A family recipe, two brothers and brown paper sacks.

Kodiak Cakes is a family story, and the company dates it to 1982. On its website the Park City, Utah, company says it all started that year with Joel Clark going door to door with a red wagon, selling brown paper bags filled with his grandfather’s flapjack recipe. The Deseret News columnist Lee Benson told the story in March 2021: Joel helped his mother, Penny, fill his red wagon with brown paper sacks of her pancake mix and sold them around their neighbourhood in East Millcreek, near the University of Utah, where his father, Richard, taught at the Institute of Religion. In a June 2000 profile, the paper’s food editor, Jean Williams, quoted Joel’s older brother, Jon Clark, as saying that their grandfather had made the pancakes for their mother’s family and that she then made them for her own children. She ground her own wheat, the paper said, and one summer she typed up the recipe and pasted it onto brown paper bags of ingredients for Joel to sell. The neighbours bought them, but when summer ended the “business” lapsed.

The company itself came later. The Deseret News said in 2021 that Jon decided in 1995 that he wanted to start a company and remembered his mother’s whole-wheat pancakes, and Food Dive wrote in March 2018 that Kodiak Cakes was “formally launched in 1995.” In the 2000 profile Jon, then an MBA candidate at the University of Utah, described months of testing recipes, borrowing library books on grains, sweeteners and baking powder, and talking to chemists at baking-powder companies, with whose help he arrived at a formulation of his own to lift a heavy whole-grain batter. Dry milk, egg whites and honey were added to round out the flavour, the paper said.

The name came from Alaska. Jon named the business Kodiak Cakes, Benson wrote, because he liked the hearty, rustic image of bears and had always dreamed of going salmon fishing on Kodiak Island. The 2000 profile said the name was inspired by a fishing trip to the Kodiak, and Food Dive said in 2018 that it was named for the coastal Alaskan town Jon had visited, which personified the rugged, outdoorsy feel he wanted for the brand.

Joel came home from a church mission in Australia a few weeks before the mix was ready, the 2000 profile said, and the brothers took bags of it to gift shops in Park City, Jackson Hole in Wyoming and Sun Valley in Idaho. Letters then began to arrive from people around the country who had bought the mix in those shops, and the brothers turned to grocery stores. Joel told the paper that Dan’s had taken the mix and that the brothers cooked pancakes in its stores at weekends.

From Safeway to Shark Tank and L Catterton.

Jon did not stay. After two years, the Deseret News reported in 2021, he graduated and moved into hospital management, leaving the company to Joel. Joel told Entrepreneur’s Stephen J. Bronner in May 2018 that his brother had offered him the chance to take over the business in 1997. Joel kept it going on the side while he finished at the University of Utah, took an MBA at Oxford and worked as a consultant, Benson wrote. He told Food Dive in 2018 that the original whole-wheat flapjack mix was still the company’s single product when Safeway took it in 2004, and that this was when he quit his job. According to the 2021 profile, his father, newly retired, joined him that year and stayed until 2009.

In 2009 Joel posted a help-wanted notice on the University of Utah jobs board, and Cameron Smith answered it, the Deseret News said. Clark told Entrepreneur that he hired Smith as chief operating officer that year and that Smith had become like a co-founder. Target placed an order in 2012, according to both the Deseret News and Food Dive.

Television followed. Smith emailed the producers of Shark Tank in January 2013, Clark told Entrepreneur; the episode aired in April 2014, he told Food Dive, and he and Smith walked away from the investors’ offers. The same year the company added Power Cakes, a protein pancake mix, which the Deseret News called “Protein Power Cakes.” In 2018 Smith told Food Dive that the company was moving into baking with brownie, cornbread and muffin mixes, alongside frozen pancakes and frozen waffles, and Clark described a line of fruit syrups made with fruit purées and cane sugar.

Ownership changed in May 2021. In a release published by Utah Business on 26 May 2021, the private equity firm L Catterton announced that it had acquired Kodiak Cakes; terms were not disclosed, and existing shareholders, including Sunrise Strategic Partners, Trilantic North America and the founders and management team, kept a significant minority stake. Food Dive, reporting the deal on 25 May 2021, described it as a majority stake. The release named Joel Clark as co-founder and chief executive and Cameron Smith as co-founder and president, and said the company was headquartered in Park City. Clark said in the release that L Catterton “shares our vision.”

The move to Park City was also a physical one. Benson wrote in March 2021 that the company had recently moved into a new headquarters in the town, and that the recipe had not really changed: Kodiak Cakes, he wrote, was still making whole-wheat pancakes and still grinding its own wheat.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group sit on three different shelves of the grocery aisle: olive oil, pancake and baking mix, and the salty snacks of pretzels and potato chips. Each category has its own packaging habits, and a brand’s identity is often carried less by the food itself than by the tin, bottle, box or bag that holds it, and by the name printed across the front.

An olive-oil tin or bottle tends to lean on a family name, a place and a sense of origin. A pancake-mix box is built around a front panel that has to be read at a glance, with a picture of the finished stack and instructions on the side or back. A pretzel or chip bag has to work as a flat, printed surface that is folded, sealed and stacked, so colour, a wordmark and a window or photograph of the contents do much of the work.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the business, who owns it now, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A packaging job for an old school friend.

The look of the brand began with a friend. In the June 2000 Deseret News profile, Jon Clark said that while he was perfecting the flavour he ran into an old friend, Todd Scofield, at a Skyline High School reunion; the paper described Scofield as a talented graphic artist and said he agreed to design the packaging. The brothers did much of the rest themselves, the profile said: with no money for lawyers they handled the legal work, met the FDA several times to prepare their own label panels, and dealt with bar codes, trademark searches and the fees needed to get a new product onto store shelves.

The bear has since stepped off the box. When the company moved into its new Park City headquarters, Benson wrote in 2021, a tall statue of a Kodiak bear stood guard out front, and the Deseret News photographed Clark and Smith posing beside it.

The brand’s language leans on the outdoors. The 2021 L Catterton release gave Kodiak’s brand promise as “Nourishment for Today’s Frontier,” and the company’s mission page has described the hearty meals of frontier folk “from the frigid Yukon to the High Sierra.” Its current story page states the mission as “To inspire wilder, wide-open lives by feeding epic days through real breakfasts,” says the headquarters sits in the shadow of the Wasatch range, and describes a give-back programme called Keep it Wild, which the company says partners with non-profits such as the Vital Ground Foundation, a group working to protect North America’s grizzly bears and their habitat.

The paper sack has stayed in the story too. The company’s own account still begins with brown paper bags and a red wagon, and the 2000 profile recalled the typed recipe pasted onto each bag by hand.

For a design guide, Kodiak Cakes shows how a homemade origin story — a wagon, paper sacks and a bear named for an Alaskan island — can carry a packaged mix from ski-town gift shops to national grocery chains. Compare Krusteaz, a mix brand that began in Seattle, and Bisquick, the General Mills baking mix. For this guide we use bear brown, flapjack gold and spruce green with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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