793 Will Nitze: Founder & CEO of IQBAR

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin Show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs.

0:46Kara Goldin:Hiring can be one of the most important and time consuming parts of running a business. As you think about what your team needs heading into 2026, whether that means growing or getting more focused, making the right hire matters more than ever. LinkedIn Jobs helps take the guesswork out of that process. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can identify strong candidates faster and higher with confidence. You're not just filling open roles, you're building a team that sticks. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30 % more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor. And that kind of retention really adds up.

1:29Kara Goldin:And finding the right hire doesn't have to feel overwhelming. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your roles, specific criteria, and highlights top matches. So you're not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you're running a business, you need a hiring process that's fast and focused. LinkedIn's AI assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It's a smarter, faster way to hire, and it's why I rely on LinkedIn Jobs.

2:10Kara Goldin:Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Kara Golden to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Golden Show. Today, I'm so excited to be joined by Will Nitza, who is the founder and CEO of an incredible, incredible company, products called IQ Bar, a functional nutrition brand that's grown into a nine-figure business in just a few short years by doing something surprisingly rare, making products that are actually effective, clean, and accessible.

3:03Kara Goldin:So Will didn't set out to chase trends. He started IQ Bar in 2018 after struggling with fatigue in a traditional nine-to-five role and realizing that most convenient food options were working against its focus and energy. I cannot wait to hear more about that. And since starting the company, IQ Bar has sold over 100 million bars, expanded into hydration mixes, coffee, lots of good categories and also available in Costco in a very small, short time. Partnered with Michelin-starred chefs. So much going on. Will is really taking the bull by the horns and making IQ Bar stand out in a super crowded, not just one category, but multiple categories.

4:00Kara Goldin:So, So excited to talk to Will a lot more about what IQ Bar is doing. So thanks so much for joining, Will. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So to start in 30 to 60, give or take, how do you describe IQ Bar and the problem that you really set out to solve? Sure. Well, how I would describe it now is we're a brain and body nutrition platform. form bars are our hero line but like you said we do hydration we do coffee but everything we do has to check a bunch of boxes so has to be good for the brain and body and functionally good for the brain and body it has to be clean label it has to be affordably priced and it has to taste good and then there's a bunch of more unit economic based stuff has to ship efficiently has to be small cubic inches, yada, yada, yada.

4:55But that's how I would describe it. Now, what I set out to do was just create brain food like that, as simple as that. And I can get into how that changed in the evolution from A to B, but that's the long and short of it.

5:09Kara Goldin:So, yeah. So I'd love to have you take us back to those pre-IQ bar days. What was happening in your own life and how did this all come about? Yeah, I mean, so it was a confluence of many things. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always wanted to be my own boss. I didn't know how to do that or what my calling was. And I couldn't figure it out by the end of college. And so I took a job in software sales, sales and marketing. And so I was selling B2B software to oil and gas companies. So just about as different from what I do now as possible. But it was a great thing because I learned what it's like to work for someone and how does a company operate and how do you write a good email and how do you run a good meeting and how do you motivate employees and just like all that bedrock stuff.

5:57I'm so glad that I did that. And I did that for three and a half years. But at the same time, I knew I can't do this. I can't do this for 30, 40, 50 years. Like I will never be happy doing this. And I read a couple books that also changed my trajectory of my thinking One was Mission in a Bottle by Seth Goldman and Barry Nailbuff, the Honest Tea guys. And I really related to Seth. We both went to Harvard undergrad. We had the same major. His first job, he was not really passionate about. And then he started Honest Tea and they had all these ups and downs. And then they had this beautiful exit to Coke.

6:38And I was like, I just want to be that guy. Like, I just want to do what that guy did. And so I started tinkering around with beverage ideas. and you know this far better than I do, but quickly it became apparent that the economics were challenging, to say the least. And so I then morphed into food and I was always mostly interested in the brain-gut connection, how the things we eat affect our brain, much more so than what most people focus on, which is what does it do to your waistline, building muscle, things like that. I was more interested in how well do I think after lunch? And then what is my brain like in 40 years when I've consumed diet X versus Y versus Z?

7:24So yeah, that just sort of gave way to this obsession over brain food and had no data that the market wanted it, that it was a good idea, nothing. But yeah, I did a Kickstarter and that was what launched it and quit my job and the rest is history.

