Rebuilding a $600M Company From Scratch | Peter Rahal, David

**Turner Novak** (0:02)
Peter, welcome to the show.

**Peter Rahal** (0:04)
Hi Turner, thank you for having me.

**Turner Novak** (0:06)
Thanks for coming on, this will be fun. You, real quick for people who don't know, you actually started two companies, but the company you're running right now, David, can you just real quick give us some 30 second context on it?

**Peter Rahal** (0:17)
Yep. So, David, our mission is to design tools that help you increase muscle, decrease fat, and we do that through a protein bar that has the highest protein to calorie ratio on the market.
So, what that looks like is a tool that's 150 calories, 20 grams of protein, and zero sugar.
So, that's our hero products, is the protein bar, but then we also have protein ice cream, which is really incredible. It tastes like the full fat, your kind of favorite, naughty ice cream, but with incredible nutrition. So, 30 grams of protein, 260 calories, and 2 grams of sugar.

**Turner Novak** (1:05)
So, that's a pretty bold claim, healthy ice cream.

**Peter Rahal** (1:09)
It actually is. Like from a strictly speaking nutritional profile, it's like a post-workout type of product.
So, that's David. We make different protein products that maximize this concept of like protein to calorie ratio. So, anywhere between 75 percent of the calories to 50 percent of the calories coming from protein.

**Turner Novak** (1:37)
How unique is that? Like what a food like protein foods normally have, or just generally food in general?

**Peter Rahal** (1:43)
Yeah. I mean, I'm protein bar. So, our gold bar is 75 percent of its calories coming from protein. So, the rest of the market would be around 45 percent of its calories coming from protein. You know, it's pretty easy to calculate. One gram of protein is four calories.
Carbohydrates and fats. Fats are nine, carbohydrates are four. So, it's actually just like a way to objectively measure food, in a way, versus the subjective like clean, bad, good, like food's quite a barbed-wired ideological place. And so really one of our missions at David is like to make it more intellectual and evidence-based rather than sort of like, you have these a heuristics that sort of aren't that sophisticated.

**Turner Novak** (2:40)
Yeah, it's interesting like the way the food is always branded. Yeah, like to your point, like clean or it's like non-GMO or free trade or something. It's like, oh, what does that even mean? Technically, you just say anything you want. It's like greenwashing.

**Peter Rahal** (2:53)
Yeah, completely, like clean can mean anything.
So yeah, like one of my first business was Rxbar, which one of the frustrations I had was like there was this utter confusion around nutrition and it was like, there was no definition and total misinformation. It's like it's not a real science and yeah, it just led to people sort of like these massive swings in nutrition culture. So wanted to build something really robust that was like really evidence-based.

**Turner Novak** (3:32)
And it's kind of crazy because I mean, in terms of like how big food is, it's just like a thing, like a market, like a category. Every single person eats probably, I don't know, two to six times a day. We spend in the US, it's like two to three-ish trillion depending on like how you measure certain things globally. It's like a lot of people, it's like 10% of their daily income or like 50% of their income is just spent on food and eating.
And it also, it's like goes in your body and it impacts how you grow. Like it's just everything. Food like is like upstream of everything. Everything flows from what you eat. And to your point, it's like we just kind of like make things up like, oh yeah, this is healthy. Like, don't worry about it.

**Peter Rahal** (4:14)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it really affects like, you know, it's like how is it organized? It's a macronutrients, micronutrients, calories and like those things all matter. More than the ancestry.

**Turner Novak** (4:26)
So and what's, what's kind of the scale of David like today? Like how do you talk about just like the current scale of the business?

**Peter Rahal** (4:35)
Yeah, like my first business, we were really secretive about it all. And now I just sort of say everything.
This is our second year. We'll do over 300 million this year, which is incredible. It's been like dog years here. It feels like it's been five years, but it's only our second year. So we're just domestic in the US. And yeah, we'll grow 300 percent this year.

**Turner Novak** (5:06)
Nice. I think, I think I saw you're thinking it'll be about 300 million in revenue this year, or in a year or two, I think is what it said.