The Rotten Potato That Built a Billion-Dollar Company

When Daniel Lubetzky was deciding what to call the snack company he was about to launch, the word that kept returning to him was not a marketing term. It was a description of his father.

His father was Roman Lubetzky, a Jewish boy born in Riga, Latvia, in 1930 and raised in Kovno, Lithuania, where the family ran a small business making corsets. Roman was nine years old when the war began. When the Germans invaded Lithuania in 1941, the world he knew closed around him. The family was forced into the Kovno ghetto. When the ghetto was liquidated, they were sent to a labor camp, and from there, by cattle car, into the Dachau camp system in Germany.

It was there, somewhere in the middle of that machinery built to erase him, that something happened that Roman would carry for the rest of his life.

He was starving. By the end he was six feet tall and weighed somewhere around seventy or eighty pounds, a boy turning to bone. And one day, when no one was watching, a German soldier threw a rotten potato at his feet.

That was all. A half-spoiled potato, tossed to the ground near a dying prisoner by a man who could have been punished for it. Roman always said it kept him alive. Not only the food, though the food mattered. The thing that stayed with him was that a man in that uniform, in that place, had looked at him and seen a human being worth the risk.

Daniel has written about it plainly. The soldier risked punishment to throw that potato to a prisoner, and Roman always credited it with keeping him going. In his son's words, "that potato — that fleeting moment of kindness — helped him stay alive."

When Daniel launched his company in 2004, he named it KIND.

A boy who survived, and chose what to do with it

Roman Lubetzky was liberated at fifteen and a half. The end did not come at a camp gate. In the final days of the war, the guards marched the surviving prisoners into the mountains, and a freak spring blizzard descended. Roman, his father, and his brother burrowed under the snow to keep from freezing, and when morning came the guards were gone. The soldiers who found them belonged to the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, an American unit made up almost entirely of Japanese American soldiers, some of whose own families were being held in internment camps back home while they fought in Europe.

Roman spent time afterward in a sanatorium, recovering enough strength to live. Then, still a teenager, with relatives who had settled in Mexico, he made his way to Mexico City and began again from nothing.

What he built there was a life. He taught himself languages. He worked relentlessly. He raised a family. And the most remarkable thing about him, in his son's telling, was not that he survived but what he refused to become. He did not pass down bitterness. He passed down its opposite.

Daniel has put it this way: his father's life taught him that kindness and empathy are the foundations on which humanity will stand or fall.

That is the sentence underneath the company. Everything else is product.

The long way around to a snack bar

Daniel Lubetzky did not set out to sell food. He set out, improbably, to build peace.

He was born in Mexico City in 1968. As a boy he had a streak of the showman in him, performing magic tricks at parties under the name "The Great HouDani" and selling candy at a markup on the side. He moved to the United States as a teenager, studied at Trinity University, and went on to Stanford Law School. And then, instead of taking the path that degree opened for him, he went looking for a way to use business to bring enemies together.

His first venture, PeaceWorks, was built on a simple wager: if Israelis and Arabs had to cooperate to make and sell a product, the working relationship might do what politics could not. The company sold spreads and sauces made through exactly that kind of cross-border collaboration. It survived, but it never became large. What it gave Daniel was more durable than scale. It taught him that a business could be organized around a conviction, and that the conviction could outlast every hard quarter.

In 2003, frustrated that he could not find a snack that was both genuinely healthy and genuinely satisfying, he put a hundred thousand dollars of PeaceWorks money into developing his own. The idea was almost defiant in its simplicity: a bar made of whole nuts and fruit you could see through the wrapper, with nothing in it you could not pronounce. KIND launched the following year in a handful of Whole Foods stores, and for a long stretch Daniel was the man driving around restocking shelves and pressing samples on store managers himself.

The years it almost ended

The story that gets told about KIND is the clean one, where a good product simply wins. The real one had at least one moment where the whole thing nearly came apart.

Walmart placed a large order, and KIND was not yet built to fill it. Shipments went wrong. The retailer lost patience. And the timing could hardly have been worse, because the failure landed at the front edge of the 2008 financial crisis. To keep the company alive, Daniel sold a third of it to outside investors for fifteen million dollars. It worked. It also meant giving away a third of the thing he believed in at the precise moment belief was hardest.

KIND climbed back. Starbucks took the bars. Walmart returned. Target followed. By 2014 Daniel was in a strong enough position to buy back the stake he had sold under pressure six years earlier, this time for around two hundred and twenty million dollars.

Then came a different kind of fight. In 2015 the FDA told KIND it could no longer use the word "healthy" on its packaging, because the bars were too high in fat. The fat in question came from almonds. The agency's rule, written years earlier, did not distinguish between the fat in a nut and the fat in a candy bar. Daniel could have quietly complied. Instead he challenged the rule directly, filing a formal petition. About a year later the FDA reversed itself. A company called KIND, it turned out, was not built to back down from something it believed was true.

In 2017 the food giant Mars took a major stake. The valuation, by the time the arrangement was complete, reached into the billions.

What he was actually selling

There is a version of this story that is purely a business case. A bar that opened a new category. A founder who stocked his own shelves and doubled revenue year after year. A fight with a federal agency. An exit most people will never imagine.

All of that is true and none of it is the center.

Daniel has said that pursuing what you believe in is itself a kind of success, regardless of how it turns out, and that a real sense of purpose can make a person almost impossible to defeat. He was not describing a marketing plan. He was describing the reason the company survived every moment it should not have.

The clear wrapper was never only a design choice. It was an argument you could hold in your hand: nothing hidden, nothing you cannot see, what it claims to be is what it is. That idea did not come from a branding session. It came from a man who grew up hearing what the world becomes when people stop seeing each other, and who decided to spend his life building the opposite case.

Years after the company became a giant, Daniel still travels with cases of KIND bars and hands them out to strangers himself. He has said he is half afraid that the day he stops will be the day he has become someone else.

That is not how a man behaves about a snack.

That is how a man behaves about an inheritance.

Three things worth taking from Daniel Lubetzky

1. A name can be a promise rather than a label. Most companies arrive at their names last, after the focus groups and the trademark searches. Daniel started with his. KIND was not a position in the market; it was a commitment made to his father's memory before the thing it described even existed. And because the name meant something, it did real work. It told him to fight the FDA rather than fold. It told him to refuse the cheaper ingredients. A name chosen for what it stands for, rather than how it tests, becomes a spine. It holds the body upright when the pressure comes.

2. One generation hands the next something larger than money. Roman Lubetzky survived Dachau, arrived in a new country with nothing, and built a life with a third-grade education and an iron will. The miracle his son points to is not the survival. It is the refusal to let what was done to him decide what he would do to others. He could have transmitted rage, and no one would have judged him for it. He transmitted kindness instead, on purpose, through the stories he chose to tell and the way he chose to live. That inheritance happened to take the shape of a fruit and nut bar. It could have taken almost any shape. The point is that it traveled, intact, from a frozen field in Bavaria to a shelf in an American grocery store, carried by one man's decision about what kind of person to be. That is the most consequential thing a parent can pass down, and it cannot be put in a will.

3. Purpose is not decoration. It is what holds when everything else gives way. A company without a real reason to exist tends to drift the moment things get hard, optimizing for survival until the thing worth saving has quietly disappeared. KIND kept making it through, the Walmart collapse and the financial crisis and the regulatory fight, because there was always a question underneath every decision that was simpler than strategy: does this move us toward what we are, or away from it. Daniel still hands out bars to strangers not out of nostalgia but as a way of keeping himself honest, reminding himself that the purpose was never the sale. The sale was the proof. The purpose was the point.