The Controversial Rise of David Protein

You have probably seen the David bar everywhere. You've seen it on social media.

This is a David Protein bar.

The most hyped protein bar on the planet. The one that is wrapped in gold.

You've seen it endorsed by celebrities.

These are actually so good. And I swear I'm not just saying that because you guys paid me a lot of money.

You've probably seen it at Target and Walmart and Costco. But here's what you might not know. David Protein launched in September of 2024. That makes them about 2 years old. And in that time, they've entered one of the most saturated, competitive spaces in the world. They've created a product that costs 50% more than most of their competitors. They've cleared over $100 million in revenue, and as of just recently, they were valued at over $2 billion. That's insane. That's not normal. That doesn't happen. So today we're going to break down what David did in order to get to this point. We're going to look at what strategic advantages they used in order to enter one of the most competitive spaces in the world and come out with a multibillion-dollar valuation in just 2 years. And we'll look at the controversial move that they made that made it possible for them to dominate in this space and make it hard for almost anyone else to compete. Now, as we're going through this, I want you to keep 3 things in mind: product, audience, and sales channels. These are the 3 pieces that a brand has to get right if you're gonna build a scalable and maybe sellable business. And David may be one of the best examples I've ever seen of a brand that did all 3 of them well at the exact same time. And that is partially why they were able to go from zero to a multi-billion dollar valuation in just 2 years. And in order to understand how they got here, we first need to understand the founder. The founder of David is named Peter Rahal, and this is not Peter Rahal's first business. In fact, his last business you might also be familiar with was called RXBAR. RXBAR was a protein bar for CrossFit athletes that was eventually acquired by Kellogg's for $600 million. Now, I have been citing RXBAR as an example of a brand that did things well. I've been citing them for years. I wrote about them in my first book called 12 Months to $1 Million as an example of a brand that went into a competitive, saturated space that was dominated by the big players and still won within just a few years. How did they do that? They did that by targeting a very small subset of the market, and that was CrossFit athletes. And they created a product that was just different enough to get the attention of those CrossFit athletes. Do you remember the pack? that was on an RXBAR. It was very minimalist and had the ingredients on the front, and it was called the RXBAR, which was a tip of the cap to CrossFit athletes. That's a term that those athletes use in their workouts. So it was a perfect example of a brand that was targeting a very small subset of the market and creating a product that matched what that group wanted. And as a result of doing that well, That bar, the RX Bar, also became popular with other groups of the marketplace as well. Now, here's the part of the story that you may not have heard. After Peter Rahal sold RX Bar to Kellogg's, he stayed on for about a year and then he was under a non-compete where he couldn't launch other protein bars. When his non-compete was up, he started working on a new business, and that's the business that ultimately became David, the David Bar. Now, I think this is very interesting because it's tempting for a lot of entrepreneurs after they have some success to go into a completely different business. But that's not what Peter Rahal did. He went right back into the industry that made him rich. In fact, he went into the same product that made him rich. He went back to making protein bars. Now, it's interesting to note here that he didn't just go make another protein bar. He went and tried to do something different that the market had never seen before. And there was something in his favor. And it was this new novel ingredient that got Peter's interest. And because of that ingredient, he was able to make a product that no one had ever seen before that would stand out to the group of people that he wanted to target this time. We'll talk more about that ingredient in a second. So Peter took his experience and his connections and his knowledge of one space, saw an opportunity to get back in the game, and that's eventually what laid the groundwork for David. Now, David did not start with just Peter Rahal. This time around, Peter built a team before they ever took a sale. The first move that Peter made was he brought on an operating partner. His name was Zach, and Zach was running a high-protein bakery, and he recruited him over to help run David Barr. And then Peter did something really smart. He started to build the cap table with influencers. In fact, there were 3 influencers that he brought to the table. You may know these names: Dr. Peter Attia, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and Dr. Layne Norton. Basically 3 of the biggest health and wellness influencers in the protein space, the people who are loudest about saying that you should eat more protein. He went out and recruited them and got them to invest in David. Now, there is a lesson for us to learn here, but let's be real honest. Going out and getting the attention of a Dr. Andrew Huberman or getting in the network of the people who know Jeffrey Epstein, this is not available to people like you and me. This is something that we can't replicate, but here's the playbook that we can follow. The first move that Peter made was to recruit an operating partner and then start to stack the deck with people that could influence the marketplace and get the word out about his product. That is something that we can model. Now, maybe we can't go and raise capital from influential people, but we can absolutely get our product into the hands of content creators, of influencers, podcasters. In my book, I call this stacking the deck. It means getting people lined up and ready to talk about and use your product before it's ever ready for the marketplace. Peter did that on a grand scale. He lined up operators and influencers, and then he leveraged those connections to go and raise capital. David Protein raised $10 million before they ever took A single sale. But the order of operations is so important. Peter went into an industry where he knew he could win, where he had a strategic advantage. Then he recruited the team, and then he raised the capital. He had the operators, he had the influencers, and the capital just made things happen faster. This is what I call the owner's model. It is not the CEO's job to do everything in the business, but it is the