The Curveball of Protein Snacks

When it comes to building simplyFUEL, it’s all about the hustle.

BY MARI RYDINGS

Most emerging brands — nicknamed “challenger brands” for their reputation of upsetting the status quo — attempt to disrupt an established market with an innovation created to solve a problem that mainstream brands aren’t addressing. Sometimes, though, a brand develops organically, which is exactly what happened for Leawood, KS-based simplyFUEL.

The motivation behind creating simplyFUEL was to feed a passion for healthy living through better-for-you protein balls to a wider consumer audience.

When founder and chief fueling officer Mitzi Dulan, RD, CSSD, was a newly minted registered dietitian fresh from a highly competitive dietetic internship at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, she dove straight into the entrepreneurial world, launching her own nutritional consulting company. She built an impressive client base that has included the likes of the National Honey Board, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Kansas City Royals. The partnership with the National Honey Board served as a catalyst for the popularity of her signature protein balls after the recipe appeared on Dulan’s America’s Nutrition

Expert Pinterest page. With about 3.5 million followers, the recipe went viral.

Over the next two years, Dulan continued developing protein ball recipes out of her home and sharing them on social media. The balls are formulated with the same base ingredients — oats, honey, peanut butter and protein powder — with inclusions such as chocolate chips and almonds for variety.

The 2015 World Series was the game changer that would give simplyFUEL its first base hit.

“By 2015, I had been the team sports dietitian for the Kansas City Royals for 10 years,” Dulan recalled. “I was out at the ballpark, and I told the guys I was going to bring them my protein balls the following week. It was the first time I ever made the team food from my kitchen as I always worked with the chef. They absolutely loved the balls. I kept having to make more, eventually quadrupling the recipe. The players kept eating them, loving them — and winning games.”

Baseball is a superstitious sport, and the players connected their winning streak with the protein balls.

“I got lucky … six weeks later, we won the World Series,” Dulan said.

A chance meeting with a sports reporter after a celebratory party in the Royals clubhouse during the playoffs led to a series of appearances on all the local TV networks, which were already familiar with Dulan’s work from her appearance as an expert for nutrition segments.

“My protein balls became a little bit famous in KC, and people started asking, ‘How can I buy these?’” Dulan said. “That’s how the company got started.”

The brand began as an online store in 2016 while Dulan made products in her kitchen to fulfill digital and word-of-mouth orders. In those early days, the simplyFUEL production team was a bit unconventional as Dulan called on a network of friends to help fulfill orders from customers like the US Men’s National Soccer team and the Los Angeles Lakers.

The 2017 Natural Products Expo West show was the next big play for the company when simplyFUEL drew big-name attention.

“We ran out of samples the first day and had to make more protein ball dough that night,” Dulan recalled. ”We had so many people coming to the booth that we were rolling protein balls in the booth as fast as we could.”

At the show, the brand caught the attention of Los Angeles-based Pressed, a manufacturer of cold-pressed juice and plant-based foods that sells its products in its own retail stores. Pressed became simplyFUEL’s first large-scale client, adding the protein balls to the 68 locations it had at the time. The retailer has since grown to 114 locations in California, Texas, Arizona and New York City.

A Los Angeles-based buyer from Costco also noticed simplyFUEL at the show. But with no co-packer, that opportunity quickly turned into a challenge.

That didn’t stop the fledgling brand. Before long, simplyFUEL secured a co-packer and — after more than a year of searching — invested significant capital into a protein ball extruder that could help the brand scale up production while maintaining the integrity of the product.

“I wanted to keep the sphere shape of the protein balls intact,” Dulan explained. “I wanted to keep the integrity of the product so that all the ingredients are blended into small pieces together. I wanted it to look and feel like it was still handmade.”

Yet, by the time the necessary pieces were in place, the Costco buyer from Los Angeles was out on medical leave. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Like so many early-stage brands, the forward momentum all but evaporated in a matter of weeks.

“I was supposed to meet with a buyer from Costco’s Midwest region in March 2020, and it was cancelled because of COVID,” Dulan said, reflecting on one of the brand’s biggest challenges.

“It was a really tough year because I had made the decision that we were going to go through some major growth, and I was ready for it. I was going to use a distributor in LA to hit Southern California hard. It was going as planned for January, February and early March. We were adding 50 locations a month, but I had to back out of the California situation from a financial perspective and just try to hold on and make it through COVID.”

At the time, simplyFUEL’s customer list included NFL teams like the Dallas Cowboys and New York Jets. But when the pandemic prevented teams from getting together, the orders stopped.

“It’s hard to make it in the industry in general,” Dulan acknowledged. “But I’ve always been an entrepreneur and owned my business. I’ve bootstrapped my company, and I operate lean.”

In 2020, the brand used a convertible note to securing funding, and it has plans to fundraise in the third or fourth quarter this year, which will help grow the brand and expand the product line.

The return of in-person tradeshows is helping get the name out there again.

Dulan returned to the Natural Products Expo West show in 2022 with the goal of reigniting some of the momentum that started before the pandemic. This time, when Costco came calling, simplyFUEL was ready.

The VP for Costco’s Texas region stopped by the booth at the Expo and offered to introduce simplyFUEL to the buyer in the snacks category. It was just a few weeks later that the brand had secured its first Costco protein ball purchase order.

As a result, simplyFUEL protein balls launched in 13 Costco stores in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area earlier this year and in Costco stores in Oklahoma and Wichita, KS, also part of Costco’s Texas region. The protein balls have performed so well, in fact, that Costco is expanding distribution to the entire Texas region, which includes Houston and Austin. The emerging brand is set to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area this month.

Currently, simplyFUEL protein balls are available in three flavors: Chocolate Coconut Peanut Butter, Brownie Batter and Peanut Butter Honey Almond.

The brand also offers keto granola and a one-ingredient chickpea protein powder and plans to expand the line with a second protein powder.

One thing that’s definitely in simplyFUEL’s favor — the market. Dulan was in the protein-packed, better-for-you products game when the only people interested were athletes. Now that everyday consumers are seeking these products, simplyFUEL is well-poised to shift from the emerging brand roster to mainstream player faster than expected — and by the bootstraps. CB

—Right