Clif Bar

“So halfway around the block, I decided not to sell the company, and then I felt completely free.”

“We got a deal, we got an offer for a hundred and twenty million dollars on forty million dollars in sales.”

“And it took us nine years to pay off that thing.”

“So we tried to make it in our bakery, we just didn't have the equipment to do it. So I found a bakery down the street that agreed to help me produce it, like a, like almost like a cookie bakery. And we leveraged the packaging companies and said, We'll pay you.…”

“We almost doubled sales for the next eight years in a row.”

“So we named it Cliff Bar after my dad. My dad's name is Clifford Erickson.”

“My father gave me off his credit card, 20,000 dollars, but most of it, I, man, I look back, and I kind of think, how did I pull this off?”

“A real good friend that I was working with named Doug Gilmore, you know, we, I helped him out with some of the advertising for the bicycle company, and I knew that he was very, very creative person. I said, you need to design the package for me, and he came up…”

“And in 2010, he and his wife Kit handed over 20% of the company to their employees.”

“So I did a handshake deal with a distributor in, you know, early nineties where it ended up biting me because they weren't performing. And so I canceled their quote contract and they came back and sued me for ownership.”

“By the end of 1992, we sold 700,000 dollars of Clif Bars.”

“Secondly, my partner wanted out, so I had to negotiate a deal, and so that was seven months of negotiation, and third was I had to go out as, Our attorney says, dialing for dollars. I had to go find sixty million dollars.”

“The power of a business done the right way Is way more powerful than two rich people.”

“Power Bar was already, already sold, and Balance Bar was sold, so it was just, it was kind of just us as the third.”

“This is the first time that our business model is put to kind of a full test. Like, it's easy when you're like, not easy, but, so we have this five bottom lines business model, you know, sustaining our business, our brands, our people, our community, and our p…”

“And then as soon as you can take some action and don't sit on things because we don't have time to sit on things. We've been making decisions where we have to act now or tomorrow. And if we wait three days, sorry, we're screwed. So Adapt and take some action.”

“So far, we've given out in the first part of March, 3.6 million bars to food banks and healthcare workers and frontline. And then we're on another, we're on the second round. We're now committed another three million.”

“We had a team of 25 people around the country, and then they had local people that they would hire for the weekend events, and I really think that's what put us on the map, but our product was, ah, inexpensive enough where we could actually give out whole bars…”

“So we did some print ads and we did a print ad called It's Your Body, You Decide. And it was going directly after Power Bar. And in five days, we had a lawsuit against Power Bar.”

“Kit and I never took, A dime from anybody over our 30 years of running Clif Bar, , we never brought on an equity partner.”

“We just, we never did not grow for 30 years.”

“And we had 700 accounts in like months. And our goal Sounds very aggressive, but we're, our goal is to put them out of business, and for the first 10 to 15 years, our people were like, we are going to just go after their market share everywhere we could”

“That's when Laura Bar had just come around, and Cliff Bar was here, but we're all kind of new, you know, and vegan was new. And they said, you know, go to Whole Foods and see what the bars are like. There's, it's growing. It's becoming a bigger category.”