This Protein Bar Cofounder Sold His Company For $600 Million. Now He Wants Another Bite Of The Market.
David Versus: “I think RxBar had a great story and a great team,” Peter Rahal says about his first act, “but this time around we are going to avoid some mistakes.”
Aleksandr Karnyukhin for Forbes
Peter Rahal’s new David bar was designed for the Ozempic generation. A portrait of a hungry entrepreneur.
By Simone Melvin, Forbes Staff
Sitting at a table at Balthazar in downtown Manhattan, Peter Rahal spears a piece of smoked salmon on his plate and ignores the nearby toast. The 38-year-old cofounder of nutrition bar brand RxBar thinks about protein constantly—and not just for his own health. Rahal has been dreaming of creating a new bar the day he and his cofounder, Jared Smith, sold RxBar to Kellogg’s for $600 million in 2017. Rahal made that dream a reality in September when he launched David—or, so he calls it, “the final protein bar.”
Having made a (pretax) $300 million from his 50% share of the RxBar sale, Rahal led David’s $10 million seed round this year with an investment of $6 million. Named after Michelangelo’s 16th century masterpiece, David claims to be the most protein-dense bar in existence and is backed by high-profile physicians and health podcasters Peter Attia (who is also a minority investor) and Andrew Huberman. With 28 grams of protein and just 150 calories, the compact snack currently comes in four flavors and sells exclusively direct-to-consumer for $3.25 per bar.
“I’ve been in the nutrition bar space for 20 years, through all the changes—from Atkins to keto to paleo to fasting to carnivore to whatever,” Rahal says, still ignoring his toast. “But there are two consistent things that have driven the category: The desire for muscle gain and fat loss. So, the question was, how do we design a product that delivers those two things?”
Rahal took the opportunity to create a new bar in October 2022, immediately after his 5-year non-compete agreement with Kellogg’s expired. He spent a year developing David with his cofounder, Zach Ranen, 27, under the guidance of Attia, who acts as the company’s Chief Science Officer. Rahal’s current iteration of David includes milk protein isolate, collagen and whey protein, and is held together with allulose and polydextrose. It’s a far cry from RxBar which touted easy-to-pronounce ingredients—including eggs whites, dates and almonds.
“I think RxBar had a great story and a great team, but I think this time around we are going to avoid some mistakes,” Rahal says. “I didn’t know what I was doing back then—not that I know what I’m doing now—but I certainly know what not to do.”
Rahal started RxBar from his parents’ kitchen in 2013 with Smith, his childhood friend, when the two were in their mid-twenties. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs in the food industry, Rahal had always been conscious of the importance of quality ingredients and health. And as an avid consumer of protein bars, he saw that there was nothing on the market at the time made exclusively from “clean” or whole foods.
They bootstrapped their company with a $10,000 personal investment and started selling directly to consumers at CrossFit gyms. In its first year, the company was profitable on $2 million in gross revenue and grew to $6.5 million by the following year.
Aleksandr Karnyukhin for Forbes
In 2015, RxBar underwent a rebranding that would transform the company. Rahal and Smith moved the product’s short ingredient list to the front of the packaging in a large font—followed by the last ingredient, “no B.S.” By year four, the company was making $161 million in revenue. Then Kellogg’s came knocking with its $600 million offer.
The sale came at the start of a wave of health bar acquisitions: Simply Good Foods acquired Quest, a protein-based snack company, in 2019 for $1 billion, and Mars bought the maker of Kind bars for $5 billion in 2020.
Although Rahal was in the cohort of young founders who sold their nutrition bar business to large conglomerates, he says his initial plan was never to sell RxBar. But he and Smith decided to take the deal to scale the company—and secure financial freedom. After the sale, Smith left the company after a few months, while Rahal stayed until May 2018. Within that time, RxBar moved into a bigger building in Chicago and more than doubled its staff to 200 (although it later laid off 40).
