{"id":2464537,"date":"2018-02-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-09T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/uncategorized\/raising-bar\/"},"modified":"2022-05-12T12:43:54","modified_gmt":"2022-05-12T18:43:54","slug":"raising-bar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/health\/nutrition\/raising-bar\/","title":{"rendered":"Raising the Bar"},"content":{"rendered":"

In 1990,\u00a0Gary Erickson was running\u00a0a struggling bakery in Emeryville, California. He enjoyed baking\u2014many of his recipes came from his mother\u2014but had a hard time\u00a0keeping his business afloat.\u00a0He wanted to do right by his customers and employees and make a positive dent in the world, but he didn’t know how to create a strategic plan that would get him there\u2014while allowing him to follow his twin passions: climbing and cycling.<\/p>\n

His philosophy on bike touring was similarly amorphous. Instead of burdening himself with\u00a0gear and a careful plan, Erickson preferred to set out, often with his buddy Jay,\u00a0with just a seat bag packed with essentials and an open mind. The two\u00a0traveled all over the European Alps this way,\u00a0exploring remote sections of road\u2014pedaling and, in some case, even shouldering their bikes over\u00a0Alpine passes. \u201cWe didn’t know where we were going to sleep at night or eat each day,\u201d Erickson says. \u201cBut traveling light gave us freedom and exposed us to new people and experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

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One morning, back in California, the duo embarked on what they thought would be a 125-mile bike ride through the mountains east of San Francisco. The ride turned out to be 175 miles long, and all Erickson had for fuel was 6 energy bars. He had eaten five of them, but\u00a0couldn’t stomach the thought of a sixth.\u00a0\u201cI was starving, and I knew I desperately needed to eat something,\u201d recalls Erickson, \u201cbut I couldn’t bring myself to eat another bar,\u201d he says.\u00a0\u201cIt was a taste issue. I knew I could solve it, that I could make something that tasted\u2014and worked\u2014better.\u201d<\/p>\n

THE FOLLOWING YEAR, <\/strong>in 1991,\u00a0Erickson moved into a crummy\u00a0$300-a-month\u00a0garage and got to work in his mom\u2019s kitchen. \u201cI got my mom involved because, first, she was the person who taught me how to bake\u00a0and, second, I trusted her sense of taste to balance out my desire to make an all-natural energy bar with no butter, sugar, or oil,\u201d Erickson says.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got my mom involved because, first, she was the person who taught me how to bake\u00a0and, second, I trusted her sense of taste to balance out my desire to make an all-natural energy bar with no butter, sugar, or oil,\u201d Erickson says.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>\n

Painstakingly tracking each recipe, he subjected his friends to new batches for the next six months. \u201cFor a while, the recipes kept getting further and further away from what you\u2019d call food. Finally, after one failed batch, I decided to start over. I got out my mom\u2019s classic oatmeal\/chocolate-chip cookie recipe and used that as the foundation. My friends loved it.\u201d That\u00a0recipe would eventually become the basis for the original Clif\u00a0Bar. A few months later, after a year and a half of trying to crack the\u00a0all-natural, and still-tastes-good code, Erickson made his first sale to a bike shop. More bike shops signed on, and\u00a0before long, his bakery had evolved into an energy bar company.<\/p>\n

SO WHY DOES AN ENERGY BAR COMPANY<\/strong>\u00a0inspired by an epic\u00a0bike ride have\u00a0climbing-themed branding? The answer: Erickson’s father, Clifford. \u201cMy dad turned me on to nature with trips to Yosemite, where we\u2019d hike or ski,\u201d Erickson says. \u201cAs a kid, we took these wonderful road trips with my uncle and cousins where we\u2019d pack up the Pontiac and drive from national park to national park, camping for two days before moving on.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Those\u00a0camping\u00a0trips as a child turned into climbing adventures\u00a0as a young man.\u00a0In 1982, he and a buddy scaled the face of Half Dome, in Yosemite Valley\u2014a climb that\u00a0ultimately inspired the now iconic packaging. \u201cMy friend\u00a0Doug Gilmour, who designed the packaging, always saw me as a self-reliant climber,\u201d Erickson says. \u201cPart of my personality comes from those early trips with my dad.\u201d On his father\u2019s 66th birthday, Erickson told his dad that he was naming his new energy bar after him.<\/p>\n

