Clean Simple Eats

For its first few years, Clean Simple Eats sold nothing you could hold. Erika and JJ Peterson ran the Utah company on digital meal plans and online fitness challenges, and the money from those downloads paid off $30,000 in personal debt. By the time they launched their first protein powders in 2018, Erika wrote in Utah Business, the company had enough cash to prepay its first manufacturing run.

It started at home. After the birth of her third child, Erika was struggling with postpartum depression, and she has written that the family was living off freezer food and cereal. They threw out the packaged food and started cooking with fresh ingredients. She trained as a health and wellness coach and posted her recipes on Instagram, where the seasonal meal plans found a following.

For two years the couple worked like "ships passing in the night," in Erika's words, with JJ at his day job while she built the business after hours. He joined full time in 2016 and pushed the company into supplements. He also formulates the products. Once the debt was gone they took no set salary and put the profits back into the business.

The product line grew fast. Each serving of the Brownie Batter powder carries 20 grams of grass-fed whey protein isolate, and the company says it uses no artificial sweeteners or added sugar. The family that began by throwing out its packaged food now sells more than 175 products in bags and cans.

Its product pages end with the same line: manufactured in Utah, USA. The company works with manufacturing partners, and Erika has written that finding the right one for its clear protein drink was the challenge of that launch. The drink sold out in 13 hours on launch day.

Clean Simple Eats has nearly 50 employees and an office in Riverton, and most of its revenue has come through its own website. Its quarterly challenge still runs seven weeks of recipes and workouts, which is how the whole thing started.