YouBar featured in the November 2025 edition of Baking and Snack Magazine

YouBar is featured in the November 2025 edition of Baking and Snack Magazine.

Read the feature to discover why "YouBar’s love for innovation has made it a leader of the protein revolution".

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Backing and Snack Magazine - November 2025

Pure Imagination

YouBar’ s love for innovation has made it a leader of the protein revolution.
by Lucas Cuni-Mertz

YouBar draws plenty of inspiration from the world of Willy Wonka. Giant lollipops and candies adorn the walls of the reception area at its City of Industry, Calif.-based headquarters. Stickers of a strolling Wonka decorate light switches throughout the building. In the office of Anthony Flynn, founder and chief executive officer, you’ll even find a replica of Wonka’s signature purple coat.

The company’s nods to the legendary character go far beyond aesthetics, however. Like Wonka’s famed chocolate factory, those who partner with this burgeoning co-manufacturer of protein bars and baked goods enter a world of pure imagination. If a customer dreams up a product — Flynn and his teamwork tirelessly to make that dream a reality.

“We love the idea of innovation,” Flynn said. “And I’ve always loved Willy Wonka’s focus on creating. You keep on trying, you keep it whimsical, you keep it light, and eventually, you will create great things.”

Create great things YouBar certainly has. Products made here line the shelves of retailers like Whole Foods, Target and Walmart and are top sellers on Amazon and Shopify. Its long list of customers includes household names whose sales sit in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Across its two plants, YouBar produces more than 1 million units per week — a number that is climbing quickly.

And while YouBar is the name, bars are far from all the company makes. YouBar produces plenty of them, to be sure, but its portfolio has grown to include protein-packed toaster pastries, cinnamon rolls, nut-butter balls, donuts and more. A protein churro is even in development.

The common denominator across all these products? Their ability to wow the consumer, Flynn said, earning those spots in the biggest retailers and driving velocity on the shelf. 

“We don’t spend money on marketing,” Flynn said. “Our marketing is that we know what works: creating a loud product. We put all our effort into innovation so that when a client launches a product, it’s a success.”

YouBar’s dedication to innovation has cemented it as a go-to co-manufacturer for brands across the better-for-you (BFY) space, from category giants to scrappy startups. And as the protein craze has taken hold across the industry, it’s served as a golden ticket to success YouBar could’ve hardly imagined. From 2022 to 2024 alone, the company’s revenue skyrocketed 85%.

“Growth has been extremely fast,” Flynn said. “And what we have coming down our pipeline is even faster.” 

One boom after another

YouBar’s goal is to become the leading co-manufacturer of protein snacks globally — an ambitious plan that the company is already well on its way to achieving.

Its sights weren’t always set this high, however. In fact, when the business began in Flynn’s home kitchen in 2006, it was little more than a side hustle. Flynn, a senior at the University of Southern California (USC) at the time, was making his own protein bars to satisfy his various food allergies, and he began making them for family and friends.

“I’d be eating these homemade bars in class, and people would ask, ‘Can you make me some?’ ” Flynn recalled. “They’d tell me the ingredients they want, and I’d make them fresh.”

Flynn was in the market for a new computer at the time, and it was through this search that the idea for YouBar came to life.

“I went to Dell’s website, and you could create your own computer,” he said. “I thought that was such a cool concept, and I wondered if I could make a website that would allow people to create their own protein bar.”

After taking a web design class at a local community college — Flynn joked he wasn’t paying USC prices for a side project — YouBar was born, allowing consumers to make personalized bars by selecting their own nut butters, protein powders and more.

“My goal was that if I could make four boxes a day, I didn’t have to get a real job,” Flynn said. “My reach goal was 40 boxes a day.”

It didn’t take long for Flynn to blow past those numbers. Customer orders for one or two boxes quickly turned into requests for 50, 100, sometimes 1,000 boxes. These high-volume orders weren’t from insatiably hungry protein bar fanatics, however, but from fitness influencers — yoga instructors, CrossFit gym owners, diet book authors and the like — who were using the site to launch their own line of bars.

To meet this sudden influx of demand, Flynn upgraded from his home kitchen to a 750-square-foot rentable kitchen. But the growth didn’t stop. YouBar took off in the blogosphere, receiving praise from publications like Daily Candy, Urban Daddy and Thrillist. In 2008, the company was featured in The New York Times, leading to another explosion in orders.

“We very quickly scaled from just me making bars to all of a sudden 30 to 40 employees cranking out bars, which was very exciting,” Flynn said. “That 750 square feet then felt very small.”

As orders continued to grow, Flynn began to understand the influence that emerging diet trends had on the bar category. In 2009, a customer asked for a paleo bar. Flynn had no idea what paleo was, but within months, the company was producing thousands of bars for the wave of consumers embarking on the caveman diet.