After exiting the brand in 2018 and moving to Miami, Rahal began plotting his next business venture. “Leaving RxBar was hard because it was my whole life,” he admits. “When I left the company, I lost my organization.”
He started investing in other companies in the food space, beginning with the prebiotic soda brand Olipop, which was founded in 2018, and is now valued at $200 million. Rahal says he has since invested roughly $50 million in about 100 different businesses, including ready-to-eat oats brand Mush and the better-for-you popcorn company LesserEvil. Rahal says his investment strategy involves looking for a novel product that sets itself apart from the market, combined with a founder who would “be willing to die before their company fails”.
His second act now resembles the early years of RxBar. With David in motion, he moved to New York in 2023 to build the business. “I had to start from scratch with David,” Rahal says. “It was just me and my cofounder [Ranen] with computers.”
But there are reasons why other companies haven’t set out to make a product like David. One factor is cost: Premium protein such as collagen and binding products like allulose are expensive. At $3.25 per bar, David is 16-35% more expensive than competing brands like Quest and Barbells, which sell comparable products online for $2.79 and $2.40, respectively.
Additionally, developing a product with a unique nutritional profile takes significant time, money and resources. Many new founders in the space aim to launch their brands as fast as possible, which means taking their ideas to outside developers who can expedite product manufacturing, according to Maya French, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alumna and cofounder of plant-based protein drink Koia.
“These founders often don’t have a lot of funding to actually do the research, or the correct scientific partners to create what they want to,” French says. “And it takes years, like any other science experiment.”
“Protein is not just for bodybuilders, it’s essential for everyone,” Rahal says of David, “and the market is only going to help push that narrative forward.”
Rahal’s access to capital and nutrition experts has set him up well. Rahal says that in its first six weeks on the market, David sold more than 1 million bars and rang up at least $3.3 million in sales. And he is making a bet that a high-protein diet isn’t another fad.
The snack bar industry is growing—Jim Salera, an analyst at Stephens specializing in packaged foods, estimates the domestic market is currently about $10 billion in retail sales, up $2 billion from 2019—but it’s becoming murkier to define as more companies began using protein in existing products. The world’s biggest candy conglomerate, Mars, started putting protein into Snickers bars in 2023 and two years earlier, General Mills created protein bars from their popular cereal brands Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Golden Grahams. Although Kind Bars never touted itself as a protein-based snack, the company caught onto the wave before being acquired, releasing its first protein-forward line of bars 2018.
It’s no coincidence that the greater interest in protein comes at a time when more than 15 million people in the United States are taking Ozempic or Wegovy, according to research by the San Francisco-based nonprofit healthcare foundation KFF. For those taking Ozempic to manage weight, eating enough protein is crucial to maintain muscle while losing fat. Consumers using GLP-1 drugs present the greatest opportunity for growth, Salera says.
“It’s possible that down the road, if you get prescribed this drug, your insurance might require you to see a dietician or be on a nutritional plan,” he continues. “That will no doubt include some sort of protein supplement or one of these products that add protein into your diet.”
All of which bodes well for Rahal’s bet on a protein-powered future.
“Protein is not just for bodybuilders, it’s essential for everyone—and the market is only going to help push that narrative forward,” he says. “There are waves you want to surf, and weight-loss drugs are a huge wave, which means that we’re not spending energy educating anyone—the market is.”
By the middle of 2025, Rahal is looking to move into retail locations, but the company is still new, and he isn’t making any definitive projections. For now, there’s a pinned video advertisement on the David’s company Instagram page of a woman playing the violin in an empty auditorium, spliced in between shots of David’s shiny gold wrapper and a few lines of text including “nature made marble, humans made David.”
“It’s supposed to be art,” Rahal says, acknowledging the ad. “When you look at the meaning in the sculpture of David, it’s the idea of sculpting something perfect. And when you see a brand, you want it to stand for something and inspire you like good art. I think there’s no better symbol of that than David.”
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