Luckily, Daniel Katz found a weird loophole. Penske doesn’t have an age restriction as long as you’re willing to drive one of their big, yellow rigs around. “I’ll literally pull up in a huge yellow truck,” says Katz. “And not a small truck either; like the 25-foot industrial one.” But why is a teen, who just earned the right to vote, let alone drive a car, having important client meetings with large food-industry giants in the first place? “I’ve created the healthiest protein bar ever,” Katz says. That may sound like a bold statement, especially from a cocky kid, but if the $3 million Katz just raised to finance his two-month old company, D’s Naturals, is testimony, a lot of people agree. Why are investors throwing a ton of cash at a kid? Only because Katz has concocted something that hasn’t existed before in the highly lucrative and competitive energy bar market: His flagship No Cow Bar is a dairy-free, soy-free, vegan creation that’s ridiculously high in fiber and protein—akin to the immensely popular Quest Bar—but without any possibly offensive whey protein or artificial sweeteners. Instead, No Cow relies on a mixture of rice and pea proteins, making it a complete protein source, made sweet by natural monk fruit extract, stevia, and erythritol (a sugar alcohol). MORE: Why Meat Bars are the New Protein Bars According to Katz, the bar has the highest amount of plant-based protein—20 g in a 170-calorie serving—of any bar on store shelves. “In the protein-bar market today, I wouldn’t even consider half of the products to be ‘protein bars’—they’re just candy bars with a little bit of protein,” says Katz. Of course, what drives a kid to create a protein bar—and not a candy bar—in the first place hopefully says something about changing trends in society. While Katz’s friends at his high school in Cincinnati were clamoring for processed goodies out of the hallway vending machines, he was pulling out Tupperwares full of grilled chicken with steamed broccoli and rice to munch on in the middle of class. As part of his nutrition regimen as a football player he calls it the “bodybuilder diet”—Katz needed a healthy protein bar that was also dairy-free to accommodate his lactose intolerance. “There just weren’t any out there,” he says. So he made one. Except, it’s not that simple to fashion a shelf-stable, truly healthy snack that’s ready for nationwide distribution. To understand how an 18-year-old pulled it off, you need to know a few things about Daniel Katz. Number one: He started his fist company at age 12, using Craigslist to trade his clunky flip-phone for better models until he had the sleekest brand on the market. “I didn’t spend any money,” Katz says. “My dad would drive me to meet strangers while I traded them for a phone with slightly better features.” So you can see what kind of shoestring-budget entrepreneurial attitude we’re dealing with here. Number two: He graduated high school a year early, promising his parents he’d attend college if they agreed to finance his entrepreneurial ventures. After three months at Indiana University—the day before the dropout deadline—Katz called his parents to tell them he wanted to move to Los Angeles and start a company. “I told them, this is what I want to do in life, this is the only thing that makes me happy,” he says. They agreed, and let him move across the country to launch the business. Number three: He loves to fail. “It means I’ll learn something,” he says. In Los Angeles, Katz hired contractors to help him formulate and sell an amino acid-fortified energy drink. When the product was finally ready for distribution, he found out a missing recycle code on the packaging made it illegal to sell on California shelves. Sure, the business failed spectacularly, but Katz says the contacts he made and his exposure to the health market were invaluable in his next venture, D’s Naturals. MORE: We Tried It: A Liver-Based Protein Bar Number four: He’s probably got more moxie than you. “What works best for me in business is to act bigger than you are,” Katz says. OK, backseat to an 18-year old just taken. Katz moved back to Cincinnati after his healthy drink idea folded in 2014. That’s when he plotted the idea for the No Cow Bar one night in his apartment, heading straight to the resource any enterprising teen needs: Google. He searched for dairy-free protein bars, but the results were sparse. Either the bars had too much sugar, or too little protein. It’s challenging to pack plant-based protein into a bar without dairy and still make it taste good. Most of the brands Katz found relied on artificial sweeteners, something he refused to do. MORE: The Seven Best Energy Bars Made from Real Food His solution came when he found a compound called Isomaltooligosaccharide, or IMO for short. IMO is a naturally occurring, but difficult-to-digest plant fiber. It acts like a sweetener, while preventing your body from absorbing carbohydrates. Basically, it can make plant-based protein taste good without needing to add any sugar. (IMO has been “generally recognized as safe” by the FDA, if that helps you sleep better at night.) Katz isn’t a food scientist, but he figured if he could get his hands on IMO, he could tinker with a basic recipe for his bar. So he called up distributors and pretended like he owned a big company when all he really had at that point were some tax forms and a name. “It’s little things like saying ‘we’,” he says. “Saying ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ makes it sound like we have 50 employees when really the company is just me.” Katz jury-rigged the first batch in his kitchen. “It was awful,” he admits. But while consistency was off and the taste might have been a little funky, he met all his nutritional targets. From there, he was able to pass it off to a team of natural foods experts who could finalize the recipe. MORE: The Truth about Pea Protein “It probably took 90 times before it was correct and to my liking,” Katz says. Fast forward three months, and D’s Naturals now has deals with national clients—including Europa Sports Products—a multi-million dollar round of financing, and a warehouse in Cincinnati with nearly 150,000 bars. Katz plans to expand his focus beyond bars. In true entrepreneurial fashion, he won’t reveal what’s next, but promises it will be the “next innovation in natural food.” (His Instagram hints at something called “fluffbutter.”) MORE: Is This Soy-Free Meat Alternative the New Tofu? “My goal is to become the fastest growing natural food company of all time,” he says. To do that, he sleeps less than four hours a night on an air mattress in his office. But as the No Cow Bar spreads nationwide, Katz says it’s all worth it. “The good thing about being young is that I have plenty years ahead of me to relax.” And that’s the one place where Daniel Katz may be proven wrong.
