BY MARK RAY
NECESSITY MAY be the mother of invention, but some mothers are pretty inventive
in their own right. Take Penny Clark. Back
in ;;;;, she sent her ;-year-old son, Joel,
around the family’s Utah neighborhood
selling pancake mix out of a red wagon.
This wasn’t just any pancake mix, however.
It was a version of an old family recipe that
called for egg whites, baking soda and vinegar, as the instructions she stapled to each
brown paper lunch sack explained.
Joel quickly sold his stock, but Penny
decided she and her husband, Richard,
weren’t ready to run a business and raise
five kids at the same time. The dream
never died, however. A dozen years later,
Joel’s older brother, Jon, revisited the idea
of launching a pancake business.
This time around, Jon envisioned a
just-add-water version of Grandpa Wallace
Christo;erson’s familiar recipe, a version
he perfected after months of research and
tinkering. In ;;;;, the brothers loaded up
their car and began selling Kodiak Cakes
Frontier Flapjack and Wa;e Mix to shops
in ski towns like Park City, Utah; Sun
Valley, Idaho; and Jackson, Wyoming. Two
years later, Jon handed the reins to Joel,
who is now CEO.
“It was slow going for many years, and
sticking with it was incredibly tough,” says
Joel Clark. “It was hard to stay motivated,
but one of the biggest reasons I stuck it out
was because of the customer letters and
emails that would arrive almost every day,
telling us how much they loved Kodiak
Cakes and thanking us for making a healthy
product that tasted so good.”
It took years before
Clark could quit his day
job, but business has been
booming since Kodiak Cakes
nabbed national distribution
deals, including one with
Costco in ;;;;. Much of
the growth stems from
a ;;;; appearance on
ABC’s Shark Tank, where
entrepreneurs pitch their
ideas and seek venture capi-
SAM FEATHERSTONE
SUPPLIERPROFILE
Kodiak Cakes offers whole-grain goodness and more
Selling like hotcakes
The Clark family left to right:
Jon, Penny, Joel and Richard.
tal. The sharks on television, unlike their aquatic
counterparts, had quite
a taste for pancakes. In
fact, one shark o;ered
;;;;,;;; for ;; percent
of the business, an o;er
