The Craft of Building Simple...
Meet Amanda Ament — founder of Simple Bars, turning a kitchen experiment into a growing business.
Hey, it’s Alex!
This week, we’re talking with Amanda Avent — a Swiss-born entrepreneur who turned a personal no-sugar challenge into Simple Bars, a natural snack brand she built from scratch in the U.S.
From cold-calling stores to flying in food scientists and navigating the maze of co-packers, Amanda shares the real moments behind the business — including the two times she almost walked away, and what pulled her back in.
Dive in below!
Simple Bars Quick Stats:
📆 Years in Business: 2.5
😮 Times Almost Quit: 2
🍫 Number of SKUs: 4–5
Getting Started…
They say it takes three weeks to change a habit, and a few years ago, I challenged myself to stop eating sugar. So I thought, you know what? Let me try three weeks, cut off from sugar completely.
So, when I went to grab groceries, I really started reading the listed ingredients on packages. I had no idea how to read nutritional tables, but I just knew I wasn’t going to buy anything that had sugar as a listed ingredient.
I did that for maybe a week and a half, and it was terrible.
I got headaches, mood swings, you name it.
But then the third week came around, and my skin got clearer, I slept much better, and I had a lot more energy.
Because I felt so good, I just kept saying, “let's do another week…”
And weeks became months, but my problem was just snacking on the nuts all the time. Natural foods I was okay with, but after months of eating nuts, you get sick and tired of them.
So I started making my own bars in the kitchen.
Eventually though, I realized there's NO way I'm the only one struggling with this, because you couldn't find a single natural snack bar at the grocery store without sugar, so I thought about turning it into a business.
I reached out to a food scientist in San Francisco and told her what I was doing. I went to her lab, and for the first three days, it was a disaster.
We tried different types of sweeteners, and finally, she introduced me to allulose, and made some with it. It wasn't too sugary, but the bars were very stringy, which I wanted to fix.
Then she brought in a friend who's also a food scientist, and I got really lucky, because it was Erika Thornton. She worked with CLIF Bar when they first started.
She’d been with the company for years, but wanted to do her own food science consulting services, to which I was her first customer. And all kudos to her — she made something work within a week.
I didn’t have a food industry background at all, and if you would have told me years ago that I’d end up here, I would’ve never believed you.
I’ve always been a healthy eater, but I wasn't a hardcore health advocate or anything.
At the time, I was just finishing my Bachelors in Business, and I knew I wanted to do something for myself. I just didn't know what it was.
I should mention — I've always been very inspired by my dad, who's a serial entrepreneur. I’ve always looked up to him and admired what he’s done, so in some ways, it felt natural, I just didn't know how or what it was going to look like.
But the health habit happened and that’s when doing it as a business struck me, and I followed it.
Working with Co-Packers…
First off, there are different co-packers at different sizes. Everyone has their own minimum order quantities.
And our situation in particular was difficult because in order to produce our bars, we needed three of the main machines that not that many co-packers have—mostly just the larger ones.
Some of these larger copackers — we’re talking minimum order quantities of a million bars a month, some per WEEK.
Luckily, we found the ideal co-packer that we started with and were able to do a test run of 15k units.
Not nothing, but better than a million. laughs
The early days…
Launching a business is a bit different for me, because I'm from Switzerland.
To fund a company in the US, you have to go through different requirements for the E2 visa. Under the student visa, you can work only a limited number of hours but not create your own business. I knew I wanted to be in California because that's where all the health trends start. The visa that made the most sense was the E2 because it gives me four to five years.
So, I finished my study abroad, came back to Europe and I had to figure out how to create an LLC.
I had to do everything in a different time zone, obviously, so I would go to college during the day and at night stay on the phone until 4 AM with people in the US, figuring out how to do this. It was definitely difficult, because I was balancing school, but I had all this energy because it was so new, exciting and it was mine.
I also knew that if I didn't do it, nobody else was going to do it. So it just felt natural.
Early Customer Outreach & Branding…
So after I got the visa, I moved to LA for a few months. While I was there, I remember driving through Malibu,, and I would just stop at stores — one by one — and I would give them the samples we had and collect their business cards. After that, I created this huge Excel sheet.
Then, when we finally did production, I just emailed all of them and I was like, hey, this is the final product, you can buy it on our website.
With all the door-knocking, I think we generated a lot of word of mouth, but we just kept going to different places and approaching different people — until we started working with a distributor. That really kicked things into gear.
Instead of us reaching out all the time, people started coming to us.
Small stores, big stores — everyone.
So things flipped completely, and it’s stayed pretty consistent since then.
Best Sales Channels & Evolving Goals…
I'm not in a rush to grow.
I've always wanted to take it slowly and enjoy the journey, rather than looking to exit in a set amount of time. Entrepreneurship culture in the US — I’ve noticed — is very much about building something, selling it, and moving on.
That's not something I want to do.
Growing slowly has been our approach from the get-go, and I think it’s a huge part of our success.
All those food brands that you see out in the stores?
I learnt that more than half of them aren’t making money.
To get into huge retailers, there are so many associated costs, and it’s hard for most companies to turn a profit.
With our approach, I’ve always kept us in a position where we're not losing money, even if it means saying no to big deals.
E-Commerce is a stable channel for us, through subscriptions, mostly. But it depends.
We have this cruise that we supply.
It’s for nutritionists, and it’s a huge order, but it’s seasonal.
Bigger stores, there’s a certain level of consistency, but small and medium retailers, you just don’t know.
We also work with another distributor in New York. He got us into 100 different new stores throughout New York and New Jersey. But again — he only placed a few orders, so it fluctuates a lot, to be honest.
What you gain by working with smaller retailers in terms of profitability, you definitely feel the trade off with less consistency in working with the big box stores.
