Tanka, a Native-owned business, invented the commercial bison bar. But Epic took credit, built an empire on a foundation of misleading claims, promised ranchers investment that never materialized, and left an industry struggling in its wake.
To hear the processed food industry tell it, the bison bar—the trendy, protein-dense snack now ubiquitous at high-end grocery stores across the country—has a clear, undisputed origin story. It was invented in 2011 by Katie Forrest and Taylor Collins, vegan endurance athletes who turned to meat to power their punishing training regimen. They got hooked on grass-fed bison, started making unusual bars from meat, dried fruit, and seeds out of their home kitchen, and quickly incorporated their obsession into a business. As co-founders of their new company, Epic Provisions, Forrest and Collins were smart and idealistic and naïve in all the right ways. Demand grew so quickly it’s almost as if they stumbled onto their defining moment: an acquisition by General Mills, to the tune of $100 million, that would launch countless imitators and have major implications for the American bison market.
The temptation to elide history in this way is understandable. The consumer packaged goods industry needs this story to make sense of itself. Perhaps more than any other product, bison bars illuminate the state of American processed food, and Epic exists at the intersection of several trends that food manufacturers are convinced are the key to their survival. There’s “snackification,” a fixation with convenience rooted in the suspicion that we’re all too busy to eat sit-down meals. There’s “wellness,” which includes a new category of functional superfoods marketed as though they have medication-grade power to give us stronger and better bodies. And there’s “clean label,” the increased insistence that packaged foods contain just a few familiar ingredients you might find in your pantry.
Perhaps most importantly, there’s the narrative that big food companies cannot save themselves, the idea that they must bring on outside help if they are to survive. By acquiring natural and organic food startups—helmed by mostly young, mostly college-educated, mostly white co-founders—multinational food conglomerates can buy their way to success and offset the flagging sales of aging marqee brands. The food industry is too old, too set in its ways, to change. But maybe it can be a benevolent master to the next generation of food companies, who are trying to offer America something new and truly different—or so the story goes.
That newness is what’s emphasized again and again, as food media tells Epic’s story. The takeaway is that Taylor and Forrest invented something no one else had ever thought of, and that General Mills never would have tried in a million years. “At the time, no protein bar of this kind existed,” wrote Inc.’s Tom Foster in a breathless profile published last month. “Forrest and Collins had hit on a powerful formula for new food brands. It was a novel product concept that fused two hot categories, protein bars and meat snacks like jerky. There was their mission for a larger purpose—sustainable sourcing—and, of course, the couple’s own compelling story. It all added up to exactly the kind of authenticity that legacy companies only wish they could create on their own.”
But there’s a problem with the insistence, central to Epic’s own marketing and repeated endlessly in the press, that Forrest and Collins invented something that didn’t exist before: It isn’t true.
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