Farther, Wider

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Farther, Wider
Chief Executive Lizanne Falsetto at ThinkThin in Santa Monica.

Nutrition bar company ThinkThin LLC is getting heftier and looking for new ways to grow its bottom line.

The Santa Monica company, which sells high-protein and fruit-and-nut bars in natural food and grocery stores across the country, has inked deals that will boost by 40 percent the number of retail locations that carry its products. Already sold in Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s stores, ThinkThin’s bars in January began appearing in Target, Safeway, Wal-Mart and Walgreens stores.

The expansion into larger retailers, said Lizanne Falsetto, the company’s founder and chief executive, is an important step in its attempt to become a household name among health food shoppers.

“The goal is to be a lifestyle brand and have many different offerings, from snacks and beverages all the way to frozen,” she said. “My dream is frozen. There’s such a great place for ThinkThin there, though, of course, it’ll be years still before we get there.”

The company, founded in 1999, has more than quadrupled its sales in the last four years, she said. In the process, it has begun to tiptoe out of its diet and nutrition bar comfort zone.

This month, ThinkThin introduced Divine bars, a healthy dessert bar the company hopes to sell near checkout registers alongside candy.

Though she declined to disclose revenue figures, Falsetto said the expansion of both its product line and the retail outlets has come as a result of a healthy, debt-free balance sheet.

Nevertheless, expanding offerings and making the move from niche retailers to a wider market can be fraught with risk.

Steve Stallman, president of Santa Clarita food retail consultancy Stallman Marketing, said success in one food category doesn’t guarantee success in others.

“Every category has unique challenges, and I think some companies are surprised that going into new ones can actually be harder,” he said. “You’re playing in a different category where people are already set in their ways. Buying patterns are different, demographics may be different and you don’t know how the competition is going to react.”

But John Weaver, owner of food retail consulting firm FoodCrafters LLC in North Kingstown, R.I., said ThinkThin has already cleared one hurdle: getting its foot in the door with major retailers”

‘Audience of retailers’

“The assumption is that she can now go to these retailers where she’s already selling her bars and make presentations,” he said. “So she’s already got an audience of retailers who are aware of ThinkThin and its success with nutrition bars.”

Falsetto, a former fashion model, founded ThinkThin after spending many hungry years on the road among Tokyo; Paris; Milan, Italy; and New York.

“Through years of travel, I realized there was not anything you could take with you that was a portable food,” she said. “Healthy food was not easily accessible in airports, and it was hard as a model to keep my mental stamina and physique up.”

Falsetto said her grandmother inspired her to make nutrition bars.

“She was a really amazing Italian cook, and one of the things she made was a lot of granola and cookies,” she said.

Though inspired by her grandmother’s baking, ThinkThin bars are different from home-made granola and cookies in many ways: The entire product line is gluten-free and many bars are dairy-free. Also, the bars tend to be high in protein and low in sugar.

The company, headquartered in Santa Monica, employs about 40, including a team of five in research and development who work with Falsetto to create the bars. It outsources manufacturing to Creative Energy Foods Inc. in Oakland, which is large enough to handle the added manufacturing from the expansion. (Last year, the Food and Drug Administration said Creative Energy was voluntarily recalling some bars it manufactured for ThinkThin because traces of salmonella had been found in peanuts it received from a supplier. No illnesses associated with the contamination were reported.)

The company retails its latest creation, gluten-free Divine bars, for $1.69 each, or about $18 for a box of 12. Falsetto is pleased that 40 percent of the company’s nutrition bar sales come from box sales.

“It says a lot about our bars that people are buying a box and not just a bar,” she said. “That shows that the brand is a lifestyle pantry staple, and that women are buying them for the whole family as well as for themselves.”

Falsetto said two of the retailers ThinkThin will join this year – Safeway and Wal-Mart – approached her after seeing industry sales data.

ThinkThin is among the top sellers in the natural niche of the nutrition bar industry according to Spins LLC, a Schaumberg, Ill., company that tracks retail sales in the health and wellness category, just behind Kind, LaraBar and Clif Bar in the approximately $80 million natural nutrition bar market. Other retailers were more amenable to meeting with her after hearing ThinkThin had struck deals with other mass-market retailers.

“It is more welcoming to walk into a buyer’s office and be able to know that you were invited to come, because the conversation becomes more equal than if you’re pounding on their door,” she said.

But for all its success with nutrition bars, ThinkThin has a long way to go to be considered a lifestyle food brand.

FoodCrafters’ Weaver said the process of becoming a household brand, as ThinkThin aims to do, is long and arduous.

“One of the secrets of success is having the fortitude and tenacity to get through those early years,” he said, “and it helps to have deep pockets because it’s a very competitive and expensive process.”

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