Helping Everyone Get Back to Human

Selling Hu to Mondelez, the largest global snacking company in the world, marks a very special moment for me and my family – it validates our decade-long mission and the global need for cleaner ingredients, healthier products and brand integrity. I am deeply grateful for every person who has helped us in so many ways on our collective emotional journey. Eight years ago, my brother-in-law Jordan Brown, my wife (and Jordan’s sister) Jessica Karp, and I pursued an improbable mission born from our own necessity. At the time, we were all “outsiders” who had no experience in the areas of food and CPG, and were told by many that we were crazy. We knew restaurants are usually bad businesses, and we also knew that chocolate was “very competitive” and extremely difficult to do well. But sometimes, as my mother taught me, your heart needs to prevail over your mind. Despite the odds, we relentlessly believed people needed to get back to a humane way of eating and living, and opened a NYC restaurant in 2012 called Hu Kitchen (as in Human).

As someone who struggled for more than half of my life with autoimmune issues brought on by food and environmental issues, I lost trust and experienced constant fear and skepticism with modern living. We planned and launched Hu with no outside investors because we never wanted someone telling us, “Why don’t you use this or that inferior ingredient as it will improve the margins.” Trust and integrity, regardless of economics, were paramount to us. We couldn’t find products that lived up to our insanely neurotic standards of clean and delicious – so we ventured in, with a “beginner’s mind,” and created our own. This is how Hu was born and built – and we have had so many spectacularly talented people who helped make this a reality.

Mondelez is a partner who respects what we have built, and will continue to be an excellent steward of our child who now needs to graduate and help more people. We are thrilled to work with them now to help bring our “Get Back to Human” philosophy to a broader audience. I am forever indebted to the Hu team and especially Mark Ramadan, for his bold leadership over the last two years. I am most grateful to my brother-in-law Jordan, for his boundless grit and his unparalleled chocolate making genius, and my amazing wife Jessica, for her everything. Family businesses are tough – and this was no exception!

While there is a still a lot wrong with the world today, we believe anyone can effect change – especially those who think they are not qualified to do so.

“You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” — C.S. Lewis