When he was 8 years old, Joel Clark loaded bags of his mom's whole grain pancake mix into a red wagon to sell door-to-door. By the mid-90s, he and his older brother had upgraded to selling the mix out of a Mazda sedan and calling it Kodiak Cakes. As he tried to scale the business, Joel made some risky business decisions and almost went bankrupt, but eventually got the brand into Target—a major turning point. Today, Kodiak Cakes is one of the best-selling pancake mixes in America.

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Black perspectives haven't always been centered in the telling of America's story.

Introducing NPR's Black Stories, Black Truths, a collection of black-led stories from NPR's podcasts.

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Hey there, it's Guy here, and I want to wish all of you a very happy New Year.

And if you happen to be spending a bit of extra time with family and friends this holiday season, you will definitely relate to this episode from the archives.

It's the story of Joel Clark and Kodiak Cakes.

Almost every member of Joel's immediate family had something to do with the brand.

His mom came up with the recipe, his brother started the company, even his dad worked for him for a while.

Anyway, it's a great story about family and food with a fair amount of failure and recovery baked in.

It first ran about 2 years ago, and I think you'll love this 1.

So I put together a promotion at Safeway.

And suddenly I got a call 1 day from my distributor rep.

And He's like, Joel, he's like, look, some mistake happened and your promotion got doubled in the system.

And it was, it showed $2 off on the shelf.

So he's like, so I, I turned it off before it got worse.

And I was like, oh man, you got to be kidding me.

This is another near-death experience that we're gonna be going through.

And I when I found out, you know, the bill was 50 grand, man, I was like, what am I gonna do?

show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Joel Clark ran into every roadblock you can think of on his way to building Kodiak Cakes, a pancake mix based on his mom's recipe that he grew into a $200 million brand.

There are crucial moments in the lifespan of a business that almost every entrepreneur encounters.

When does your side hustle become your main hustle?

What's the right moment to make a pivot in your business model?

Or when is it time to give up, learn from your mistakes, and start over?

This last question is probably the hardest, because in many cases, it makes sense to cut your losses and move on.

If Mark Constantine hadn't shut down his failing mail-order cosmetics company, he probably wouldn't have started Lush.

If Topo Atana didn't give up on his failing e-commerce site selling backyard grills, he might never have built Calendly, which got valued at over a billion dollars.

And if Stuart Butterfield had stuck with his money-losing video game concept glitch, Slack may never have become a business.

But then there is Joel Clark, co-founder of Kodiak Cakes.

The brand is best known for its pancake mix.

And for more than 15 years, Joel struggled to make his business sustainable, sometimes, as you will hear, to the point of folly.

At 1 critical juncture, he launched a second business selling cookies just to keep Kodiak Cakes alive.

But when the cookie store failed, it almost took Kodiak Cakes down with it.

In 2007, Joel thought He could fund the business by investing in a piece of real estate.

But months later, the real estate market collapsed.

He tried to kickstart sales by launching a product promotion, but it ended up costing him thousands of dollars.

And to help pay the bills, he even took a job running a home healthcare company for a while.

To be perfectly blunt, Joel had every reason to give up during a 15-year-long streak of failures and struggle.

He really believed that his whole grain pancake mix could really take off.

Because today, Kodiak Cakes is 1 of the best-selling pancake mixes in America, and the company is approaching $200 million in annual revenue.

Specifically Kodiak's protein power cakes that happened to enter the scene just as a high protein diet craze was sweeping the country.

And it all started as a simple pancake mix created by Joel's mom.

Joel grew up in Salt Lake City in the 1970s.

His dad taught religious classes for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormon Church, and his mom took care of the house where she made sure there was never any junk food lying around.

I remember my friends would come over to our house and it was always like, let's look for food.

You know, you're always, that's what you do when you're growing up.

Well, you go to my house and you open up the fridge and it's full of lettuce and vegetables.

And my sister used to say, everything we eat is green and brown.

So I always loved going to my friends houses because they always had all that stuff.

You could open up their pantry and they had like gummy bears and jelly things and

I go to my friends' houses, they had like pantries full of junk.

I go back to my house and we had like wheat germ.

So what kind of things would your mom make you eat?

And I remember her saying, you know, you should eat a yellow vegetable every day.

So we had a lot of carrots or squash and things like that.