Demand Planning & Production Challenges…
Honestly, in the beginning, it was about matching the minimums our co-packer was asking, so I didn't really have a choice. We had to do a much bigger production that we needed, then instead of doing a certain amount a year, we decided to break it down so we have fresh products on a consistent basis.
But you can never really plan. Recently, we had this one deal come out of nowhere and they said they needed product on a really tight timeline, so we had to rush the production and everything was insane.
And then you have to get the ingredients on time.
We order most of everything from California, and tend to overnight them for rush production, which is very expensive.
It can be tough, but our co-packer is very flexible and also knows that if you grow, they grow, and ours is really great. They are very flexible with dates and go out of their way to make sure we hit production on time.
I used to do all of the planning alone, too, but now I have this company that oversees all of our sales, which has been helpful.
Lessons Learned…
Something I'm good at — I think — is production. Getting the ingredients, getting the product, going to the plant, making sure everything's done properly. I think I’m also quite good at outreach, just because I've done it so much over the years.
All this being said, I'm a perfectionist. I lost so much time agonizing over the packaging, the logo, the ingredients — everything, really — originally. I’ve worked on it for a while.
It’s been a huge lesson to just get looser with decisions, and remind myself that most things aren’t ‘make or break’.
For a period of time, we worked with independent contractors, and some agencies, but we eventually hired some dedicated staff. The downside, of course, is paying more out of pocket, but it’s taken so much weight off our shoulders, and it’s easily been one of our best decisions.
Even still, delegating was very hard for me, and it took a long time to get to a stage where I was comfortable passing things off.
One of the biggest unexpected lessons I’ve learned is that there isn't one single way to do things.
You can study how successful CEOs built their empires, but they did so in different times and contexts. There are countless ways to approach business, and your journey will be shaped by its own unique circumstances.
And if I were to start again from scratch, maybe I would try to start producing less at the beginning — that was very expensive.
Oh — hiring faster. And by faster I don't mean quicker, just sooner.
Getting more outside help, delegating much sooner than what I did originally.
Honestly, for the first few months, that would have made a huge difference, because you’re hiring people who actually have experience in the industry, and that’s invaluable.
They usually have contacts, so it’s a lot easier to establish a network instead of just going door-to-door like we did.
Working in the US vs Europe…
American culture is all about work. There’s this overarching sense that if you don't struggle, you're not doing it right. People are so proud of saying that they work until like 3 AM, and that’s strange to me.
I studied abroad in Australia, and people there have what I think is the best mentality.
They're laid back, they laugh about themselves — they're just easy going. People stop working in the afternoon just to go surfing. They really prioritize work-life balance and make time to enjoy their friends and family.
In Europe, I feel it's a bit in between.
It depends where you are, but for the most part, there’s a pretty good balance.
It was very hard for me in the beginning, because I felt a lot of culture shock. But looking back, I think being around the ‘US mentality’ actually helped me a lot, because it made me work like crazy to build something. It’s not healthy in the long term, but it’s useful if you’re an entrepreneur and want to get somewhere early on.
Now, I’m more grounded. I’m into the Australian mentality more than I used to.
Back then, I would never take a day off, even on weekends, and now I give myself a lot of room to rest and recharge.
On Mentors…
When I researched how to do a business, I found something called SCORE — it’s basically this initiative that the government runs to help people build their own business. They give you a bunch of mentors that you can reach out to for free, so I would reach out to these different people in all these different categories.
Marketing, accounting, everything.
Eventually, I got referred to Richard Lamb, former co-founder at Balance Bar which was sold for $268 million by Kraft Foods who happened to be a local and also worked in the industry, so it was a perfect match.
We had a few calls, I met him, and he just gradually became a bigger help. I would send him contracts from the co packer or different stores and ask him, like what do you think? Like what would you change?
He made a lot of changes to make sure we wouldn’t be put in trouble, so that’s been very important.
Working with Family…
As much as I was able to do everything on my own in the beginning, it eventually got to a point where I was too overwhelmed. My sister Mélanie was really good at supporting me throughout those times, and she saw everything evolve — she was there when I designed the logo, and got our first samples.
Separately, I was debating getting someone on board. Well, I wasn’t debating — I wanted to get someone, but I had a hard time trusting that someone would care as much about the product as I did. Then I thought, why not Mélanie?
She’d just graduated. Even though she had a completely different career lined up, she came in, and she has been nothing short of incredible. I wouldn't be able to do it without her. We make decisions together. It takes a ton of the weight off, and it’s actually been better for our personal relationship.
Most Challenging Experience…
There are two that stand out.
Early on, I had two co-packers at once, and it was a nightmare.
Keep in mind, it takes months to find each of them and just get a “trial”, even though you pay for every test product. Plus, you have to fly in yourself and your food scientist, and pay for hotel accommodations — it gets very expensive.
At that point I was like, alright maybe this isn’t what I should be doing.
I had lost so much money and time.
Then, Mélanie came in and we got to work. We just went full on search mode, and then we found the co packer we currently work with — and we’re so lucky to have them. I’m so grateful.
The second time was a few months later, when we were still reaching out to stores non-stop.
We were reaching out all the time, not getting answers, constantly following up and getting offered deals that weren’t worth it. We were just losing a lot of money and not getting enough sales, plain and simple.
So, this one weekend, we were in Florida, I just kept thinking, I really want to be done with this. It's just not worth the stress. And then — I can’t even make it up — I was in our hotel room, and I got an email from a customer, asking us when more bars would be available.
It was simple, but that message was just a signal that we were genuinely helping people.
That it's bigger than us, you know?
So that really gave me a kick, and from there we just switched everything.
That's when we started hiring, and we really changed our entire strategy.
And I'm so glad we did.
That’s it for this issue!
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Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry