Nick Mares

He and his brother Justin MaresJustin MaresJustin Mares is an entrepreneur, the co-founder and chief executive of Truemed, a payments company that lets consumers use health savings account (HSA) and flexible spending account (FSA) funds on preventive health products; with his brother Nick Mares he co-founded the bone broth brand Kettle & Fire, and he co-wrote the startup customer-acquisition guide Traction with Gabriel Weinberg.Open the full entry co-founded the bone broth brand Kettle & Fire. In an article published by Entrepreneur on March 1, 2022, Justin Mares writes that he launched Kettle & Fire “with my brother, Nick,” making an organic bone broth from grass-fed, grass-finished animals, cooked for a long time and free of additives; after Google Trends and Keyword Planner showed that other people were already searching for similar products, they launched their first product in 2015, which he writes was about three years before bone broth became popular, with celebrities such as Halle Berry and Chrissy Teigen endorsing it.⁠[1]

Justin Mares writes in the article that he knew nothing about retail when they launched Kettle & Fire; the PaleoHacks group, which then had about 800,000 members, helped early sales, bringing in close to $5,000 in two days; by the end of the first year sales were about $3 million and the product was sold at Whole Foods.⁠[1]

An issue of the newsletter The Founder published on June 2, 2020 states that Justin Mares launched Kettle & Fire with his brother in 2015; that it was when this brother tore his ACL and needed a better diet to get healthier faster that Justin Mares proposed bone broth in the first place; and it lists among its topics how the brother’s cold email to Mark CubanMark CubanMark Cuban is an American entrepreneur and investor whose early work in computer systems and internet audio and video expanded into sports, film, venture investment and pharmaceuticals. He was the Dallas Mavericks’ controlling owner and a longstanding investor on Shark Tank, and co-founded Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company.Open the full entry set the company up for success. The issue does not give the brother’s name.⁠[2]

In a profile Q&A published by Retail Brew on August 1, 2023, asked about his favorite project, he says that building Kettle & Fire right out of high school was his favorite project; he also says that the worst advice he ever received was to go to college instead of starting a bone broth company, which was probably good advice at the time, but that he is glad he took the other route.⁠[3]

On June 21, 2016 the Thiel Foundation announced the 2016 class of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, which included Nick Mares; the announcement lists him with San Francisco, the project Kettle & Fire and the field Food, and states that he co-founded Kettle & Fire with his brother to bring to market the world’s first shelf-stable bone broth, made from grass-fed, pasture-raised cattle, a slow-simmered bone broth sold at select Whole Foods and Sprouts Farmers Market locations and several online retailers. The announcement states that the foundation accepted 29 new members into the 2016 class from more than 6,000 applications received from around the world, and that the fellowship gives young people $100,000 to learn by doing rather than by following conventional paths such as college.⁠[4]

In his 2022 Entrepreneur article, Justin Mares writes that in 2018 Kettle & Fire’s biggest problem was running out of stock; that year the company expanded into soup and bought a year’s worth of inventory, which he calls a mistake: the soup did not sell well, because soup buyers wanted a quick, cheap meal and the soup was expensive for that purpose, while customers who bought broth for health reasons were more likely to make their own soup, so cash stayed tied up in inventory for more than a year.⁠[1]

He writes that the company later repositioned the soup as a healthy, quick meal replacement, especially for people who follow strict diets such as Paleo, after which it sold; a keto soup line first tested on Kickstarter became one of the top sellers; in 2019, the year the keto soups were introduced, the company did $35 million in sales, and sales have since grown by more than 70%. The company later introduced a regenerative bone broth, which he describes as a stand on sustainable food systems rather than an expected bestseller.⁠[1]

A profile Q&A published by Retail Brew on August 1, 2023 states that after co-founding the grass-fed bone broth brand Kettle & Fire, he now helps other consumer packaged goods businesses simplify their finances as head of business development at Ampla. He says that supply chain vendors are often a brand’s most important partners, and that his work is with supply chain partners, building payments and credit options into their existing workflows to help those partners solve their customers’ cash flow problems; that he travels to cities with a strong consumer packaged goods presence, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, to meet new brands and their founders, which he calls his favorite part of the job; and that the retail trend he is most excited about is regenerative agriculture, which he hopes becomes the default, and that he sees brands building regenerative supply chains.⁠[3]

An undated article by Nosh reporter Adrianne DeLuca states that Vijay Manohar teamed up with Kettle & Fire co-founder Nick Mares to build Light Labs, which it describes as a new upstart food testing laboratory that aims to support transparency in the food system, while his other brother and Kettle & Fire co-founder, Justin Mares, serves as an advisor to the company. It states that the company had been operational for nearly a year and a half and had raised a $12 million seed round led by Valor and 8VC; that its lab director is Lev Spivak-Birndorf, a former co-founder of PSI Labs; and that his brother AJ Mares leads business development and operations, while Kiriti Manne is head of go-to-market. In the article, Vijay Manohar says that Kettle & Fire was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on testing, yet working with labs was painful, like an early-2000s experience in which one had to call someone; it was ambiguous what testing was being ordered, what the results would look like and how to interpret them, and consulting fees of hundreds of dollars per hour were charged to interpret results that had already been paid for.⁠[5]

The article states that Light Labs tests for environmental contaminants and verifies nutrition claims, centralizes testing and shares results through one portal, and uses software and AI to streamline its operations; its Product Insights Panel lets brands embed lab results on their product pages, and Kiriti Manne says that brands using it have seen an average 12% improvement in conversion rate. The company has “a couple hundred” brand partners, including David Protein, Banza, Serenity Kids and Lesser Evil, with interest strongest in baby food, supplements, protein products and snacks; its sweet spot is brands with roughly $100 million to upper nine figures in revenue, though it also works with smaller brands. The article adds that Justin Mares co-founded Truemed with Calley Means, and Vijay Manohar says that Light Labs has no business connection to Truemed or the MAHA movement.⁠[5]

The Light Labs company profile on the Valor Equity Partners website lists its headquarters as Austin, TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, names Nicholas Mares under leadership, and describes Light Labs as an end-to-end testing platform disrupting the market for nutritional and product purity testing. The footer of the Light Labs website states “Built in Austin, Texas,” and its FAQ states that the laboratory is in Ann Arbor, MichiganMichiganMichigan is a state of the United States nearly surrounded by the Great Lakes and made up of the Upper and Lower peninsulas; its capital is Lansing and its largest city is Detroit. It was admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, as the 26th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 10,077,331.Open the full entry; the homepage states that it is ISO 17025 accredited and that its platform centralizes lab testing, compliance and reporting, and the About page says that its software platform translates complex data into actionable insights.⁠[6][7][8]

In the 2023 Retail Brew Q&A he says that his favorite retail product at 15 was Annie’s frozen burritos, which he was obsessed with in high school; that these days, besides Kettle & Fire’s products, his favorite is Slate Milk as a drink between meals; and that his go-to coffee order is cold brew, black.⁠[3]

Kettle & Fire: Official website: https://www.kettleandfire.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

Light Labs: Official website: https://lightlabs.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]