How Kettle & Fire Turned Bone Broth Into A $100 Million Business

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Posted By TPO Admin

Mar 09, 2025 at 07:58 am EDT

Justin Mares is fired up about creating new nutrient-rich products for the Make America Healthy Again era.

Before launching a new line of bone broth with Hawaii-based venison brand few months ago. Ahead of the deal, he spent three nights in Hawaii with Maui Nui’s crew hunting invasive Axis deer in the dark with a night-vision scope and a long-range rifle. Each animal was killed in its natural surroundings, under the watch of a government inspector of the same sort you’d find at a traditional slaughterhouse. Mares, who carried at least 40 of the slain deer to an ATV waiting nearby that then brought the animals to a mobile butchering facility, experienced firsthand what he considers one of the most ethical examples of small-scale animal slaughter in America. It’s also been good for business.

“There’s nothing more nutrient-dense than harvesting a wild animal and turning that into a source of nutrition,” says Mares, explaining how wild meat isn’t usually available for commercial sale, which makes this bone broth so special.

Venison, Anyone: Justin Mares—with Maui Nui cofounder Jake Muise and Kettle & Fire CEO Brian Hack—has added a wild game line to Kettle & Fire’s bone broth line.

Mares’ quest to sell what he considers healthier food to some of the most health-obsessed customers on the planet has fueled his bone broth brand Kettle & Fire fornearly a decade. Since he cofounded the brand in 2015 with his brother, Nick, the 35-year-old Mares has built his once-tiny bone broth business into one doing more than $100 million in annual revenue, double what it brought in two years ago. They can’t make enough of it to meet demand. The brand’s loyal fan base, which has bought out its entire range of nutrient-rich soup stocks online for the past five years.

Kettle & Fire cooks its products for 14 to 20 hours and sources grassfed-beef with a strict set of standards to ensure high levels of collagen, amino acids, and vitamins and minerals. Mares and his team also remove the kinds of additives and ingredients like seed oils targeted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Make America Healthy Again crowd. Kennedy has touted the benefits of bone broth on social media and podcaster Joe Rogan, who has extolled the benefits of the carnivore diet for years, is also a big fan of bone broth.

The attention to minutiae when producing the broth is vital. When Mares found out one of Kettle & Fire’s natural flavor suppliers used small amounts of canola oil as a binder, the company stopped working with that supplier and changed to another that used olive oil. Then they banned all natural flavors entirely. Kettle & Fire also pays to certify its broth is free of any residue from the herbicide glyphosate and proudly displays that fact on its label.

“It’s hard and unglamorous and non-sexy work. No one cares to this level of detail,” says Mares. “It’s crazy that even as a company with decent purchasing power, we have to go so deep with all of these suppliers to understand, how do we buy products and ingredients that are not making people, in my view, sick?”

His fanatical customers agree. Kettle & Fire has also spent the past nine years pioneering a return to what the soup and stock aisles used to look like—products filled with fortifying natural ingredients. It’s no longer a niche product: Cartons of Kettle & Fire are now sold at 22,000 stores nationwide, from Whole Foods to Walmart and Target as well on its own website and at Amazon, Walmart.com, Thrive Market and more. Kettle & Fire has some of the highest repeat purchasing rates across the soup aisle grocery-industry-wide, and the brand has brought in new customers to a once-sleepy category.

Hot Take: “Humans have been eating bone broth for years,” Mares says. “The only reason that soup is nutritious is because of the bone broth base.”

“The hardest thing to do is to have the big vision and then to maintain conviction over long periods of time. That’s where [Kettle & Fire] has a unique superpower,” says longtime independent board member Sam McBride, the former COO of Rx Bar (which sold to Kellogg’s for $600 million in 2017). “They saw this coming a long time ago and stuck to their sourcing and standards and they haven’t wavered.”

Despite its growth, Mares wants Kettle & Fire to remain private, for now, and keep growing on his own terms. To that end, he and his brother bought out their early backers at the end of last year with the help of McBride, who founded the Chicago-based Colter Ventures. McBride raised additional funds from new investors, which valued Kettle & Fire at an estimated $200 million, or roughly double its revenue. These investors—who put in $43 million—have what Mares describes as “a long-term time horizon” and are open to seeing a return on their investment from profit distributions or eventually getting bought out, instead of focusing exclusively on a sale or public offering. Mares and his brother Nick are minority shareholders in the deal.

