The Hard Thing First

No. 109 | The manufacturing company that accidentally built the best snack in the protein aisle.

“Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.” — Anton Ego, Ratatouille (2007)

There is a tray of CirC bites on my desk and I reach for it without deciding to. I am 18 months on my health journey, and the bad food decisions that ran my life for decades are mostly gone. What is left is more deliberate, and I like it that way. The appetite I have left goes to what I actually crave, and lately that is these. I do not think about CirC. I just reach for it. In snacking, that is the entire game. Become the automatic choice and you have already won.

Most investors are modeling the market. We are eating the product.

The protein bar is a $5.6 billion category. Everyone can see it. They miss the shift inside it. Bars still own the shelf, but shoppers are moving toward bites, resealable packs, and the freedom to eat three and save the rest. The demand is here. The category leader is not. Thirty serious brands are fighting over the bar. One is serving the bite. What looks like a niche today often becomes tomorrow’s category.

We have seen this before. Grüns took daily nutrition out of the powder tub and into a pouch you carry, and the portability was the whole point. Unilever’s $1.2 billion acquisition of Grüns closed this past Monday.

CirC is a manufacturing company that happened to make the best snack in the aisle.

The product exists because a chocolate bar melted on Theresa Burnley’s shorts on the way to a tournament. She is an athlete, six Boston Marathons, three kids who played college lacrosse, and she got tired of snacks that failed the moment she needed them. So she made one that did not. Then her husband Chris spent 15 years learning to make a small protein sphere at commercial scale. RX Bar asked him to manufacture for them. He said no. They built their own version. It is not the same. The moat is not a patent. It is 15 years of process that nobody else has figured out how to run.

That is the kind of advantage I trust. Not a deck. A thing that is hard to make.

The proof never came from a pitch. With no outside capital and the founders unpaid, Chris built distribution the old-fashioned way. CirC landed in Costco, where it sells at 147% of target velocity despite launching only 24 months ago. Walmart and Target are loading in now. The head nutritionist for US Special Operations found CirC at a Wawa and put it in front of Navy SEALs and Rangers. He chose it for taste, for packaging, and because it does not melt. The product that exists because a bar melted now wins because it refuses to.

None of this means it is safe. The gap is the one you would expect. They have never built a consumer brand at scale. Walmart delists what shoppers walk past, no matter how good it is. That is the bet and the work.

The product is not the thesis. The order of operations is. Most consumer startups begin with the marketing, then spend years trying to build a product worthy of the attention they bought. CirC did the reverse. The product came first, built on 15 years of manufacturing nobody else has. The brand comes second. That order is the whole thesis. Most founders today can manufacture attention but not a product. CirC manufactured the product. The attention is the part still in front of it. Unlike the manufacturing, it can be hired for. Brands that run this backwards vanish in the first reset cycle at mass retail.

I am in my hotel room in DC, watching the NBA Finals and snacking on CirC. They travel better than I do.

It does not melt. It does not need explaining. It just needs to be found.

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Disclosures: CirC is a Sugar Capital Fund III portfolio company. Sugar Capital is also an investor in Grüns, acquired by Unilever in 2026. Unilever Ventures is a limited partner in Fund III.