7:42Kara Goldin:This episode of the Kara Golden Show is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Hiring can be one of the most important and time-consuming parts of running a business. As you think about what your team needs heading into 2026, whether that means growing or getting more focused, making the right hire matters more than ever. LinkedIn Jobs helps take the guesswork out of that process. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can identify strong candidates faster and higher with confidence. You're not just filling open roles, you're building a team that sticks. In fact, LinkedIn hires are 30 % more likely to stay at least a year compared to the leading competitor.

8:26Kara Goldin:And that kind of retention really adds up. And finding the right hire doesn't have to feel overwhelming. With LinkedIn Jobs' AI Assistant, you can skip the guesswork and jargon. It filters candidates based on your roles, specific criteria, and highlights top matches, so you're not wasting time digging through endless resumes. When you're running a business, you need a hiring process that's fast and focused. LinkedIn's AI Assistant delivers 25 strong candidate suggestions each day, giving you the chance to invite the right people to apply and keep the process moving. It's a smarter, faster way to hire, and it's why I rely on LinkedIn Jobs.

9:11Kara Goldin:Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash Kara Golden. Then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash Kara Golden to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. So what was the first idea that you had for, I guess, using ingredients in IQ Bar, but what was kind of the form that you decided to go with first? So the RX Bar case study was a great one because it happened right as I was starting. And it got me interested in the bar category because I wanted to build something big.

9:55And so bars were certainly a big category. And I didn't really know where to start. So I just, I just went and I bought a bunch of bars and looked at the back of them. And this is the beauty, beauty of food and Bev. You know, the answers to the test are to some degree, just sitting right in front of you. And I got a starting point of like, how do you create a bar? How do you create a base of a bar? How do you make a bar stick together? How do you make a bar last a long time? Um, and then I, but then of course I, you have to be different. And so I started thinking through, okay, if this is going to be brain food, what does that actually mean?

10:30That could mean 10 different things. You could be a nutraceutical, you could be a supplement, uh, you could be a food product. And, um, and so my, my approach for better or worse was, okay, just look at the data of what nutrients, micronutrients as well as macronutrients have been shown to be good for the brain. And so there are just things like omega-3s, magnesium, flavonoids, etc. that there's just quite a bit of data suggesting that it's good for the brain. Okay, cool. So I have these like 10 things. What are the whole food ingredients richest in those 10 things? So for vitamin E, it might be almonds or sunflower seeds.

11:12For flavonoids, it might be blueberries or matcha. you know so on and so forth and and then so i had a list of uh ingredients and i was like cool can i mash those together and make a bar out of it like my thinking was as simple as that and it was very like spreadsheet based i have no idea how other well i have some idea now but um my sense is that's very different than how most people formulate products um but it also created a lot of early like false positives. So for example, curcumin is a grape for your brain. It's a derivative of turmeric. The problem is it stains your fingers yellow when it's in a bar and it costs way too much.

11:57Or resveratrol is a derivative of grapes. It's why people will sometimes say grapes or wine or whatever is good for your heart and can be good for your brain. But really, it's resveratrol they're talking about. Well, that's great, except it makes your bar to cost$10. So you run into these economic realities and unit economic realities and start having to think through, okay, I can include this, but not that, you know, and that's still, that's a never ending journey, by the way.

12:29Kara Goldin:Constantly looking for whether or not a certain ingredient will actually for a variety reasons be good or not so good for what you're doing. Yeah. Or can I make this organic? Well, I could, but then that would shift things 20 % in this direction. And that would shift this on shelf price point in this direction. And this number of people are not going to be cool at that. And so it's just, yeah, I've just found it's, I mean, there's thousands of these sort of mental tug of wars around inputs, positioning, et cetera. And then, and then there's the positioning of it, right so that was probably our biggest learning was we like i said i positioned it as brain food and very but we then surveyed all of our customers and say why do you buy this why do you buy this why did you buy this we kept expecting them to say oh because it's brain food and that's so cool and different and no one said that people were like i buy it because it's low sugar or i buy it because it's a clean label.

13:30I buy it because it's affordable, whatever. And then we had that kind of come to Jesus moment of like, who are we? Who are we? We can lean into what we thought we were and create a small business or we can listen to the market and listen to data and listen to survey results and lean into those and create a very big business. So we obviously chose the latter.

13:54Kara Goldin:So how many SKUs did you launch with? Three. Three SKUs. And are those still your SKUs today or have those shifted in some way? No, they've shifted massively. So, I mean, I'm like any bushy-tailed, bright-eyed entrepreneur. I'm like, how do I make something for Whole Foods that's like trendy and blah, blah, blah. And so almond cacao and blueberry walnut and matcha sunflower, you know, like those were the first three SKUs. What are they now? Like what are our top flavors now? Chocolate sea salt, peanut butter chip, almond butter chocolate chip. So it's like you have the, again, this is like you come in with this one concept and then the market just punches you in the face.

