters because it dismantles a romantic myth that many founders hold: that a powerful social mission can substitute for a great product. Lubetzky's journey shows that purpose must be the *added reason to believe*, not the primary reason to buy. His willingness to pivot—from PeaceWorks to distributing someone else's bar to building his own—demonstrates that staying alive as a business is often more important than staying pure to an original vision. The conversation also reveals the deep, often invisible influence of family history on entrepreneurial drive, and the humility of a billionaire who attributes much of his success to luck.

Key takeaways

• Consumers do not buy a mission; they buy a product they love. The social mission can be an added reason to believe, but it cannot drive the sale.
• Losing control of manufacturing nearly destroyed PeaceWorks; controlling formulas and recipes was essential to KIND's success.
• Saying "yes" to Walmart too early, without systems to track in-store sales, led to a costly failure.
• Checkout counter placement at Whole Foods and Starbucks was a breakthrough because KIND bars didn't fit existing merchandising categories.
• A scarcity mentality—hoarding cash and avoiding investment—can limit growth even when a product is succeeding.
• The best partnerships come from finding people who are different from you and better than you in their areas of expertise.
• Luck plays a gigantic role in building a multi-billion-dollar company; hard work and wit are necessary but not sufficient.