This Bar Saves Lives is a social entrepreneurship venture with 2 other actors.
By Sujeet Rajan
WASHINGTON, DC: Indian American actor Ravi Patel, who founded a hugely successful poker magazine, and was a broker and an investment banker in the past, has come up with yet another successful venture: his for-profit granola bar company ‘This Bar Saves Lives’– started in July of last year with actors Ryan Devlin and Todd Grinnell – has now been endorsed by Whole Foods supermarkets, which started selling the bars in 200 of its 375 U.S. stores from yesterday, Tuesday.
The Whole Foods’ decision comes on the heels of Sprouts Farmers Market stores, which are also selling the bars in all of their 150 stores across the country.
Patel, 35, who grew up in Illinois and North Carolina, co-founded and ran a popular poker magazine ‘All In’. He is known for his roles in Transformers (2007), Powder Blue (2009) and Five (2011). Since the fall of 2008, Patel has appeared in a role as George Patil on The CW’s Easy Money. In 2010, he starred in Past Life on Fox and is set to star in his own Fox sitcom pilot opposite Rachael Leigh Cook. He is also co-directing One in a Billion with his sister Geeta Patel.
This Bar Saves Lives, which is based in Venice, California, emanated after the three actors traveled to Liberia a few ago, on a humanitarian trip. According to a blog on the company’s website www.thisbarsaveslives.com, the trio came face to face with the tragedy of severe acute malnutrition and the incredible life-saving food that was combating it – Plumpy’Nut® hailed as a “miracle supplement” on 60 Minutes.
“To witness it literally lifting children from the brink of starvation was a watershed moment for us,” says the blog.
Every year, severe acute malnutrition claims the lives of 2.6 million children, which amounts to one child every 12 seconds. At present, some 20 million children worldwide are afflicted with it, and less than 10% of children are receiving the life-saving treatments they need.
The business model works like this: every time a bar of This Bar Saves Lives is sold, the company directs their partners to make a life-saving packet of food to be distributed around the globe, wherever it is needed the most.
The company, since its inception, has sold more than 300,000 granola bars and in turn, donated more than 300,000 nutritional packets, according to Upstart Business Journal.
In an interview to the Journal, Patel said: “We are mission first. We’re a bunch of actors who had no business being in the granola business and are doing this because we want to help a problem, so we always have to keep an eye on that. That means being as savvy as possible with the quality of what we give while being as efficient as possible in how we give it.”
The company has partnered with other organizations, including with the organization Save the Children, which handles the actual distribution.
When asked which was their priority, acting or entrepreneurship, Patel responded: “This is by far our number one priority,” adding that he had passed on a string of auditions just to spend more time on the company. Grinnell runs the operation’s side of the business and all the philanthropic outreach, Devlin heads up the sales side, and Patel oversees marketing, partnerships and finance duties.
Their goal is to sell a million of the company’s granola bars, which is where the distribution deals with Whole Foods and Sprouts play a big role, said the Journal.
“It’s hitting the gas on all of the verticals that we planted the seeds in the first phase,” Patel says, adding they also have the bars in every Morgans Hotel property; at big events like Coachella, which is produced by AEG Music; and with chain restaurant properties.