14:44And you're like, hmm, why am I calling this almond cacao? Like if I just simply took the same product and called it chocolate sea salt, would I sell 100 % more? And the answer is yes. So yeah, it's just been a data aggregation plus acting on that data exercise over and over and over again.

15:08Kara Goldin:Yeah, I think it's your ability to change, right? And go with what you're actually seeing and looking at that data is so critical. I remember when we were first starting Hint that very similar, you know, we were trying to create products that were different because all the buyers want different. And what we realized is that blackberry and cherry and raspberry, in the case of flavored waters, those were the ones that were actually, they were going to pull off the shelf. It didn't mean that hibiscus wasn't a terrific flavor, but the consumer has to imagine what it's actually going to taste like, especially if you're not sampling it in stores.

15:59Kara Goldin:And so that's going to make a big difference, especially when you're just getting started and you need the turns in order to expand your presence on any shelf or, you know, get into other markets as well. So it's totally critical. And it's also key not to leave one kind of odder flavor, even if it's great on the shelf, because buyers also think that it's not moving. And it could just be that one SKU that's not moving, but they'll judge your entire brand based on whether or not that one product is moving or not. So what was the first store you got into? And when you saw it actually moving, what was that day like for you?

16:53Well, so we were e-com first. We always were very intentionally e-com first. And part of the reasons we picked bars is they're such a good e-com item. They're so compact. The price or weight ratio is so good. The price per cubic inch ratio is so good. and there's just a lot of people buying protein bars online. So that actually helped us get our first ream of data that then allowed us to change packaging, change packaging again, change the product, et cetera, such that when we were ready for brick and mortar, we had already had 10, 20 reps. But so our first major retailer, it's a bit of a cautionary tale, was CVS.

17:36And I was in Boston at the time, and so it was kind of local here in Providence and I made like every mistake in the book. I knew a guy who had gotten his products in and I was like, whoa, these guys have whatever it is, 12 ,000 doors, like just an insane number of doors and this guy got into a couple thousand doors and it's 45 minutes away. Like, let me talk to these people. So I asked him who the buyer was for him and it was an innovation set. This was the time when big retailers were pulling in startup-y brands and trying to stay relevant, sort of like old line retailers were pulling in shiny objects.

18:19And he connected me with a guy. I talked to the guy, and I sent them samples. They liked it, and they said, okay, this could work. Let's try it in 12 stores. And we tried it in 12 stores, and it did well. uh now we made sure it did well um if you catch my drift and then we got plussed out to like 3 000 doors so and this was only six months into our existence and we're like whoa we're in every city in america via cvs which sounds very cool when you get into the nitty-gritty it's like six month, you know, payment terms. Um, I think it was like 30 days you get half and then the other half you don't get for six months and you might never get if, if there's too much, uh, spoils or what have you.

19:13Um, we were in like the back corner and we weren't in the bar set. This was a huge learning for me. It was how much set matters. Um, we were in like the brain health set and so it was us and then like a powder and then some pills and so if you're going into the store looking for bars you're just not going to find us um you would have to come upon us somehow in that back corner and so it just it was a tough lesson tough pill to swallow early um luckily we made it out alive we like basically broke even on it we had a huge gross margin and then we lost all of it to spoils because it was like, you know, in a good store, we'll move five, six, seven units per scoop per store per week.

20:01Like that's a good, quite good in bars. And we were moving 0.2 units, you know, like laughably low. Um, sort of like, Whoa, we're not going to move there through this 12 bar caddy, like in the next year at any given store. So that was a good, uh, masters in, in brick and mortar retail that, that we learned there. Um, But I would say Kroger, actually, funnily enough, also another retailer you typically people don't get to till five years down the line. I was our first major retailer and went quite well. So long winded way of answering your question. That was a cool moment. But we had to go through a fairly rocky, bumpy path to get to that one.

20:47Kara Goldin:Yeah, it's interesting. I wouldn't have thought that CVS would be a great one for you guys to go into right out of the gate. But I think the other thing is, you know, it's somebody's telling you that your baby is beautiful. And you want to go. You're an entrepreneur. And but it's yeah, I mean, I'm glad there's I'm glad you guys made it through it because there's a lot of people that that could just really sink you by the time, you know. So and depending on what your category is, too, I mean, if you've got to use distributor as well and trying to make sure it's getting out of the back room and you're going to get chargebacks on it, I mean, it's just it could really, really have ended not so great.

