The Co-founder of Perfect Bar Spent her Childhood Homeschooled and Living on a School Bus
I’ve talked to founders of all sorts, but rare are the occasions that I find myself tearing up in the interview. You may think that’s unprofessional, but it’s my company, and I’ll cry if I want to.
If you think of the Founders and heads of companies you see lauded as the best thing to happen to capitalism, usually you hear about the Ivy League University they attended – or in some cases that they dropped out of. But for Leigh Keith, Co-Founder and Chief of Brand & Mission of Perfect Bar, the spectacular part of her story is that she didn’t spend a single day of her life in a formal classroom. Her education was in grit studies and her untraditional background led to the creation of the fresh protein bars you can find in grocery stores across the country.
Before the refrigerated bars were a household name, and partnered with one of the largest snacking companies in the world, the brand was founded so that the Keith family could simply survive.
“The [Perfect Bar] recipe came from a need for our parents to feed us on the go.” Keith said of her parents referring to them as “eccentric.” “We grew up on the road, graduating from a motor home to living in a school bus, and eventually a bed and breakfast my parents bought.”
But when the patriarch of the Keith family was diagnosed with melanoma and needed to undergo treatment, the family could no longer support themselves without steady income and they were in crisis.
”My parents had 13 kids and I was one of the older ones. We were faced with separating our siblings up to take care of them,” she recalled.
Until that point, Keith’s father supported the family by selling holistic supplements. What we know as Perfect Bars were created to get the Keith kids to eat those supplements, which Leigh recalls as “not yummy like a Flintstone Vitamin.”
To keep the family under one roof, the four eldest siblings set out to find a way to make a living based on what they knew how to do: Make delicious, refrigerated protein bars.
In 2005, they started making and selling Perfect Bars at Farmers Markets, co-ops and other opposite-of-mainstream spaces. They didn’t know what to do with their dad’s supplements, but they did know how to make the bars with fresh peanuts, honey and other good-for-you ingredients.
“That was the same year that Kind Bar was founded … It was a similar year to when Chobani was founded around 20 years ago,” Keith recalled the innovation happening in the grocery store.
For nearly a decade, Perfect Bar sampled thousands of bars and taught consumers to start looking for their snack bar in the refrigerator aisle. Those 10 years of organic growth produced the traction that caught the attention of the brand’s first and only investor – VMG Partners.
“We thought we’d always be an off-the-beaten-path brand in co-ops and natural foods stores,” Keith recalls.
But at that point, they were the number one selling bar in Whole Foods and at Costco in the LA Region. Regardless of everything they had accomplished, taking on an investor felt incredibly risky to Keith.
She wasn’t wrong. Venture Capital and Private Equity checks do often come with lofty expectations, like a 10x return on investment. But with “smart money,” or an investor that’s willing to spend time and resources on a founder, a company can truly use an investment to build a team, scale and grow with support.
VMG was persistent in convincing the Keiths that they could be mainstream. And once they were ready to sell a minority stake in the company, VMG helped them form a board and coached them on how to prepare for their first board meeting. Smart money.
Until that point, the company had been run as a family business – even when the employees outnumbered the siblings. The Keith family made a promise as brothers and sisters that they would always be themselves and maintain the culture of “humble caretakers,” no matter where the investment took them.
“We just needed to be proud of how far we’ve come and never lose sight of it,” she said, noting that after the investment Perfect Bar’s revenue grew like never before.
After Perfect Bar achieved its growth targets, the timing was right to find the right partner for Perfect Bar, which was Mondelez.
“They’ve just done such a good job taking care of legacy brands like Oreo. The work that they were doing to support the LGBTQ+ community, the proud parent campaign, it was beautiful to see the social impact that a food brand could have.” Keith gushed.
And looking back at the trajectory of the company and everything that Bill, Leigh, Amyas, and Charisse started at 21, 19, 18, and 17, respectively, Keith remembers it seeming so impossible to keep the family together.
“We just took it one day at a time. Not only did we put them through high school, but we put them through college. We set them up in their first home and they got their education debt-free.”
And, this is the part when I cried – I’ll just transcribe this bit verbatim for you so that you can feel it too.
“This business has absolutely changed the course of our family’s lives for the better. The path we were on in 2005, my brothers and sisters having to be raised in separate houses. We were just in a dire, dire situation.”
“I have vivid memories of brushing my teeth in the Home Depot bathroom at 5 in the morning. That’s how we got ready – in the employee bathroom with my little sisters in tow. I think about that as an adult, you held your head high and you were 12 years old.”
“I am very proud of that grit and that little girl who held her head high. I am who I am because of that. To take that and do what we did, and what we’re still doing … not every story can have a happy ending like that.”
See?
I was already a habitual Perfect Bar consumer (honestly, have you tried Perfect Bar Layers?), but understanding that the co-founder of the company is someone I genuinely admire makes my addiction just a little sweeter. But maybe that’s the organic honey.
Find Perfect Bars near you.