Founding an Industry: Q&A With Energy Bar Entrepreneur Jennifer Maxwell

In the mid-1980s, Jennifer Biddulph was a nutrition and science major and track athlete at the University of California, Berkeley. Her boyfriend, Brian Maxwell, who had been a track star at UC Berkeley a decade earlier, was an Olympic marathon runner.

Like many marathoners at that time, Maxwell was concerned about what to eat to avoid running out of carbohydrate fuel and “hitting the wall” during a race. He and Biddulph began experimenting with recipes that included amino acids, complex and simple carbs, and other nutrients that could not only help high-level athletes perform, but also get what Biddulph called “that extra 1% advantage.”

In 1986, Maxwell and Biddulph debuted PowerBar®—the world’s first energy bar. In the ensuing years, the duo grew their company into a nine-figure business, married and had a family, and eventually sold PowerBar to Nestle in 2000.

JAMBAR founder and CEO Jennifer Maxwell

But in 2004, tragedy struck. Brian, who had been diagnosed with a congenital heart condition as a teenager, died of a heart attack at age 51—leaving behind Jennifer and six children under the age of 15. Devastated, Jennifer turned to music as a healing force. She took up the drums and today plays in two bands. She also started running again, and in 2021, combined all of her passions into a new energy-bar company, JAMBAR®.

All of JAMBAR’s four flavors are certified organic and whole-food based, and Jennifer Maxwell donates 50% of the company’s profits to community, education, music and outdoor activities. She also funds a sustainability program and entrepreneurship scholarship at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Recently, Maxwell joined industry veterans Bill Capsalis and Steven Hoffman for their podcast Compass Coffee Talk. Read on to learn more about the genesis and evolution of PowerBar and JAMBAR, along with Maxwell’s thoughts on philanthropy, sustainability and the future of the natural products industry.

Q: You literally created the energy bar industry and an entire food category out of scratch. What was it like back in PowerBar’s early days?
We started in our little apartment from nothing, really from nothing. And we grew not just a great product that was innovative at the time, but also a company that was innovative, as well.

We had an employee stock-ownership program, so all of our employees owned the company. We also divvied up the profits among all of the employees, from the warehouse people to top management. And I think that was one of the things that led to our success—people really believed in what we were doing, and they were essentially working for themselves.

Q: How did you actually get PowerBars out there and into stores?
We started as a mail-order business; of course, there was no Amazon at the time. We figured the bar would sell itself, so we'd go to events and give out a lot of product, and also put flyers on windshields of cars at races. There would be a little coupon you could tear off and you'd send it in the mail and get your three dozen bars for $39.

I was still a student at Berkeley, so on breaks from classes, I’d go to the post office, get the orders in the mail, go back to our apartment and fulfill the orders and put them out on the porch for UPS to come pick them up. And all of a sudden, we'd have 20, 30, 40 boxes a day going out of our little apartment.

After we moved on from being a mail-order business, our main market was bike shops. We went down to the local bike shop, walked in, showed them the product. People were so receptive to our bars that we were able to do our own brokering. We'd have stores calling us to place an order.

Q: By the '90s, things were rocking and you ended up selling PowerBar. And then you had some life events occur, unfortunately. You took a break to take care of the family and play music. What led you to get back into the industry with JAMBAR?
JAMBAR came about as part of a conversation I was having with my daughter around the kitchen table. She said, "Mom, I know you like energy bars, and there's nothing out there that you want to eat for one reason or the other." And I said, "You're right. I'm a food scientist, so why don't I get back into the game and spend some of my knowledge and experience creating something that is great?"

It took me about four years of putting ingredients together to come up with a product I liked. My big thing is I wanted it to be organic, because I believe in preserving our earth and helping people avoid pesticides and eating the best that they can. That limits ingredients a little, because you have to have mass quantities of organic ingredients available.

And then I wanted to use all real food. I didn't want to use ingredients that I didn't know where they came from, that were somehow changed in a lab or created with mechanisms that I didn't really want to put in my body. I wanted ingredients that are close to nature and that taste great.

And, of course, there are a lot of ingredient options that we didn't have in the '80s, whether it's different grains, proteins, fruits, chocolate, and different ways of holding the product together. That’s a plus because one of the most important things I wanted to include in my portfolio of flavors is a lot of variety.

Each of the four JAMBAR flavors—Chocolate Cha Cha, Malt Nut Melody, Jammin’ Jazzleberry and Musical Mango—is very different from the other. Where other products on the market might take a base formulation and just add a little of this, a little of that and call it a new flavor, I didn't want to do that. So it made my formulation job very challenging—working with an array of very different percentages of all of these different ingredients, but keeping each bar similar enough that it's treated the same in the factory.

We have our own state-of-the-art manufacturing facility—which, interestingly, was once a Grateful Dead recording studio—so that gives us the ability to call our own shots. We can do a run of one flavor and then reset for the next run of a different flavor. We can say, “OK, it's Mango Bar Day.” We cut our own mango, and because it’s the second ingredient on the label, we have a lot of mango in there.

Q: What are some of the other major differences you see in the supply chain and business practices as you’ve come back into the industry with JAMBAR?
I think there’s always a lot to learn. I have a lot of experience and I have my own way of doing things, but I have to be able to adapt to a new way of doing things, which is full of technology. We came from an era of no technology to an era of everything's technology. So that's a pretty steep learning curve. Of course, I don't live in a tunnel or a cave, but in terms of really getting the most out of your resources, you have to be very savvy with your technology.

But the caveat to that is we have to be able to keep what makes us human. And that’s the challenge we are having today, in terms of really looking at what we want to accomplish. With JAMBAR, we want to accomplish supporting community, we want to accomplish manufacturing a great product full of real-food ingredients, and we want to accomplish having a type of work environment where people feel they can really make a difference and be a part of.

And the overall arching concept behind remembering what makes us human is communication. Sometimes, when you get a lot of technology involved, effective communication goes out the window. That's what I'm seeing with sales, in distribution and sometimes in marketing and brokering—communication can become very challenging, and you can lose a little bit of the essence of what you want to accomplish each day or each week or each month. That’s why I emphasize communication—it’s paramount to keeping the ball moving forward.