Kodiak Cakes: Joel Clark

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2020

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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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 approaching $200 million in annual revenue as 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 Year's 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.
0:31.0	So I put together a promotion at Safeway.
0:35.0	We're going to offer a dollar off, right?
0:38.0	Suddenly I got a call one 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.
0:46.0	And it showed $2 off on the shelf.
0:50.0	Well, that's a huge discount. That was a deep discount.
0:53.0	So he's like, so I turned it off before it got worse.
0:56.0	And I was like, oh man, you got to be kidding me.
0:58.0	This is another near death experience that we're going to be going through.
1:02.0	And when I found out, you know, the bill was 50 grand.
1:07.0	Man, I was like, what am I going to do?
1:10.0	From NPR, it's how I built this.
1:18.0	A show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:25.0	I'm Guy Ross and I'm a show today how Joel Clark ran into every roadblock you can think of on his way to building Kodiak Kays,
1:35.0	a pancake mix based on his mom's recipe that he grew into a $200 million brand.
1:43.0	In a democracy, change comes from the ballot box, but sometimes the will of the people is overrode by an assassin's bullet.
1:50.0	From Wondery, American History Tellers is a podcast that explores the events and people who shaped our history.
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