FOR LOVE AND SATIETY

After 20 years of growth from a home kitchen to an automated facility, Bobo’s stands strong on its core values and good vibes.

BY JOANIE SPENCER

In today’s world of emerging brands, co-manufacturers are in high demand. In fact, it’s hard to find young brands making their own products at scale. Then again, there’s Bobo’s, a Loveland, CO-based oat bar brand.

During its 20 years in business, Bobo’s has mostly relied on making the bars in-house. First, it was in shared k itchens before upgrading to its own small baking facilities in the B oulder area. But today, the company is ready for its next stage of growth, manufacturing its products in a newly completed wind-powered commercial bakery.

How Bobo’s got to where it is today is a tale as old as CPG startups themselves. It all began in founder Beryl Stafford’s kitchen when her daughter Alex — known as “Bobo” to her family — decided to bake some goodies from a recipe she found.

“She started making these treats out of a cookbook,” Stafford recalled.

“They were originally flat little cookies that were dripping with gooey yumminess, and she just kept making them for her friends at school.”

One of Stafford’s close friends, who worked in the natural food industry, took notice and convinced her to adjust the recipe, add oats and make them into bars … and perhaps start a business.

“I didn’t know anything about business,” Stafford said. “I didn’t know anything about food, and I didn’t know anything about sales. But I was newly divorced with two kids, and I knew I had to reinvent myself. So, I thought, ‘Why not? Let’s see if it works.’”

Stafford modified her daughter’s corn syrup and white sugar-based treats, adding oats and replacing the corn syrup with brown rice syrup and nixing white sugar for natural cane sugar, as well as swapping the butter with coconut oil.

She covered them in plastic wrap and took her Bobo’s Oat Bars to a local coffee shop, and soon the bars were a hit in coffee shops and co-ops. Before long, they caught the attention of a Whole Foods bakery buyer … and the rest is CPG startup history.

Two decades and six manufacturing spaces later, Bobo’s Oat Bars bear the Whole Grains Council stamp and are certified gluten-free, kosher certified, dairy-free and Non-GMO Project verified, and they haven’t strayed far from Stafford’s original modified recipe that included just five ingredients. Only now, the bars, bites and toaster pastries comprise a variety of flavors and are manufactured on four production lines in a 123,000-sq.-ft. bakery.

The company was built, one sale at a time, through good old-fashioned trial and error and, of course, bootstrapping resources. And, for the most part, it’s all been done in-house. After all, Bobo’s was born in the pre- Shark Tank era, before crowdfunding and social media, at a time when co-manufacturers weren’t exactly the most sought-after partnerships in CPG.

In fact, in the early days of the business, Bobo’s Oat Bars were made by hand in shared kitchen space with other notable Boulder-based brands like Justin’s and EVOL. It took about 10 years before Bobo’s was baking bars in its own small facility as it began to enjoy slow, but steady, growth.

Despite the innovative food brands that have emerged from the Boulder area, the lack of industrial space eventually pushed many of them toward co- manufacturing outside the city walls. However, Stafford chose the self-manufacture route, and Bobo’s has maintained control over the process and growth.

“The business was launched in Beryl’s kitchen, and she chose to ‘DIY’ it the entire time,” said T.J. McIntyre, Bobo’s CEO. “That’s become a great legacy that, 20 years later, is woven pretty thoroughly into who we are and how we do things.”

For McIntyre, who joined the company in 2016, Bobo’s manufacturing strategy has been a key factor in its growth.

With executive experience with some of the leading Colorado-based natural brands including Smart Balance, Earth Balance and Boulder Brands, McIntyre is focused on increasing production output through automation and growing the business organically through category and channel expansion.

With 50% market penetration in retail, including rotations in every region of Costco and 15,000 points of distribution for Walmart, opportunities abound for expansion as well as doubling the equivalized items inside the stores where Bobo’s already has a presence.

On supermarket, drug, convenience, military and, of course, big-box store shelves, Bobo’s currently competes in the cereal bar and nutrition bar categories. The most recent product launches — a protein bar, a dipped bar and a PB&J variety — will expand the brand’s presence in both categories.

—Below With its new 123,000-sq.-ft. bakery, Bobo’s is prepared for continued growth.

In c-stores, Bobo’s is on pace with other natural brands as it increases presence in high-end banners such as Wawa, Plaid Pantry, Jacksons, Racetrac and more.

