Trubar Sold for $173 Million After Scaling to 32,000 Stores

Turkish snack company Eti Gida acquired Trubar for $173 million earlier this year, capping a seven-year run in which founder Erica Groussman scaled the protein bar brand from counter-top trial sales into roughly $100 million in gross revenue for 2025.

Trubar now sits in 32,000 U.S. retail locations and has shipped nearly 46 million protein bars in 2026, according to Groussman, who remains CEO after the acquisition and kept her team intact — a condition she called essential when evaluating buyers.

The company started with almost nothing. Groussman bought a wooden tray from Bed Bath & Beyond, loaded it with bars and asked local businesses to put them on the counter. Juice shops, delis, beauty salons and independent stores became her first channels. The shops priced bars around $3 to $4 and reordered when stock sold through.

"That's how I knew it was good because they were selling," Groussman says. "People were buying them and then asking to buy more."

Where did the idea come from?

Groussman hit on the concept during a family trip to Disney, when a protein bar from an established brand left her feeling unwell. She studied communications at UCLA, then worked in film finance and real estate before becoming a stay-at-home mom raising two children.

"I remember just feeling very ucky," she says. "My belly was very distended and uncomfortable. That was my epiphany. There has to be a better way."

She raised funds from family and friends, partnered with a food scientist and a co-manufacturer, and launched Trubar in 2018. Early flavors included Daydreaming About Donuts, Oh Oh Cookie Dough, Saltylicious Almond Love and Smother Fudger Peanut Butter. The cookie dough flavor was an early bestseller.

She still develops products hands-on. "We'll taste the bar, and I'll say what I taste," she says. "What am I getting afterwards? What's the aftertaste? What do I want to see more of? Do I want more crunchy?"

What nearly killed the company?

Groussman brought in an outside operator to help manage the business while she juggled running the company, raising children and building a home. The person's spending outpaced early sales, and Trubar ended up with $7 million in debt. Early revenue from smaller retailers didn't come close to covering it.

The operator, she says, "ran it into the ground." Her husband urged her to walk away. She refused.

"It's a part of me," she recalls telling him. "I really want to keep it going."

In retrospect, she says she underestimated herself: "I knew more than I thought I knew. We always doubt ourselves."

How did Whole Foods and Costco happen?

Groussman pitched a Whole Foods contact persistently on LinkedIn and landed a trial in 30 locations around 2020. With no marketing budget, Trubar became the top-selling bar in those stores, she says, competing against RXBAR and Kind.

Costco came first in Canada, with a single truckload during the Covid-19 period. The brand struggled there, weakened by low Canadian brand awareness and a possible pricing disadvantage as a U.S. label. The U.S. rollout came later and proved far more successful — a reminder, Groussman's experience suggests, that a failed market launch doesn't invalidate a product.

In 2021, a publicly traded holding company acquired Trubar. Groussman agreed because it let the business expand while she stayed CEO without taking on personal debt. The portfolio included a skincare brand and a CBD company; both failed while Trubar became the group's strongest asset. Money Trubar generated, she says, was used to prop up the weaker businesses.

By 2024 she had become CEO of the renamed public company. "I was the only one standing," she says.

How does she run the company now?

Trubar has roughly 28 employees and a deliberately hands-on CEO. When a Walmart shipment risked arriving late, Groussman called packaging suppliers outside the normal network and found one that finished the job in two weeks. When a box mislabeled almonds as cashews — the ingredients themselves were correct — the team bought green stickers from Staples and fixed the boxes on-site before delivery.

"When anything is slightly going wrong, I'm like mama bear," she says. "What do I gotta do? Who do I need to talk to?"

Her operating rule: solve first, diagnose second. "Just get 80%, just go," she says. On hiring: "You interview for your resume; you hire for chemistry."

Post-acquisition, Trubar has launched Trubar Kids and Trubar Pro, and Groussman sees room to extend into other categories. "It was always known that they wanted to keep me as well as my team," she says. "I'm not done. It's my baby."