Key Points
- Small snacks can mint billion-dollar fortunes for their founders.
- Entrepreneurs like Kind Snacks’ Daniel Lubetzky use their family offices to invest in other companies.
- Elle Lanning, president of Lubetzky’s investment platform, shared how they are expanding beyond consumer packaged goods.
A version of this article first appeared in CNBC’s Inside Wealth newsletter with Robert Frank, a weekly guide to the high-net-worth investor and consumer. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Billionaire Daniel Lubetzky built his fortune on Kind snack bars made with nuts, fruits and whole grains. He sold a controlling stake in Kind Snacks to food giant Mars in 2020. Through his family office Camino Partners, he has backed other popular consumer brands like fast-casual chain Cava, hair care brand Prose and Belgian Boys breakfast items. Camino, founded in 2023, has recently widened its focus to longevity, investing in fitness chain Barry’s and home health-care provider LiveWell. It is one of more than 100 family offices built on food and beverage fortunes, according to data provided exclusively to CNBC by Fintrx, a private wealth intelligence platform. A growing class of family offices are expanding beyond their principals’ entrepreneurial roots in consumer packaged goods. Another snack bar founder, RXBar’s Peter Rahal, has invested in X (formerly Twitter) and biodegradable packaging firm Cove through his family office, Litani Ventures. Paul Merage, co-founder of the Hot Pockets’ parent company Chef America, started his family office after selling the frozen food manufacturer to Nestlé in 2002. Today, Consolidated Investment Group has a sprawling real estate footprint in the U.S. and Israel through direct investments and joint ventures, including more than 25,000 apartment units in cities like Dallas and Denver. In the case of Camino, investing in longevity is a natural evolution, according to the investment firm’s president Elle Lanning, who has worked for Lubetzky since she joined Kind in 2010. “The way we think about it is consumer health typically starts with an education wave and then an availability wave. Food and nutrition was one of the first spaces where there started to be a consumer education wave,” she said. “For us, Barry’s — like exercise as an impact on consumer health — is like a second wave to nutrition.” Camino has also shifted from early-stage companies to proven businesses, typically with at least $20 million in revenue. It deploys anywhere between $20 million to $80 million per company upfront or over time. Initially, Lubetzky wanted to invest in younger companies. “He loves to build from the ground up,” Lanning said. However, she advised Lubetzky that early-stage investing comes with greater odds of failure and said he had to think of a struggling portfolio company like a product that is failing to sell. “If you are an early stage investor, you have to possess this ability to know when it’s not working, and call that,” she said. “And he’s like, he can’t do that, you know, these are living organisms. These are people and their livelihoods.” For Lubetzky, venturing outside consumer packaged goods means calling in experts. When investing in other growing areas like aerospace and deep tech, Camino typically does so through fund managers. “I think the reason why we have maybe done as well in life is we know what we know and we know what we don’t know,” Lanning said, “and we try to make sure that the decisions we make are very informed by that.”