But that’s just the beginning. With new technology now at its fingertips, the runway for growth is still quite long because shoring up production opens up R&D and product development.

In 2022, Bobo’s grew 40%, despite several out-of-stock periods before the company moved into its new facility. Shortly into 2023, February proved to be the bakery’s second biggest month on record.

“It nearly cleaned us out,” said Jason Jimenez, Bobo’s director of operations.

With investments in automation to streamline production and overcome labor challenges, the bakery is on pace to at least match last year’s growth.

The entrepreneurial spirit that started Bobo’s is what keeps the engine revving today.

“As an entrepreneur, you never sit back and pat yourself on the back because there’s always more to do,” Stafford said. “There’s always another place where we can sell Bobo’s. When you start with nothing, and then you get people excited about buying Bobo’s Oat Bars … it’s addictive.”

With many items being baked to order, Bobo’s works with a two-week lead time and a 270-day total shelf life, so the product is constantly on the go … just like Stafford herself.

“Product is never longer than 30 days on our racks,” Jimenez said.

That’s one reason why Bobo’s has, for the most part, focused on making its products in-house, rather than relying on a co-manufacturer.

“We leaned on external manufacturing last year when we were capacity constrained, but it’s just not the same as working with your own team,” McIntyre said. “Even the best co-manufacturers, while they can be an extension of our team, they’re not going to function like our team would internally or have the type of flexibility we have.”

Self-manufacturing, he explained, also helps Bobo’s better control its margins, which has been critical to its growth in a post-pandemic environment.

With the new facility and equipment investments, Bobo’s is better equipped to serve its current customers, avoid the out-of-stock nightmares and focus on its continued growth.

One area where automation is significantly helping Bobo’s keep up with growth is the packaging department. Horizontal flowwrappers run up to

700 pieces per minute for bites, while flowwrappers for bars handle about 250 pieces a minute.

The Westrock packaging automation runs by volume and weight, and it doubles the throughput of the previous location, where all packaging was a manual process.

“It’s been a life saver,” Jimenez said.

Facing typical manufacturing workforce challenges, the packaging automation has helped alleviate some of those labor woes. The operation is set up so that those working on the 24 Revent, Sveba-Dahlen and Gemini/KB Systems rack ovens can shift over to packaging where needed once the bars finish their bake cycle.

The bakery was designed with four central “baking kitchens,” which receive ingredients and house the mixing stations that feed the four production lines. The kitchens are large enough that one can feed two lines when needed for larger runs, such as Costco orders.

BOBO’S

“If we’re running the Apple Pie variety on two lines, we can run them both from just one kitchen,” Jimenez said. “Costco’s main products are Apple Pie and Strawberry, so this allows us to make them both at the same time. In the past, we had to make one flavor, then the other. This layout gives us much more flexibility.”

That flexibility is key for this nimble bakery, but strategic approaches to automation keep it all running smoothly. While one line might still rely on manual work, another line with Reiser automation deposits dough into trays. Additionally, investing in a Vemag extruder has allowed for one of the new products released earlier this year.

The automation has not only increased throughput but also provided greater product consistency.

More than all that, the new bakery enables Bobo’s to keep living out Stafford’s entrepreneurial values and core principles as a mission-driven company.

The wind-powered facility, developed by Colorado-based design-build firm McWhinney Brothers, supports Bobo’s mission of remaining a good steward of the environment.

Although Bobo’s does not own the building, the team worked with the landlord throughout the greenfield process to incorporate sustainable design elements that will benefit not only Bobo’s environmentally friendly production but also whoever occupies the space in the future.

“Of course, the owner wanted to have a building that was environmentally conscious,” said Henry Hughes, Bobo’s EVP of marketing. “But as we built it out together with the tenant improvement budget we had in the lease, we also could do things that pushed it in that direction.”

Bobo’s rapid growth in recent years — coupled with incremental increases to capacity — casts a light on how operational inefficiencies can impact a company’s carbon footprint. Collapsing three small production spaces into one site allowed Bobo’s to reset and reexamine its environmental impact as a midsize food manufacturer.

“Moving into this facility has enabled us to not only get efficient but also embrace sustainability from an environmental perspective,” McIntyre said, noting that in the first few months after starting up the lines, the operation has established systems to capture the waste stream and calculate natural gas consumption to track and control emissions — which is zero for electricity.

Bringing on Jim Stewart as director of environmental health and safety was the natural first step in that reset.