And then she baked a lot of bread, like whole wheat bread.

We didn't have a lot of white flour and white sugar.

So, you know, everything we ate was clean and whole and real.

And I remember her kind of saying that, like, it's about eating real food.

I guess her whole wheat pancakes were like a family kind of favorite and then so good that what other people would ask for them when they would come over?

Yeah, well we loved the whole wheat pancake recipe.

So, you know, I have fond memories of waking up to the smell of that.

It's like, oh yes, mom's making pancakes.

She'd beat the egg whites, like in a, you know, separate those, beat them up.

So they're nice and fluffy white, fold those into the batter.

I mean, that was an awesome meal, all whole, whole wheat, freshly ground.

She would grind the wheat for her pancake mix?

We had a wheat grinder in the garage and that thing was turned on a lot.

You just buy like unmilled grains of wheat and then make flour.

The, the, the whole wheat, throw it in the grinder and it would churn out this freshly ground flour.

And so, yeah, our friends would come over once in a while and have those.

I remember like my brother's friend having breakfast with us a couple times.

And I mean, I think it was, Some of the neighbors probably asked.

I also think it was my mom kind of feeling like there's a need out there for more real food products made with whole grains.

And there's probably an opportunity to sell this, this recipe as a mix.

So she was making this pancake mix and decided, hey, maybe I'll like package this up and try to sell it door to door?

She would shop at natural food stores looking for real ingredients, real food, you know, raw sugar, things like that.

And the mainstream supermarkets really just didn't have a lot of options.

Whole grains were out there, but they just weren't that common.

And so, I think that's why she thought of this would be a good niche.

But I think she also thought maybe she could make some extra money doing it.

Because money was tight for us growing up.

So she basically said, look, I'll package this up.

So she started packaging these things up.

And I think the initial plan was, hey, let's try selling these to neighbors and see how it works see if people like it.

That's a good question I don't know if we even had a name for it.

blessed with a name like Penny to be used in marketing and advertising and she didn't use her own name?

So she's going, she's putting them on like brown paper bags like lunch bags?

Totally so she packed all these brown paper lunch sacks on the counter with the freshly ground wheat, dried milk, and you know the other ingredients salt, baking powder, stuff like that.

My mom has the most incredible handwriting and she literally hand wrote on every bag how to make it.

Yeah so she came to me and she said hey and I remember her kind of you know doing this project and I don't remember how it how it sort of came about that I was going to do it I just remember like we're having this conversation it's like hey you know do you want to go sell these so we we loaded up this I have this old red wagon We put all these bags in there and I went out and started knocking doors in the neighborhood and asking people if they wanted to buy the pancake mix.

And by the way, do you remember how much you sold these bags for?

I want to say $5, but that sounds a little expensive for 1982, you know.

But for hand-milled wheat, that's pretty great.

And so this is 1982, how old were you at the time?

And So I'm imagining you pulling a red wagon full of pancake mix, and did the neighbors buy them?

I knocked on it, so we lived in a cul-de-sac, and I went around to all the neighbors in the cul-de-sac, and I think everybody bought 1.

I mean, I'm this eight-year-old kid, right?

And I was actually pretty outgoing as a kid, like that didn't bother me at all.

And so, you know, I remember doing that and then going around to some of the other neighbors outside of our street and I ended up selling all the bags that we had.

All right, so now there's a viable business.

And so does this become like a family affair at this point?

No, so you know what happened was so we you know we sold all the mixes in the wagon.

But then we didn't keep going with it you know we kind of just let it die out And didn't keep pursuing it at that time.

All right, so you go on, start your life, get through school, and did you do a mission when you were

I left when I was 19, just like a month after my birthday.

And, you know, we, we've talked about this in the show a little bit, and I love this example, People who listen to the show know about this.

Young Mormons who go on missions, I think, are very well prepared to become entrepreneurs because you're knocking on 1, 000 doors a week and 900 of them are just like slamming in your face and you still have to be polite, right?

It's 1 of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.

You know, I mean, yeah, you're just doing that over and over and trying to talk to people, trying to get somebody to listen to you.

Sometimes people are nice, but most of the time people are nice, but every now and then you get someone who is, who's just upset and they're just like, man, get out of here.

You go to college at the University of Utah.

And then I guess while you're in college, your older brother John is like, hey, I'm going to start a business selling pancake mix based on mom's pancake recipe?