“That was the first time we realized these trends can be quite powerful if we can be the platform to help brands launch and be first to market,” Flynn said. “It gives them a huge growth opportunity.”

YouBar moved from its rentable kitchen to a 3,500-square-foot facility — a space Flynn thought was massive at the time but that the company again quickly outgrew. Next for YouBar was a 15,000-square-foot plant in Monterey Park, Calif., that it still operates in today, followed by its 50,000-square-foot headquarters in City of Industry.

In 2012, YouBar ended its direct-to-consumer business and pivoted to full-time co-manufacturing to better serve these brands.

“You can either be a co-manufacturer or sell individual boxes straight to the consumer, but you can’t really do both,” Flynn acknowledged. “So we said, ‘Let’s get clear on who we work with.’ ”

For the years that followed, YouBar focused solely on producing bars, emphasizing clients that shared Flynn’s love for innovation.

“Our best clients are the ones that really want to be innovative,” he said. “They’re looking at new diet trends. They’re very specific. They have that North Star of what their customers want.”

Over time, though, these customers began asking for more than just bars. They wanted cookies, donuts, baking mixes, protein powders and more — and Flynn was finding it increasingly hard to say no. After much consideration, the company in 2018 decided to expand its portfolio beyond its namesake bars. The results were immediate.

“It has just been a whole other boom for the company,” Flynn said.

YouBar’s decision was followed by protein’s explosion onto the BFY scene. Brands were suddenly looking to pack protein into every product you could think of, and YouBar emerged as the co-manufacturer of choice to get it done. Today, the company receives more than 100 inbound leads a week of brands looking to partner with it on their next protein project.

Everybody wants protein in their product — nothing is safe,” Flynn joked. “It has just been huge growth. Protein has gone from being one of many trends to the single most important driver of our business.”

In 2024 alone, YouBar products contained more than 1 billion grams of the ingredient, and that number is even higher this year. While the company’s leadership has seen many health trends rise and fall over the years, they’re confident protein is one that’s here to stay.

“Protein addresses a universal nutritional need,” said Emily Vencat, chief innovation officer at YouBar and Flynn’s sister. “Unlike fad diets, it resonates across demographics, from fitness enthusiasts to everyday snackers.”

Consumer need for protein is only expected to grow. The nutrient has been shown to boost satiety, and health-conscious shoppers are boosting their intake as a result to prevent overeating, Vencat said. And with the use of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic on the rise, this growing consumer base is prioritizing protein to avoid muscle loss as they lose weight.

“The versatility of protein — from muscle recovery to satiety — ensures broad consumer adoption,” she observed. “This universality makes protein a long-term pillar rather than a passing phase.”

The three uniques

While there are many co-manufacturers that brands could partner with to get in on the protein trend, there’s good reason why so many choose YouBar. The company attributes it to what it calls its three uniques.

YouBar’s first unique is its small minimum order quantities (MOQs). While many co-manufacturers set MOQs that are prohibitive to smaller brands, YouBar keeps theirs at 10,000 bars per flavor per run. This gives the company a balanced mix of larger brands running hundreds of thousands of units daily as well as younger companies just scaling up.

Vencat emphasized that giving a platform to these upstart brands has been essential to the company’s success.

“Our big clients started as small clients 60% of the time,” she said. “It happens so often.”

YouBar will even keep a few production shifts open throughout the week, just in case a smaller client gets that game-changing call from a Costco or Whole Foods and needs a large order filled at the last minute.

“We’re always happy to work double shifts, triple shifts, weekends, whatever it is to make sure our clients get that product fresh in hand and in full for their retailers,” Flynn said.

YouBar’s second unique is its innovation house, where Flynn and his team of R&D scientists create clients’ products from scratch. This differs from many co-manufacturers who require the customer to come in with a finished recipe, a practice that oftentimes  results in problems, Vencat said.

“When you scale something up, a lot of the time it loses that je ne sais quoi,” she said. “But the co-manufacturer will say, ‘That’s not my problem, you handed me the recipe.’ The fact we have an innovation house means it is our problem and that we really want to get it right from the bench samples all the way through manufacturing.”

In the innovation house, YouBar’s food scientists find applications for the latest ingredients, trending flavor profiles and new product formats, ensuring customers get a high-quality product that’s on the cutting edge of what consumers are seeking.

“We have many times where ingredient suppliers call us up saying they have this new ingredient they think is really cool, and we’ll formulate with it,” Flynn said. “Our clients are constantly getting the latest in innovation from ingredients or formats or diet trends.”

Despite growing considerably, YouBar still emphasizes bringing customers into the innovation lab for one-on-one collaboration during the R&D process.

