Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachel & Jake Beaudry.
Hi Rachel & Jake, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Rawr was born out of a pain point and was more of an accident. We were professionals in the investment industry that were also adrenaline junkies and athletes.
I, Rachel, had been a distance runner in high school and in college that got into the bodybuilding industry through a back injury. This led me to be very macro nutrients driven (protein, fat, carb tracking). My husband Jake on the other hand had raced snowmobiles, competitively did BMX biking and other extreme sports. He had gotten into micro nutrients because he had a health scare with being pre-type two diabetes and he was able to reverse this diagnosis through eating very low, glycemic nutrient dense foods.
When the two of us came together and rubbed our strengths off on each other I, Rachel started to learn about adding more color to my diet and was able to reset my hormones by doing so. Jake was able to feel a lot more stable through focusing on eating higher protein!
As newly weds we went and tried every protein bar on the market trying to find one for our go-to grab and go snack. We were completely unsatisfied with our options and that’s what led us to the kitchen. We wanted to daily consume something that would be high protein, lower carb and made of real food ingredients that would also taste delicious! Most bars on the market tasted like sweet dirt haha! Bars with clean ingredients often only had 8-10gram protein and were high sugar OR they were high protein, low sugar but filled with fake sweeteners and fillers and binders.
We had no idea how to start a food product and we loved our professional careers so we thought maybe this would be an eventual “side gig” for us; which we now laugh at because Rawr has become by far the most labor intensive thing we’ve ever pursued and it’s very rare that we would ever work less than a 40 hour work week.
We day dreamed about launching the protein bar, but did not want to pursue it unless it was part of God‘s plan for our life.
We had created our little personal bar prototype in 2014. In 2015 Rachel was at a women’s Christian conference and a guest speaker was about to hit the stage. Before the speaker began her message she stopped and said that she felt somebody in the room had a creative food idea. She asked who this was.
I, Rachel did not stand and in fact, no one raised their hand or stood; however when the woman mentioned it a second time, my in-laws were in the row behind me pointing at me (they knew of our protein bar pipe dream).
This guest speaker then spoke directly to me and said I had a God idea that was going to become famous.
This was the moment we felt we had confirmation to go all in on the bar; however we waited for God’s perfect timing to quit our careers.
It wasn’t until July 2017 where we walked away from our professional careers, prepared to go to Africa and we spent the remainder of 2017 serving a ministry in Mozambique Africa. Then in January 2018 we came home and we formulated the final prototype, created the website and branding and got ready to launch our product. We launched Rawr Bar June 2018 in the Linden Hills Farmers Market in Minneapolis.
Rawr began to take off very organically through word-of-mouth customers from the farmers markets. We were getting into a lot of local gyms. In 2020 when Covid hit our business went from being 80% wholesale and 20% online to being completely flip-flopped and we now have about 80% of our sales through our online website and 20% is through wholesale relationships (gyms, cafes, smoothie shops etc).
There have been a lot of steps that led us to where we are today. We have grown from being a small husband, wife team and we operated as such for the first three years, to now having over 30 employees. We went from 2 flavors, to now 15! We are now building our own facility, a 20,000 square-foot facility, where we’ll be able to take Rawr to the next level! And we have gone from being completely handmade to slowly learning in house how to machine some of our bar flavors, and soon others, without compromising our recipes and ingredients.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I don’t think that any entrepreneur would say it is a smooth road starting a business and growing it!
There is a lot of adversity and a lot of challenges! With food a large pain point can be sourcing ingredients
One of our biggest challenges has been getting ingredients in a timely manner, especially ingredients that rely on agriculture like freeze dried fruit powders, nut butters, cacao and chocolate, vanilla and coconut nectar. When there is a drought or natural disaster, sometimes an ingredient is nearly impossible to source. There are times we’ve had to discontinue a flavor, for example our Dark Chocolate Raspberry Bar was discontinued for a season as raspberries had a very poor harvest in Europe where most (freeze dried) raspberries are sourced from.
We are very selective with our suppliers, so if an ingredient is difficult to source, we do not typically have a lot of back-up options.
Another challenge has been scaling. Often when we go through a large burst of growth we join our team in the kitchen to help them stay afloat with production. We can be seen working 60-80+ work weeks and have some seasons in the past where we worked upwards of 100 hour work weeks, while trying to hire and train and stay on top of all the other parts of running a business. We have gotten better at delegating, but sometimes we still need to patch in the work in the kitchen while hiring!
We’ve been impressed with Rawr Organics, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Rawr Bar is a real food, high protein bar made with quality, organic ingredients. Rawr Bars are dairy free, gluten free and delicious. We use ingredients like nut butters, coconut nectar, coconut oil, freeze dried fruits, dark chocolate etc to give the bars robust flavor.
A few things that set us apart –
1. We do not use fillers to bind the bar together like tapioca fiber, chicory root, corn fiber or IMO’s
2. We do not use fake sweeteners or zero calorie sweeteners like Stevia or Monk Fruit – we believe in real food which contains calories and nutrients
3. Our bars are refrigerated due to using organic, real food ingredients. They last 6 months by fridge.
Something that we are proud of brand wise is that Rawr Organics has a large heart for mission work and using our product to have a global impact. We donate 10% net proceeds to two amazing organizations that feed and empower hungry children worldwide (Feed My Starving Children and Stop For the One).
In 2026 we are also beginning to develop a bar for hungry kids that Feed My Starving Children would like to help us get in the hands of thousands of children!
Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
Something that customers find surprising and often do not know is that our bars are still mostly handcrafted. Of our 15 flavors, we hand roll 10 of them. There is a lot of love that goes into each small batch! We use rolling pins, spatula on the chocolate and hand cut each bar and hand package them!
We chose to make our bars in-house from the beginning because prior to our launch when we looked into out sourcing manufacturing, each manufacturer would have used either a filler, binder or increased sweeteners to make it easy to machine our bar. The primary reason we started was to avoid fillers, binders and high sugar, so we’ve taken the much slower path to growth by handcrafting our bars from the start.
Pricing:
- Most 12 packs are $36.79
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rawrorganics.com
- Instagram: @rawrorganics
- Facebook: @rawrorganic
