In 1990, Gary Erickson set off on a 175-mile bike ride with his good friend Jay. When you’re riding that long, you can’t just rely on water and Gatorade to get you through. Your body is burning calories faster than you can take them in and energy bars are a true necessity. Except at the time, he packed the only ones on the market in his bag and which as many of us can recall were sticky, unappetizing messes! Certainly not something a health conscious individual would want to eat. As he puts it, that’s the moment the CLIF Bar was born.
But what we admire most about Erickson isn’t that he created a delicious energy bar, it is his entire business model. As any successful business owner will tell you, it wasn’t long before he was facing pressures to sell CLIF Bar and cash out on his great idea. But for Gary, that’s not what business is about, and we admire that more than we can say.
CLIF Bar is committed to doing business a better way in an uncompromising fashion. They were featured in the book Small Giants for how they run their business truly walking their talk, not just flashing catchy tag lines. Knowing that food is the core of their business, CLIF Bar uses only organic ingredients and organic farmers to source their products. They also offer amazing work-life balance programs that allow their employees to not only be healthier, but happier and excited about coming to work each day.
We’re featuring Gary as our #FeatureFriday today because we know one thing…