“We genuinely love working with our clients and bringing their new and innovative ideas to life, so a personalized approach forms naturally in our culture,” Vencat said.

Another advantage of YouBar’s innovation is that it allows brands to get their products to market quickly.

“Most co-manufacturers hit an aggressive timeline of idea to market of between one year and 18 months. We hit six months routinely,” Vencat said. “Our clients, whether big or small, are launching multiple new products every year.”

YouBar’s third unique, and arguably its most important to many brands, is that it’s a turnkey solution. The company will not only formulate and manufacture a client’s product — it will handle all regulatory requirements, obtain desired certifications like gluten-free and non-GMO, source ingredients, provide packaging materials and more.

“We handle the entire supply chain, all the documentation,” Vencat said. “[Clients] don’t have to do anything.”

This is a game changer for brands that may have the idea for a great product but are unfamiliar with all the steps and regulatory hoops they must jump through to get it off the ground. YouBar does all of this for them.

“We’re almost like a sherpa,” Vencat said. “You have the vision, you want to get up that mountain and we have the tools to bring that vision to life for you.”

YouBar goes above and beyond for its clients in other smaller ways as well. For example, every one of its customers has Vencat’s personal cell phone number.

“They text me and call me literally 365 days a year, and I’ll always get back to them,” she said.

The company will also break up customer orders into smaller runs just so that the finished product is that much fresher. As Flynn emphasized, it’s about doing whatever they can to achieve that “ wow ” factor.

“Even though a bar may have a yearlong shelf life, that difference in the first three months, especially if it’s a high-protein, low-sugar product, is a whole different level of ‘wow’ compared to those last three months of shelf life,” he explained.

Embracing the challenge

Growth has come easy for YouBar as of late, but producing the bars and baked goods that have fueled that growth can often be more difficult. These high-protein products are notoriously tricky to make — both from a formulating and processing perspective — and this has become even more true as customer requests have expanded beyond the average protein bar to include everything from layered, multi-textured bars to decadent desserts.

While many manufacturers shy away from these products as a result, Flynn embraces the challenge.

“We like the fact that products are getting more complex because it allows us to lean into what really makes us special, which is making insanely good products,” Flynn said. “We know that our competition for the most part tries to keep their clients inside of a very narrow bandwidth of what they can do. And they can do it very well. What makes us unique is that we will go that extra mile to add new layers to it, change baking times, whatever it takes to really make a product a wow experience.”

Achieving that experience requires plenty of trial and error, and Flynn acknowledged that for every successful product the company has made, there have been many more versions that failed. Keeping a positive spirit throughout that process, however, is critical.

“Edison found 1,800 ways not to make the lightbulb before he actually made it — it’s the same principal here,” Flynn said. “We will go as far as it takes to fulfill that dream. That’s at the heart of us.”

Steadfast determination isn’t all it takes, of course. Producing high-protein products also requires YouBar to invest in heavy-duty machinery built to handle these difficult doughs. The company learned the hard way over the years that running these products on normal machines inevitably results in them breaking.

“We basically go to manufacturers and ask, ‘What’s the most powerful machine you have?’ ” said Dennis Flynn, YouBar’s chief operating officer. “Our Reiser Vemags, for example, are their most powerful ones because we need to extrude something that’s quite a bit stronger than what normal bakeries extrude.”

The company is investing in a host of new equipment that will allow it to up the ante on its innovative protein products, including enrobing and dual extrusion systems for producing layered items and mixers that form a more aerated dough.

“We’ve been doing [dual extrusion] for a long time, but we’re changing how we’re doing it, utilizing certain kettles or heating processes that allow us to get some really cool slurries or coatings that would not normally be seen in a bar that are also great to ship in summer,” Anthony Flynn explained. “It allows openings of whole markets that just could not have been done before.”

YouBar also takes steps to overcome another challenge these products pose: cost. Protein isn’t cheap, and as such the company’s material costs are much higher than those of the average bakery, Dennis Flynn noted. To combat this, YouBar pays meticulous attention to scrap, minimizing waste and giveaway wherever it can.

“You need to invest in checkweighers that talk to the machine to get it precise,” he said. “You have to have scrap collection systems to make sure dough runs back through.”

By keeping waste at a minimum, YouBar ensures clients get their premium products at an affordable price point, helping them stay profitable and scale.

“Our goal is to be as efficient as possible in production while simultaneously making the coolest products out there,” Anthony Flynn said. “As long as we focus on those two things, our clients grow and we grow internally.”

A protein production

YouBar splits production between two plants: its City of Industry headquarters primarily manufacturers baked goods while its Monterey Park plant focuses on slab and extruded bars, baking mixes and protein powders. However, Anthony Flynn noted both plants can make any of their customers’ products if needed, offering YouBar greater production flexibility.