ERICKSON NOW HAD AN ENERGY BAR <\/strong>people liked and a company full of potential, but he still needed one more ingredient to make it a success: a business-savvy partner who shared his vision. He found that\u2014and more\u2014in Kit Crawford, a jazz dancer and performing artist. Crawford\u2019s parents had raised her on homegrown, organic foods, which instilled in her a deep connection between the earth and what we eat. In an effort to get her attention, Erickson took modern dance lessons. \u201cWe were friends, and I wanted to be more than that,\u201d he admits. \u201cThen she married someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Gary
Gary and Kit, Climbing Wall<\/span> <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fourteen\u00a0years later, after Crawford\u2019s first marriage ended, their romance finally blossomed. Together\u2014their desks are now ten feet apart\u2014they’ve slowly turned Clif\u00a0into the company it is today. \u201cWhen I developed Clif, I never thought of making a ton of money or an exit strategy,\u201d he says. \u201cI always took the long view.\u201d As the company has grown, so has\u00a0Crawford’s influence.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I developed\u00a0Clif,\u00a0I never thought of making a ton of money or an exit strategy,\u201d he says. \u201cI always took the long view.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote><\/div>\n

\u201cFrom how we took\u00a0care of our employees to the organic ingredients we use, all those decisions came from Kit,\u201d he says. Erickson credits Crawford’s direction for their decision to make employee health and happiness a priority, and create a workplace with an employee cafeteria that serves sustainably sourced foods and an on-site gym, yoga studio, and climbing wall. Ten years ago, Erickson and Crawford went one step further and created an employee stock ownership program. \u201cEveryone thought Kit and I were nuts, but we quadrupled the size of Clif together,\u201d says Erickson.<\/p>\n

FAST-FORWARD TO TODAY<\/strong>\u00a0and Clif\u00a0has ridden the energy bar boom to become one of the biggest independent players in the business. As the energy foods\u00a0universe has expanded, so has Clif. Over the past two decades, they’ve launched the successful LUNA bars for women and a wide range of other\u00a0products, including nut-butter filled bars, whey protein\u00a0bars, and Z\u00a0bars, a line of organic energy snacks for kids.<\/p>\n

But until 2016, there was a missing piece. \u201cWe had deep relationships with the people who grew our ingredients. We shared our values with the employees at our headquarters, in Emeryville, California, but the bars were baked by someone else,\u201d Erickson says.<\/p>\n

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That changed when Clif\u00a0built its own commercial bakery from scratch, in Twin Falls, Idaho, employing nearly 300 people. Like\u00a0Clif\u2019s\u00a0LEED Platinum headquarters in Emeryville, the new $90 million Twin Falls facility is a special building, designed around\u00a0connecting people with nature through windows, skylights, stone walls, and indoor plants.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all part of Clif\u00a0Bar\u2019s values of advocating for organic agriculture and doing what it can to improve\u00a0our current food system and the lives of its employees.\u00a0\u201cOver the last ten years, Kit and I have set out to build a company and a culture that holds itself responsible to five bottom lines: our business,\u00a0brands, employees,\u00a0 communities, and planet.\u201d<\/p>\n

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As a company of and for people who love the outdoors, Clif Bar & Company puts people and planet first. “We’re working to run a different kind of company,” says Kit Crawford, “…the kind of place we’d want to work that makes the kind of food we’d like to eat, and that strives for a healthier, more sustainable world–the kind of world we’d like to pass on to our children.” Find out more about Clif Bar here.<\/a> \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gary Erickson built Clif Bar into a beloved brand the old-fashioned way\u2014by staying true to his values<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1961,"featured_media":2278601,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"uuid":"0f3d1f8f9ddca14eaf61ab14591f88e7","footnotes":""},"categories":[2550],"tags":[],"byline":[],"ad_cat":[],"legacy-category":[],"class_list":["post-2464537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nutrition"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Raising the Bar","url":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/health\/nutrition\/raising-bar\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/health\/nutrition\/raising-bar\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/31\/clif_hero_h.jpg","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/31\/clif_hero_h.jpg"},"articleSection":"Nutrition","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"jmccauley"}],"creator":["jmccauley"],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online","logo":"https:\/\/www.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/favicon-194x194-1.png"},"keywords":[],"dateCreated":"2018-02-09T00:00:00Z","datePublished":"2018-02-09T00:00:00Z","dateModified":"2022-05-12T18:43:54Z"},"rendered":"