CEO's job to make sure that the business has the right resources and the right people to be able to execute on its vision. That's the owner's model, and that's what helped get David off the ground and ultimately to its first $100 million within about 12 months. Okay, so I told you that there were 3 pieces to having a scalable, sellable brand: product, audience, and sales channel. Let's start with product. If you're going to go into a saturated space, a saturated market, a highly competitive industry, which is honestly where most of the money usually is, you have to have a reason for existing that is better than we're 5% cheaper than everybody else. No, no. In fact, the opposite is often what works. David is a great example of this. David went into this saturated space charging 50% more than most of their competitors. They were coming in at a premium. And here's how they justified it. The 2 things that David did differently than everybody else that allowed them to make a splash in this market and charge 50% more than everybody else was they had a completely different macronutrient profile and their packaging is way different than anything else seen on the market. Now, if we look at the packaging, of David. This looks more like a piece of technology than a protein bar. And in a lot of ways, this is a piece of technology. They used a new, novel, controversial ingredient to get this unique nutritional profile that was new in the marketplace. And they designed this to look super high-end. In fact, if you remember what the RX Bar looked like, if you remember that packaging, It was so unique and so novel, and it had big bold letters on the front. David followed the exact same playbook. They created packaging that looks like nothing else in the market. It looks super premium, super high-end, and as a result, they were able to command a 50% higher price point than almost everybody else. I have actually come full circle on this point. I used to think that packaging did not matter at the beginning of a business. I have changed my tune on this because if you're going to have a premium product, which is the way to win in most markets, you have to have packaging that looks the part. And David absolutely nailed it on this one. The second part of the sellable brand model is audience. Audience is choosing a group of people that you're going to target when you are marketing your product and giving them a reason to choose you over everybody else. Remember the example of RXBAR, Peter's first company? That group of people was CrossFitters. He created a product specifically for them, and they loved it so much that they brought it to everybody else. Well, in the case of David Barr, Peter Rahal was on the record of saying that they decided to go after a subset of the market that nobody else was targeting, and that group of people was women. Now, if you're old enough to remember, like, 2 years ago, you may remember that the protein trend was mostly marketed to men. The bro-ish masculine protein trend that has changed now over the last couple years. But at the time, there really wasn't a whole lot of messaging about women and protein. So David Barr decided to make that the audience. David Barr specifically targeted women, which was basically an untapped market for the protein trend. In fact, one of their marketing campaigns literally said, men disappoint, David satisfies. Now, I personally don't love that tagline. I take that one personally, but it is pretty good marketing. It does call out the exact audience that they're going after, gets their attention, and introduces David as the product. Really good marketing. And since the launch of David, the company has brought on other female influencers as well. So they have gone very targeted to getting this demographic, women, to consume their product. And those individuals, those customers, have brought this product to the rest of the mainstream, which is why those of us who do not identify as female have probably eaten our fair share of David bars. So David created a new unique product and they targeted a group of people that was underserved. The third part of the model is sales channels. Now, this is the part of the story that I really love. When we look at how David Protein launched, their strategy was remarkably simple. They had one very simple one-page website. They had one product. They had one thing that you could buy. In fact, Before the product launched, their website was a very simple email capture. It was a waiting list to buy the product once it was ready. Now, this is the lesson that I think every entrepreneur can benefit from. We look at this company now and we see a multibillion-dollar company. But when they launched a long, long 2 years ago, their entire focus was getting people on a waiting list to buy the product. And by the time it launched, they had 5,000 people ready and waiting to buy the product. Now, that might sound like a lot, but 5,000 people can be sort of manufactured. Of course, if you've got a couple influencers on your cap table, it's a lot easier to do that. But some good social media posts, getting the product to a hand of a few content creators, maybe some ads, you can get a few hundred or a few thousand people lined up to buy from you. David Protein only had 5,000 people by the time they launched. In fact, I love this part. On the day of launch, Peter Rahal, the founder, livestreamed himself for more than 10 hours talking about the product, convincing people to give it a shot. I love that this dude who has a 9-figure exit and is raising capital and has these cool people on a cap table is still doing the grindy work of asking people to give the product a shot. But here's where the story gets a little bit controversial. The ingredient that made the David Bar possible is an ingredient called EPG, which stands for esterified propoxylated glycerol. It's basically a manufactured fat. It's a modified fat. And the theory behind this is that your body won't absorb the calories from this oil. And so it's a lower calorie food. This is not a healthy thing, okay? It is a highly processed plant fat, but it's new and novel and it's right on trend. It allows them to get a ton of protein into this product with fewer calories. That's on trend at the same time that GLP-1s are turning us all into modified robots, essentially. It's right on trend with the world. But at the time, EPG was a new novel ingredient that only a few companies used. And I know this because I was investing in and looking at brands that had partnerships with the maker of this product. Epogee was the name of the company. Epogee was a play on the EPG, and this company was the distributor and the maker of this fat, and they were only in a few products. And my partner and I were developing brands and products that had this ingredient until one day the product was no longer available and the brands that were using this went out of business. One of these brands was a chocolate bar company called Gatsby Chocolate. I was a buyer and a fan of This brand, they made really good dark chocolate that was super low calorie. And one day they were just gone. The brands that we were talking to were going out of business. What the heck happened? Here's what happened. After David Barr launched, they realized that they had an opportunity. They had a good product. They were able to raise capital. They had a good founder and they had a cap table with influencers who were willing to spread the word. So they did another round of capital raising. They raised $75 million. And this time we know the valuation. It was $750 million, which means they sold 10% of the business and raised $75 million. What did they do with that $75 million? They bought the entire company of Epogee, basically giving them a monopoly on this one novel ingredient. In fact, 3 of the brands who were using this ingredient sued David and said that they were using unfair business practices. And I'm not going to lie, I was a little butthurt about this. I thought this was a super interesting on-trend opportunity to develop cool food brands, and it was no longer available to me or my partner or the other brands that we were in talks with about creating food brands using this product. Apparently, Peter Rahal and the David team thought the same thing, and they had something that you and I didn't, which was the ability to raise $75 million and buy the entire company so they could use the ingredient to manufacture David Barr at scale. The lawsuit that was against David ended up in David's favor, and if you look today, they now are making the product available again to other brands, but only approved brands that go through an application and approval process to work with Epogee, which again is owned by David Barr. Regardless of what you think about it, it gave them a strategic advantage in the marketplace to be able to have the first mover advantage of this new novel ingredient that makes this product and other products like it possible. Which leads me to what I think is the most controversial part of their rise. Remember the chocolate bar that was also using this controversial ingredient? Gatsby Chocolate. They went out of business because David Barr had a monopoly on the use of Epogen. The low-calorie fat product. Well, what's interesting about this is that Gatsby Chocolate was started by the same founder as Halo Top. Halo Top is the first high-protein, low-calorie ice cream. Well, David's first product beyond the David protein bar was David ice cream. High-protein, low-calorie ice cream. So David Barr put Gatsby Chocolate out of business. And then the next move they made was a direct competitor to Halo Top. The same founder was behind Halo Top and Gatsby Chocolate. That's where things get real weird to me. Now, I hate to admit it, but I went to Target and bought some David ice cream and it's frickin phenomenal. It is excellent. And that's when I realized that David was going to be more than a protein company. This was going to end up a conglomerate. And that makes the next part of the story Make all the sense in the world. In September of 2026, the parent company that owns David Bar raised more capital. They raised $250 million at a $2.25 billion valuation. Now, for a protein bar that is 2 years old, that makes absolutely zero sense. But once you see behind the curtain, it actually makes all the sense in the world. The parent company of David and Epogee is called Medici. And that's who raised capital at a $2.25 billion valuation. But then when you see that David Ice Cream is starting to take the place of Halo Top, which is a 9-figure business all on its own, you start to see how big this vision can get. That's just on the food side. Medici also owns EPOGEE, which means that every brand that wants to use this ingredient has to come through that parent company. And they've recently announced the launch of a brand new candy company called Hall Pass. And Hall Pass is basically a low-calorie candy company. They're going after the same spot on the shelf that Gatsby Chocolate had, and they're going after Peanut Butter Cups and all of the cool Hershey's snacks that are so popular. So all of a sudden, David and all of the related companies have the ability to go after Quest, and Premier Protein and Hershey's and Halo Top and take up the market share of all of these really big companies. Why are they able to do that? Because they have a moat that allows them to control the manufacturing of a new and novel ingredient that gives them an advantage that no one else can compete with. And they have a really good founder and a really good influencer team, and they raised a lot of capital to make it possible. So when I first saw that David had raised capital at a $2.25 billion valuation, I thought, that's ridiculous, that's stupid, that's absurd. But once you see all of the different places where they can dominate and win, it actually makes a lot of sense. So what can we actually learn from this? Because I know that there are gonna be people in the comments who say, okay, the playbook is to first have a $600 million exit and then get famous influencers on your cap table. And then raise hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's true. If you do those things, you definitely have a strategic advantage. But what I think is more interesting for new entrepreneurs or people who are still on the up and up like you and me is the playbook that Peter did twice. You can call the RxBar exit an accident. Maybe he got lucky. Maybe he had good timing. Maybe he just Got in front of the right audience or had a good product at the right time. You can say that was luck or an accident, but what you can't say is when the founder does it again following the same playbook, that the playbook doesn't work. There is an obvious playbook here that we can learn from and can be plugged into almost any business. Once you have nailed the first product and you've marketed it to a specific group of people and you've got a core group of customers that are raving fans, then you have earned the right to launch additional products. David did 9 figures in sales before launching the ice cream, and now they're a multi-billion dollar business. My name is Ryan Daniel Moran, and I help entrepreneurs build 7-figure businesses that they can sell. And if that's the journey that you're on, then I would invite you to go get our best resources for free over at capitalism.com/100k. And if you're an entrepreneur who is building a brand, I'd consider it a privilege to support you on your journey. I hope that you decide to subscribe to the channel. Thank you for watching. I'll see you guys on the next video. Take care.