YouBar typically runs two shifts at both plants Monday through Saturday with Sunday reserved for sanitation and maintenance, although the number of shifts per week varies as order volume fluctuates.

The company’s City of Industry plant houses 15,000 square feet of production space that includes five processing and five packaging lines. Bulk ingredients are stored in either 3,000-lb totes or 600-lb barrels while minor ingredients are stored in 40-lb buckets.

On the day of Baking & Snack’s visit, YouBar was producing a breakfast sweet good. Dough is mixed in a horizontal mixer before being manually chunked and placed onto a dough lift feeding a Rondo sheeter. Here, dough passes through reducers and a cutter before being passed onto the Rondo make-up line, where dough strips receive a layer of filling and are folded before being cut by guillotine and manually panned and racked. Sweet goods bake in Hobart and LBC double rack ovens and are then manually depanned onto a sorting table. An A&D checkweigher ensures product consistency before they pass under an icing line powered by a Savage Bros. Co. icing kettle. Iced sweet goods then cool at room temperature on a spiral cooler before heading off to packaging.

Here, sweet goods are wrapped by one of two Bosch/Syntegon horizontal flow wrappers that pack- age a combined 350 rolls per minute. YouBar is in the process of adding an Ima-Ilapak flow wrapper that will significantly bolster capacity, increasing packaging speeds by 280 sweet goods per minute.

The packaging lines also feature a case coder that burns the expiration date and lot number into every package — a sustainable innovation that eliminates the need for ink labeling.

“It’s going to be the next big thing, ” Dennis Flynn said.

Packaged sweet goods are manually grouped and side-loaded into cases formed by an Adco carton erector. Cases are automatically sealed before passing through a checkweigher and Thermo Scientific X-ray machine that detects ferrous, nonferrous and stainless steel contaminants.

Cases are packed six to a box, which travel through a BestPack case sealer and Evolabel labeler. Finished boxes are manually palletized and shrink-wrapped. YouBar plans to automate palletizing soon, Dennis Flynn noted, emphasizing that the company prioritizes flexibility whenever considering a capital investment.

“Flexibility is key,” he said. “We invest heavily in what works with a wide variety of products.”

Product is stored in the facility’s 25,000-square-foot warehouse, where it awaits delivery to YouBar’s offsite warehouse, customers or a distributor.

YouBar has come a long way from its days in Anthony Flynn’s home kitchen. Flynn’s initial goal was to make 40 boxes a day — YouBar does that now in under a minute. Nineteen years, hundreds of millions of units and billions of grams of protein later, Flynn’s love for the business hasn’t wavered.

“I thought I’d be sick of it by this point,” he admitted. “If anything, I’m more excited about what’s coming out, now more than ever.”

YouBar has guided many young brands on their journey to the top of the mountain in the baking and snack categories, and with the way business is growing, it’s sure to do the same for many more. It’s a privilege the company doesn’t take for granted.

“Ultimately we want to be seen as both pioneers and partners in better-for-you snacking,” Vencat said. “Our legacy is to be remembered as the engine that powered the protein snack revolution.”

By staying true to its love for innovation and pure imagination, YouBar is doing just that.

Sidebar

Raising the (protein) bar As the protein trend gains momentum, consumers’ expectations of these products are growing, too. No longer are they willing to accept the stereotypical protein bar that tastes like cardboard — they’re demanding decadent bars and baked goods that closely resemble their favorite desserts.

“Flavors are becoming more indulgent, with dessert-inspired profiles like cookies & cream or cinnamon roll leading the way,” said Emily Vencat, chief innovation officer at YouBar. “Texturally, consumers want less chalky, more candy-like experiences. Multi-layered bars with drizzle, fillings or crunch elements are increasingly popular.”

The newstalgia trend — introducing familiar products with a modern twist — is fueling this demand as well. Consumers want to indulge in many of their favorite childhood treats without the guilt, and protein-packed alternatives have emerged as a way for them to do so.

“One of the biggest trends is taking nostalgic foods that millennials loved and making them healthy,” said Anthony Flynn, chief executive officer and founder of YouBar. “That generally means lower sugar and higher protein.”

Today, YouBar produces high-protein, low-carb versions of many of these nostalgic favorites, from cookies and cereals to churros and PB&Js.

“I think some of these things are better than what they’re designed to replace,” Flynn said. “That’s been really fun to see.”

The company is elevating these products even further, designing them to be refrigerated, frozen or even microwaved to enhance their quality. A room-temperature protein bar, for example, can be transformed into a souffle-style dessert after just 10 seconds in the microwave.

“It gives you a whole different experience,” Flynn said.