A Recipe For Disruption

How One K Alumnus Is Doing His Part to Change Our Food System

By Mallika Mitra ’16

In a former meatpacking plant in the heart of the Back of the Yards community in Chicago, Bob Schultz ’15 is surrounded by grape seeds, crispy rice cereal, blue spirulina powder, dark rice malt and countless other ingredients. He jumps Willy Wonka-style from guiding a creamy brown substance from buzzing machinery to trays, to grinding with his melanger—a tool used for chocolate making—to boxing up the finished products.

If you’ve guessed Schultz is making chocolate bars, you’re close. The Kalamazoo College alumnus is making un-chocolate bars—sweet, smooth candy made from mesquite pods instead of cocoa.

Schultz launched Mez Foods in 2023 with his older brother Ben after years of working in fermentation and food science, helping to create vegan alternatives to meat products. What’s now a full-fledged company selling bars across the country started from a place of curiosity: While mesquite has been a staple of indigenous communities’ diets for centuries, why was it so underused in the U.S.?

Why a mesquite chocolate alternative?

Mesquite is probably best-known in the U.S. for its use in barbecue, but its wood is also considered a “nuisance” that people want to get rid of because it’s so hard, Schultz explains. It’s even been dubbed “the devil with roots.” But as Schultz began to research more about mesquite, including tracking down an academic who has studied the plant for his entire career, he learned more about the sustainability and regenerative aspects of mesquite. He knew he had to try to get it into the food system—and he left his full-time job to make it happen.

There were a few reasons that venturing down the path of creating a chocolate alternative made sense for the Schultz brothers. For one, there have long been human rights and sustainability challenges when it comes to cocoa. Of the 612 human rights incidents related to food supply chains that research firm Morningstar Sustainalytics recorded between January 2014 and January 2024, 27% of them were incidents of child labor on cocoa farms. Meanwhile, the industry has been the cause of deforestation and significant loss of critical wildlife habitat—roughly one-third of the forests lost in West African countries Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana over the past 60 years have been due to cocoa production.

Also, chocolate and its alternatives can be used in a lot more than just bars. There’s a good chance you’ve snacked on chocolate even in the past few days, whether that be in a mocha latte, baked goods, protein powder, sauce, ice cream or one of the countless other ways the product can be consumed.

“It’s more than just a single ingredient, it’s also a shelf staple,” Schultz explains. “It seemed like it would give us a huge breadth outside of our main products.”

And of course, there’s the health aspect. It’s no secret that chocolate isn’t necessarily a nutritious food, but in his kitchen, Schultz challenges the notion that the dessert can’t have any health benefits. Mez bars have 12–15 grams of sugar, 6 grams of fiber and 6–12 grams of protein compared to the 31 grams, 1 gram and 4 grams respectively likely seen in their chocolate counterparts. Schultz’s creation has no artificial ingredients, and is vegan and caffeine-free. Like their marketing says, the bars were in part created because Schultz—who grew up a fan of Crunch bars and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups—and his brother were “just two guys who wanted to eat chocolate every day.”

Putting a chemistry degree to work in plant-based product creation

Schultz’s interest in sustainability and food systems dates all the way back to his time on Academy Street. He says classes with professors like Tom Smith, the Kalamazoo College Dorothy H. Heyl Professor of Chemistry who retired in 2018 after 40 years at the College, helped pique his interest exploring how to use technology to pursue a greener way of living—and how there may actually be a career in doing so. When Schultz graduated, he stuck around Kalamazoo to put his chemistry degree to work at animal health company Zoetis. Living in a studio just off campus, he was cooking for himself and reading a ton of material on food science right around the time Impossible Foods, which creates plant-based substitutes for meat products, was gaining steam.

“I remember being like, ‘maybe I can use my background to do something like this,’” Schultz says.

That excitement brought Schultz back to Spain, a country he had dreamed of returning to ever since studying abroad in Cáceres during his junior year at K. He wanted to become fluent in Spanish (“K really was a booster to get me into even flirting with the ability to speak another language,” he says.) and pursue his food-related passion. That dual goal brought him to the Basque Culinary Center in San Sebastián where he spent a year and half studying research and development in food production, the psychology of food, product design and branding. The results were a thesis on a Copenhagen-based distillery’s use of the mold koji—typically used in misos and sakes—in their spirit recipe, as well as a master’s degree in gastronomic sciences.

After graduate school, Schultz returned to the U.S. and joined Simulate, a plant-based meat company in New York City, when it had fewer than five employees. He quickly became the startup’s head of product, managing a team of food engineers and technologists and helping to scale the kitchen into a manufacturing facility. The company, which was acquired by Ahimsa Companies in 2024, is best-known for Nuggs, vegan chicken nuggets that Schultz helped create.

In 2021, Schultz said goodbye to plant-based chicken in New York and turned to vegan seafood in Chicago. He became the first technical hire at AQUA Cultured Foods, which makes products like tuna and scallops without fish. As the director of research and development, Schultz not only helped start producing the seafood, he also built the team and designed the pilot facility.

As much as he enjoyed finding imaginative ways for foodies to enjoy all the products they loved—whether they were vegetarian, vegan, dairy-free or had other restrictions—he was itching to branch out on his own. After years in the startup industry he knew how important it was to partner with someone he could trust completely, so he turned to his older brother, who was winding down a product management job at Peloton.

‘Like chocolate, but better’

Mez Foods started in Schultz’s personal kitchen with a small grinder he used to experiment with new versions of milk and dark chocolate alternatives. Between February and November of 2023, his refrigerator was constantly filled with unchocolate bars as he tweaked the recipe to get the perfect balance between bitter and sweet and the shiny exterior expected from a bar of chocolate.

The brothers relied on friends and family to taste test the products, having them fill out surveys with questions like whether they would substitute a chocolate bar for a Mez bar and how much they would pay for the product. By the end of 2023, Schultz’s kitchen wasn’t cutting it anymore. The company was growing as the brothers started selling at farmer’s markets, and they needed a space to develop more Mez bars. They moved into The Plant, a former meatpacking plant that houses companies with similar missions to Mez, including a health and wellness brand that primarily works with sea moss, a wine company using wine barrels as a source for alternative beer styles, and a vegan ice cream business that dedicates all its net profits to various social justice organizations.

Having the new space has paid off. As of mid-May, Mez had sold 3,000 bars and nearly 10,000 over the past year, including more than $1,500 worth of bars in one hour after being featured on ABC7 Chicago.

Aside from The Plant, Mez bars can be found around Chicago in astrology-themed solar bar Solar Intentions, specialty food shop Here Here Market and vegan ice cream shop Vaca’s Creamery. New Yorkers can snag Mez bars at Orchard Street Grocer. They’ve also previously been in New York’s Pop Up Grocer and Alaska’s Sitka Food Co-op.

Plus, anyone across the U.S. can get bars at mezfoods.com. In addition to the company’s four go-bars—Mellow Milk, Peanut Better, Warm Spices and the new Sweet Milk—they’ve created bars for special occasions: strawberry-filled Valentine’s Day Sweet Hearts, Easter Peanut Butter Bunny Butts and the Raspberry Rose bar.

While the Mez bars are still the key to the company’s success, the brothers also are expanding into food service. Hestia, a Michelin star-awarded restaurant in Austin, Texas, uses Mez in its flourless chocolate cake.

The business may not be profitable yet, “but we have a line of sight to it,” Schultz says, adding that they’re currently seeking funding. Mez has increased net sales 143% year-to-date as of mid-May and continues to grow its direct-to-consumer sales organically while getting calls or emails from more food service accounts and retailers.

The unique challenges of creating a chocolate alternative

Mez’s success over such a short period of time may be impressive, but it hasn’t come without challenges. One of the major battles is replicating the texture and flavor of such a beloved food.

“You have to think about how to evoke similar flavors that cocoa brings to the table without using it,” Schultz explains. “How do you get that roasty note? How do you get the bitterness note? How do you get the sweetness? And then how do those all interact with one another to make a product that people actually want to eat?”

Another big challenge is bringing a new product to mind that people tend to associate with barbecue. Mez uses a completely different part of the tree—the fruit, not the wood—to make its product, but that’s not always clear to consumers who are used to seeing mesquite barbecue-flavored potato chips.

“The education piece is really difficult,” Schultz says. “We’re still trying to figure out the best way to explain it to folks and make it understandable.”

But educating people on how food—which has been an intricate part of our culture for centuries—and its systems can be built differently to create a better world is part of what gets Schultz so jazzed about talking about what we eat. In addition to scaling his business, he writes polymorv, a newsletter dedicated to exploring food’s various intersections in society.

He’s covered everything from the history of burrata and soccer player Lionel Messi’s superpower yerba maté to what gives bubblegum its unique flavor and how he learned to love oatmeal. In a more recent issue, he explained how cooking isn’t just a chore or creative outlet, but a “virtuous act that makes us better people.” In one of his first articles in 2023, right as he was going all in on Mez, he explained that changing the food system is not going to happen overnight.

“Our larger financial and agricultural systems wouldn’t hold up to that kind of whiplash alteration,” he wrote. “The great thing is that we all get to sort this change out together and we can determine how and what we want the future to look like.”

In his kitchen on the southwest side of Chicago, he’s helping to build that future, one un-chocolate bar at a time.