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No Holds Barred
Perfect Snacks pioneered refrigerated protein bars; its snacks
are now sold nationwide, including in 8,500 Starbucks.
At the beginning, the Keiths didn’t have much
besides their drive. The family of 15’s bank ac-
count? Nearly empty. The family real estate?
Heavily mortgaged. Dad was sick with cancer.
(“We started because we were fi nancially in de-
spair,” says Bill, 36, who is CEO.) All they really
had was their father’s recipe for a peanut-butter-
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 refrigerated. That meant it
would take up valuable shelf space that would
otherwise go to yogurt or cold cuts, far from
where Clif and Power bars typically lived. It was
like asking stores to start stocking cheese along-
side cereal.
“Very few companies were really designed to
save a family from potential starvation,” says
Wayne Wu, a partner at VMG, a San Francisco
private equity fi rm that invested in Perfect
Snacks in 2015. “It turned into this American
dream story. But it certainly was not an over-
night success.”
Overnight or not, Perfect Snacks is most defi -
nitely a success now. The company did $84 mil-
lion in 2018 sales, and Forbes conservatively esti-
mates its worth at $300 million. Perfect Snacks’
16 fl avors of $2.49 bars are now sold in over
27,000 stores nationwide, including giants like
Target, Walmart, Kroger and Trader Joe’s.
The siblings’ father, Bud, came up with the bars
while on an extended road trip with his brood in
the ’90s. He had quit his 9-to-5 marketing juic-
ers for Jack LaLanne, the fi tness guru and former
TV-show host, to become a traveling salesman
of supplements and omega oils and lecturer-
cum-inspirational speaker about healthy living.
Rather than leave his family behind, he packed
the entire clan—then seven children—into a 1982
21-foot Dodge RV. On the road, Bud developed
the recipe for the peanut-butter bars, mixing in
the protein powder he sold to make them more
nutritious. The kids would sometimes sell them
around the neighborhood for pocket money. (In
one particularly good year, they earned close
to $2,200, helping pay the family’s way to Dis-
neyland.) Bud sometimes added them as a free
bonus to supplement orders.
As the clan grew to 13 children, Bud and Bar-
bara Keith bought a bed-and-breakfast in a small
northern California town but still relied on Bud’s
lectures to support the family. 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 mortgage, with $1,000 in the
bank and nine kids under 18.
As Bud got sicker, the eldest children stepped
in. Bill, then a 22-year-old junior on the basket-
ball team at College of the Redwoods, dropped
out. He was joined by Leigh, then 19, and his
siblings Amyas, 18, and Charisse, 17 (now Per-
fect Snacks’ senior director of operations). They
decided to ignore the conventional wisdom and
their father’s ten years of struggles in diff erent
HOW TO PLAY IT
According to
Bill Ackman
Instead of buying
into snack-food
fads, consider the
“infrastructure”
players like
Starbucks, which
sells Perfect Bars
and other high-
margin items like
Peter Rabbit fruit
snacks and Goodie
Girl Mint Slims.
Caff eine addicts
are on track to
spend nearly $5
billion on food in
its stores in 2019.
In October, hedge
fund billionaire Bill
Ackman of Persh-
ing Square un-
veiled a bet on the
roaster that now
stands at nearly
$1 billion. His cal-
culus? Starbucks
stores have the
best economics in
the restaurant in-
dustry. Its growth
has been split
between expan-
sion in the U.S. and
abroad (particu-
larly China) and
increased check
sizes as consumers
reach deeper into
their wallets for
drinks and snack
items like Perfect
Bars. Starbucks
has surged 50%
since Ackman’s
fund invested, and
Pershing Square
believes per share
profi t growth will
continue at a
healthy rate.
JUNE 30, 20 19
A RARE BREED
Little Big Picture
The size of the 15-member Keith clan behind Perfect
Snacks would make it an outlier at any point in Ameri-
can 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.
6
5
4
3
2
Average Number of
People Per
Household, U.S.
1790 1850 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2018