Kodiak Cakes: Joel Clark (2020)
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Guy Raz | Wondery
4.8 • 31.1K Ratings
🗓️ 2 January 2023
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:07.0 | Download the app today. |
| 0:09.0 | New years is here, and with it brings the possibility of change. |
| 0:13.0 | As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful. |
| 0:17.0 | So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small. |
| 0:24.0 | Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR. |
| 0:27.0 | Hey there, it's Guy here, and I want to wish all of you a very happy new year. |
| 0:32.0 | 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. |
| 0:40.0 | It's the story of Joel Clark and Kodiak Cakeson. |
| 0:43.0 | Almost every member of Joel's immediate family had something to do with the brand. |
| 0:48.0 | His mom came up with the recipe, his brother started the company, even his dad worked for him for a while. |
| 0:54.0 | Anyway, it's a great story about family and food with a fair amount of failure and recovery baked in. |
| 1:01.0 | It first ran about two years ago, and I think you'll love this one. |
| 1:09.0 | So I put together a promotion at Safeway. |
| 1:13.0 | I'm going to offer a dollar off, right? |
| 1:16.0 | Suddenly I got a call one day from my distributor rep, and he's like, Joel, he's like, look, some mistake happened. |
| 1:22.0 | And your promotion got doubled in the system, and it showed two dollars off on the shelf. |
| 1:28.0 | Well, that's a huge discount. That's a D.I. deep discount. |
| 1:31.0 | So he's like, so I turned it off before it got worse. |
| 1:34.0 | And I was like, oh man, you got to be kidding me. |
| 1:36.0 | This is another near death experience that we're going to be going through. |
| 1:40.0 | And when I found out, you know, the bill was 50 grand. |
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