Social Spin Doctor

Daniel Lubetzky has spun chocolate, nuts and do-gooder rhetoric into a snack company worth billions. Maybe someday he’ll get back to his true passion: Changing the world for the better.

- Angel Au-yeung

If anybody had said to me I would end up in the food business, I would have said, ‘What are you smoking?’” says Daniel Lubetzky, 50, founder of Kind Healthy Snacks. “I never thought in a thousand years I would be selling food.”

Maybe that’s because Lubetzky isn’t really selling food. Rather he is peddling health and altruism, at least the cheap sort you can buy in a 1.4-ounce fruit-and-nut snack bar drizzled with chocolate. Clues to Lubetzky’s deeper ambitions abound in his office decor: On one wall hang framed photos of him with Pope Francis, Barack Obama and Shimon Peres, the late president of Israel. Books about the Middle East line another. Motivational quotes from the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama are painted in the hallways.

The overt display of social consciousness is core to Kind’s business strategy. The company has sold 2 billion snack bars since its founding in 2004 and has done so by wrapping itself in a mantle of nutrition and social good. It’s almost all spin. Kind bars aren’t particularly good for you, and the very-much-for-profit company, which is partly owned by candy giant Mars, has given just a pittance to charity: About $2 million at last count. The company says it has been “generously supporting like-minded non-profits”. Lubetzky personally has given an additional $10 million toward Kind’s philanthropic efforts.

Still, the Kind spin works: The company has an estimated $800 million in sales and has made Lubetzky very rich. Using comparable publicly traded companies and recent merger and acquisition transactions in the snack industry, Forbes estimates that Kind is conservatively worth $2.9 billion. As majority owner, Lubetzky has a stake worth nearly $1.5 billion.