The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/558143
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Ann Arbor and Detroit, with plans to expand. "I was toying with a diet that was very Whole Foods before there was a Whole Foods. That was maybe weird 12 years ago, but now it's our food culture. "My dad is an entrepreneur, my uncle, my grandpa … so it runs in the blood. It started as an obses- sion of making snack bars that I've always made and handing them out to the team so we had healthy op- tions on road trips, but after 12 years I got serious about it, and thought it could be a legitimate business." UGo Bars use all natural ingre- dients and have a shelf life of only three months because they lack preservatives. "There were around 600 snack bars that hit the market last year so the fear is we're in an oversaturated mar- ket, but if you pick up any snack bar, they either have packaging that costs more than the ingredients, or there are preservatives, or they're full of GMOs or they're not even real ingre- dients," she said, rolling through her company's promo pitch. "You look at our bars, and it's nuts, it's fruit, it's chia seeds, organic brown rice syrup. Our ingredients are real stuff and they last as long as they naturally last, and that's it. "We feel like we can be the fore- front of the fresh-food snack-bar movement. We belong to a culture now that is fed up with processed food and wants to know what they're eating." Walter's UGo Bars have been a hit with athletes — they sponsor a num- ber of runners — and the partners have penetrated the IU campus. Like her running career, she started the company with minimal expectations and has been enjoying every step. "I'm not going to say making snack bars is my No. 1 passion, but it allows me to market, to do sales, to work face to face with people, and then there is also the production side," she said. "I can tap my introverted self, get in the kitchen, and put out 2,000 bars and do it in the very regimented way that I like. "I'm a person with a million in- terests so I don't know what I'll be doing in five to seven years, but for now the process of creating and mar- keting a business makes it really fun to come to work each day." ❏