JULY 2019 FORBES INDONESIA | 69mates its worth
at $300 million.
Perfect Snacks’
16 flavors of
$2.49 bars are
now sold in over
27,000 stores na-
tionwide, includ-
ing giants like
Target, Walmart,
Kroger and
Trader Joe’s.
The siblings’
father, Bud, came
up with the bars
while on an ex-
tended road trip
with his brood in
the ’90s. He had
quit his 9-to-5
marketing juic-
ers for Jack LaLanne, the fitness guru
and former TV-show host, to become
a traveling salesman of supplements
and omega oils and lecturer-cum-in-
spirational speaker about healthy liv-
ing. Rather than leave his family be-
hind, he packed the entire clan—then
seven children—into a 1982 21-foot
Dodge RV. On the road, Bud devel-
oped the recipe for the peanut-butter
bars, mixing in the protein powder he
sold to make them more nutritious.
The kids would sometimes sell themwe put into the business, the more we
could try and control our destiny.”
At the beginning, the Keiths didn’t
have much besides their drive. The
family of 15’s bank account? Nearly
empty. The family real estate? Heav-
ily mortgaged. Dad was sick with
cancer. (“We started because we were
financially in despair,” says Bill, 36,
who is CEO.) All they really had was
their father’s recipe for a peanut-but-
ter-based protein bar. And everyone
who knew the grocery business told
them it was doomed to fail.
Sure, the Keiths’ Perfect Bar tasted
great, but it needed to be kept refrig-
erated. That meant it would take up
valuable shelf space that would other-
wise go to yogurt or cold cuts, far from
where Clif and Power bars typically
lived. It was like asking stores to start
stocking cheese alongside cereal.
“Very few companies were really
designed to save a family from po-
tential starvation,” says Wayne Wu,
a partner at VMG, a San Francisco
private equity firm that invested in
Perfect Snacks in 2015. “It turned into
this American dream story. But it cer-
tainly was not an overnight success.”
Overnight or not, Perfect Snacks
is most definitely a success now. The
company did $84 million in 2018
sales, and Forbes conservatively esti-
around the neighborhood for pocket
money. (In one particularly good year,
they earned close to $2,200, helping
pay the family’s way to Disneyland.)
Bud sometimes added them as a free
bonus to supplement orders.
As the clan grew to 13 children,
Bud and Barbara Keith bought a
bed-and-breakfast in a small north-
ern California town but still relied on
Bud’s lectures to support the fam-
ily. Then Bud fell ill with melanoma
at 57. By 2005 it was so bad he had to
stop traveling. Soon the Keiths had a
mountain of medical bills and were
two months behind on their mort-
gage, with $1,000 in the bank and
nine kids under 18.
As Bud got sicker, the eldest chil-
dren stepped in. Bill, then a 22-year-
old junior on the basketball team at
College of the Redwoods, dropped out.
He was joined by Leigh, then 19, and
his siblings Amyas, 18, and Charisse, 17
(now Perfect Snacks’ senior director
of operations). They decided to ignore
the conventional wisdom and theirA RARE BREED
The size of the 15-member Keith clan behind Perfect Snacks would make it an outlier at any
point in American history, but especially now—when the average U.S. household has barely two
and a half inhabitants.SOURCES: UNITED STATES CENSUS BUREAU; FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF ST. LOUIS.23456
Average Number of People Per
Household, U.S.1790 1850 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2018No Holds Barred
Perfect Snacks pioneered refrigerated protein
bars; its snacks are now sold nationwide,
including in 8,500 Starbucks.