21:32Kara Goldin:So I'm glad that that worked out for sure. So the functional ingredient market is projected to explode even more. Where do you think like the disconnect between reality and marketing claims out there? How do you see this this world, I guess, changing in some way? I think it's very dangerous. I mean, people in the food world are very disconnected from Main Street America, you know, because we think about, oh, functional mushrooms and this and that. And like I always say, go do a Costco demo or go do a Costco roadshow and you'll find out what actually people know about, care about, what actually influences purchase decisions.

22:20So functional is an interesting one, right? Because like everything's functional. Like food is functional. It has calories and it serves the function of giving me energy. So it's a spectrum of sort of functionality. and I would say there are the big ones that are functional, protein, fiber is really having a surging now. But these are like big functional trends that more or less everyone or just massive, massive swaths of people are very, very interested in and just that's not going away. All the way down to the micro, which is like, let's say adaptogens, you know? And so there's a subset of people who live in San Francisco, or Boston or New York or whatever, and they'll buy a bunch of this stuff online.

23:06But is that going to really do well in Oklahoma City, Costco? No. So part of it depends on what kind of a, what size of business you want to build. I would say there are a couple cases, collagen's probably a good one, where something was niche and then got taken mainstream. Creatine's another good example that's going through that same growth curve as well. It was niche. Now it's mostly mainstream. And I would say in a year's time, it'll be probably fully mainstream. So sometimes you have these breakout functional and nutritional trends. And if you can catch those, it's awesome, right? Because you're arbitraging.

23:47It's not that competitive. And then you get to ride that wave. For us, we're not willing to bet the farm on something like that. So we want to lead with that former category of protein, fiber, clean label. Like these are all key things that we want to have front and center. And then we'll say, oh, by the way, like plus, you know, magnesium and lines, man, this and that. But you don't need that plus to close the sale. Most sales actually, you close before that's even a consideration. And it's like, oh, I don't care. Or I do care. Either way, we close the sale because it's an affordably priced, high-protein, clean-label, low-sugar product.

24:34So there's so much there, right? But I would say, in summary, I believe the best move is to focus on functional inputs that are just here to stay and add as like a kicker, maybe trendier, more niche, micronutrients for the people who want to double-click on that.

24:59Kara Goldin:Yeah, definitely. And also taste, right? I'm sure you've seen that as well. If it doesn't taste good, even if it's going to give your brain all kinds of focus and make you smarter and this and this and this, if it doesn't taste good, what have you seen, especially in the Costco consumers, you've landed that account nationally? I mean, yeah, that's absolutely right. It has to taste good. And I mean, it's so category specific, right? So bars are just inherently very functional category. Like when people think of bars, they think of protein bars. And it's like versus like a tortilla chip. No one's like, oh, a protein tortilla.

25:48No, it's a tortilla chip that you put in salsa. So they're already anchored more in the functional direction and less in the taste direction for that category. But it's never the case that taste isn't incredibly important. I mean, RX Bar, right, like is a good example of they sacrifice some maybe texture things and taste things to truly go full bore on the simple simplicity angle and built a huge business. So it's, taste is of course not the whole story and people are willing to give a bit, but not that much, not that much. Like if you're a betting person, you wouldn't, you wouldn't bet on that.

26:29um so i mean our challenge is how do you make something taste good with no sugar next to no sugar so if we if we want to include one gram of sugar to two grams of sugar well that's just it's quite hard to make that taste good without using something like sucralose uh you know a lab made sweetener which we don't use we use stevia fine extract so um i mean that just is extremely hard. But you have to, have to, have to do it. Taste will, and this is especially, I go back to like the Costco thing. Just picture you're standing at a table, someone's walking up to you, you say 12 grams plant protein, one gram sugar, eight grams fiber.

27:12They say, cool, let me taste it. And you give it to them and it isn't good. Nothing you said prior matters. They're just going to walk right away. So that's like the real world example of that.

27:24Kara Goldin:It's so true. I remember when we were, Hint is an unsweetened flavored water. And unsweetened was actually not in the dictionary early on, which is, it was not sweetened. But we decided to call it unsweetened to make people actually think a little bit more about it. And we kept telling people, it's not sweetened with anything, it's unsweetened. And we would get into more conversations about it, like, well, what's it sweetened with? Because they would try the product and they'd actually like it, but then they'd be used to actually having flavored water at the time. I mean, vitamin water was it, right?