“Jim has done a lot of work to help us understand our baselines with CO2 emissions and how we can minimize it, as well as help us look at how we handle waste in the facility,” Hughes said. “Now we have a lot of opportunities to get smarter and more thoughtful about our emissions and how we can offset those.”

With a goal of becoming carbon neutral by the end of the year, Bobo’s is taking a holistic approach to sustainability through LED lighting, water reduction and efficiency in transportation.

The baking technique required for these bars relies on gas-fired ovens, so while the gas usage currently prevents Bobo’s from eliminating its carbon footprint, the bakery is exploring partnerships for purchasing carbon credits.

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Meanwhile in the packaging department, Bobo’s is managing cardboard use by recycling or selling unused materials.

Additionally, the Bobo’s engineering team, led by Charles Nichols, director of engineering, worked hard to develop packaging that was environmentally friendly yet sturdy enough to withstand robotic case-packing machinery.

“We worked really closely with the packaging engineers to maximize the efficiency of the cartoners,” Hughes said. “They understood our goals of not only keeping our cardboard usage down but also having something that we could run through the equipment efficiently.”

Sometimes, all it takes is a small change to make a big impact.

“People don’t always think about it, but if you could make a box just a millimeter thinner, it saves money and still gets the customer their product but in a more sustainable way,” Jimenez added.

Bobo’s has also invested in postconsumer recycle board, and the package design includes messaging about how to properly recycle the wrapper. The bakery has also enrolled in the “How 2 Recycle” program, which will be added to product packaging later this year.

“A lot of people will bring their waste to a compost/trash/recycle stand and not know what to do,” Hughes said. “So, I spent a lot of time learning about it so we can help make it easier for consumers.”

And speaking of consumers, Bobo’s also stands on a foundation of the people the bakery feeds. The company has come a long way from Stafford’s kitchen, but the sentiment is still the same.

“We talk a lot about bringing people home and feeding them,” McIntyre said. “That’s a way that Bobo’s has stood out from the very beginning.”

Bobo’s partners with There With Care, a Boulder-based nonprofit that provides a range of fundamental services to children and families in critical health crisis.

“This group shows up and helps them,” McIntyre said. “They really descend on families who have a child facing terminal illness and attend to their needs. That feels really good to us.”

Service like this is foundational to Bobo’s culture, and it shows in how the bakery develops its products.

“We don’t develop products for a Nutritional Facts outcome,” McIntyre said. “We just bake food. Bobo’s core products are intuitive, good food. It’s satiating, but at the same time, it reminds you of coming home from school and smelling cinnamon and raisins baking in your mom’s kitchen. That’s the benefit we bring: Love and satiation.”

WATCH NOW: T.J. McIntyre expands on the core benefit of Bobo’s Oat Bars beyond nutrition.

That love is what brought Stafford and her daughter joy from the very first iteration of a Bobo’s bar, when Bobo herself was just 14 years old.

As Bobo’s continues its category and channel expansion, the bakery is spreading that love through products like its Pride Bar line, which has run as a limited-time offer (LTO) for three consecutive years. In celebration of Pride Month in June, Bobo’s donates 100% of the profits to organizations such as PFLAG National and The Center on Colfax. While the LTO launches in conjunction with Pride Month, it remains available direct to consumers on the Bobo’s website.

“These are the things that are interwoven into the fiber of who we are as a company,” McIntyre said.

Twenty years ago, her friend sketched a caricature of Bobo into a logo, and Stafford set off on an adventure selling the plastic-wrapped bars she made in her kitchen. Stafford’s had successes and made mistakes along the way, and she’s learned how to improve with every step.

Today, Bobo’s is a mission-based business that’s bringing the same good vibes to consumers that the original gooey treats brought Bobo’s classmates all those years ago. Not bad for a single mom who didn’t know a thing about food or business. It just goes to show, people really can do anything if they want it bad enough. CB

Innovations From The Bakery Floor

In Loveland, CO, Bobo’s Oat Bars have settled into its environmentally friendly 123,000-sq.-ft. plant. Collapsing three small bakery spaces into one facility with four production lines increased Bobo’s capacity while reducing its carbon footprint and the need for additional labor. Below is a list of supplier innovations that can be found in the bakery:

AMFEC mixers

Fanuc robotic tamping unit

Lantech pallet wrappers

IMA/Delta flowwrappers

PMI Kyoto horizontal | vertical cartoners

Revent rack ovens

Sveba-Dahlen rack ovens from Gemini

Vemag depositors

WestRock case packers