It was is actually he started thinking about this while I was still on my mission huh, and so he started talking to my mom about how he wanted to start a business and My mom was the 1 who kind of planted the idea of you know, hey John why don't you take the pancake recipe and make a real product and start a business on that?

And just out of curiosity, what was the value proposition here?

Was there, I mean, there was Aunt Jemima and there's plenty of pancake mix, Bisquick and whatever, you know, out there.

This was different because it was whole grain pancake mix and that wasn't really out there?

Well, yeah, so the way John thought about it was he thought he didn't think there were enough really great whole grain options out there, which is true, the pancake category really didn't have much in it in the way of healthy items but he also thought look if I can get a product that tastes awesome that's number 1 that is healthier number 2 and then convenience was the other thing he was really going for so he wanted a product that was just add water and he felt like if he could get all 3 in 1 then then he really accomplished something.

And did you say did you kind of reach out to him and say hey I want to I'm gonna join you?

Well the timing of this was so perfect because I was getting off of my mission in October of 1995.

And so I went and stayed with John and his wife temporarily until I could figure out what I was going to do.

And so right then, that's when John was about ready to go out and start selling this pancake mix that he had been working on, you know, while I was gone.

And John said, Hey, Joel, do you want to, do you want to help me?

And he wanted to kind of, you know, obviously evolve it from where we did it out of the red wagon, make a real product, create a brand, and then go start selling this in stores.

And how, how did he have any capital to do this?

I mean, I guess he was a bit older than you at that point.

How did he have any cash to even start this up?

So John was about 28 when he started this and as he got ready to really start putting money into it, I helped him find a truck that he was able to flip.

So I used to flip old trucks and make money on them and I still do it actually.

Yeah, buy an old truck, fix it up, sell it and make money on it.

And I did that all through college and I paid for my mission that way, most of my mission that way.

And what I would do is, look, this is really funny.

I would go around, I'd drive around neighborhoods, I'd see an old truck on the side of the house and I'd walk up to the door and go, hey, do you wanna sell your truck?

And man, I had so many people say, yeah, actually we're not driving that truck anymore.

And often you'd find them in really good condition.

So they would just need like, you know, a detail being cleaned up, Maybe a little bit of paint touch-up or yeah, so usually minor things so You know I found this truck for John and John drove it around for a while and then he he sold it and he made 1, 400 bucks and so he was kind of like look I think I can actually start my business on this.

So you're in college, he's starting this thing up and you want to be involved with it.

He was ready to, he had found a little producer in Salt Lake City to produce the first kind of run of Kodiak cakes.

And by the way, was he calling them that by that point?

He had created the brand, created the first product.

Well, the way John approached it was, he really wanted something that was rustic, that was wholesome, that had a bit of a Western, rugged feel to it.

And so he and my older brother, Tim, my oldest brother, Tim, they were talking about it 1 day and kind of just brainstorming ideas.

And Tim said to John, he's like, hey, John, what about bear cakes?

And We grew up kind of hearing stories from our dad who lived in Alaska when he was in his early twenties on a survey crew.

And he tells these stories about Kodiak bears and that evolved into Kodiak cakes.

So it looked pretty similar to what it looks like today.

It has a big bear on the front, brown craft look, you know.

But what was different about it then is it was in a paper bag, like a printed craft paper bag.

And it was like sewn across the top, you know, to seal it off.

So you had to like, cut it off or take the string out.

By the way, that logo, if anyone listening can picture it, right?

There's that bear growling and it says Kodiak Cakes.

It's got like a, it's sort of a maroon rust colored circle around it with wheat.

And basically what it looks like today was what it, what he made in 1995.

I mean, it's, we've, we've, there've been just some subtle changes over time, but I mean, The bear hasn't changed at all, for example.

So tell me, how did you guys, as you kind of started up this business, where did you go to, would you just go door to door to little shops?

So we had this product ready to go, which we stored in his basement.

We made this little makeshift warehouse down there.

And where were you going to try and get people to carry your pancake mix?

So I remember the first day John went to work and I was gonna go out by myself so I started downtown Salt Lake and I started going into hotel gift shops and I remember thinking man I have we have no idea how to sell a product I'm just gonna walk in and start talking to people, right?

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Kodiak Cakes: Joel Clark (2020)