With that kind of momentum behind Mares, he is now emboldened to scale up his business and begin selling what he deems as healthier food on a mass scale. “I have a vision much more than an investor does around what the food system should look like,” he says. “With what I want to build in the world, it’s much easier to realize your vision if you have more control.”

Mares will be realizing that vision now as chairman of the board, rather than as CEO, after bringing in a new chief executive, Brian Hack, to take over the day-to-day reins last January. His younger brother, Nick, who was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2019 (when Justin was already 30), hasn’t been involved in daily operations since 2020 when he gave up the COO role, though he remains on the board. (A Peter Thiel fellow from 2016, Nick cofounded another company, Light Labs, which tests for toxins in food. Justin has since cofounded a startup called Truemed, which helps consumers use their HSA or FSA funds for root-cause chronic disease interventions.)

Pain And Gain: Justin Mares (left) first saw the benefits of bone broth at 26, when his younger brother Nick (right) tore ligaments in his knee.

“Justin is a very big picture thinker,” Hack says of his predecessor. “His awareness of where the consumer is going is really helpful for being a forward-thinking organization.”

Justin Mares was first convinced about the benefits of bone broth at 26 when Nick, then 19, tore two ligaments in his knee while playing soccer. A Crossfit enthusiast, the older Mares quickly came to believe that better omega-3 ratios and full-spectrum amino acids such as collagen and gelatin can improve health and fitness recovery. He also discovered that there was a large market of people who wanted access to nutrient-dense broth for other benefits such as gut or hair health. But the market was untapped: He couldn’t find a single brand selling shelf-stable, 100% grassfed bone broth.

While bone broth has been a staple of Chinese medicine for thousands of years, it also has a commercial history in America. It was once the base of many Campbell’s soups, but what’s found in most supermarkets today is often reformulated from powders with nutrients added back in. Many of the mass-produced soup stocks today don’t even begin with actual bones.

“Over the last 40 to 50 years, we’ve gone from using nutrient-dense whole foods with long cook times and traditional methods to using bad cuts of muscle meat, bad cuts of bones, cooked for short periods of time with a bunch of natural flavors and additives added to give you the fake umami flavor,” Mares says. “Humans have been eating bone broth for years. The only reason that soup is nutritious is because of the bone broth base and no one’s doing that sort of traditional method anymore.”

The Mares brothers set out to produce a broth that would be slow-simmered for nearly an entire day. From the outset, they committed to high standards of sourcing humanely raised beef and chicken bones—from animals that graze on grass their entire life, unlike some meat labeled grassfed which comes from animals that are fattened on corn at the end of their lives. That’s why Kettle & Fire promotes its sourcing of grassfed-and-finished bones. (Some several peer-reviewed studies corroborate the health claims.

In 2010 a review of fatty acids and antioxidants in grassfed versus grain-fed meat found higher levels of vitamins A and E, as well as cancer-fighting antioxidants. And in 2022, two studies each found that grassfed meat produces better omege-3 fatty acids as well as other nutrients.

Kettle & Fire’s launch also coincided with the rise of the Paleo diet—which emphasized foods like organ meats and seasonal fruit that are said to have been consumed in the stone age— as well as the meat-heavy Keto diet (focusing on high fat and low carbohydrates). According to grocery industry tracker SPINS, sales of foods labeled Paleo and Keto are each up between 20% and 30% compared to last year, with $750 million in Paleo sales and $500 million of Keto sales.

“The consumer is starting to realize that you can’t really divorce nutrient density from quality,” Mares says. “If you’re sourcing your animals from factory feedlots and you’re using short cook times, you’re not using great ingredients. Structurally, that product is going to be much less nutrient dense, much less good for you.”

Mares isn’t just evangelical about his products, it’s part of the company’s ethos. While at yogurt maker Chobani’s emerging food incubator in 2016, Mares learned how the brand’s billionaire founder Hamdi Ulukaya struggled after bringing in outside investors that didn’t really value the company’s unique culture and standards. Ulukaya eventually bought out those backers and has since committed to Chobani remaining privately held and backed 100% by himself.

Adapting Ulukaya’s strategy for Kettle & Fire, the Mares brothers were stringent when it came to fundraising and raised a little under $1 million in 2016. Two years later, they raised another $16 million in venture funding. Los Angeles-based Cavu Consumer Partners led that round.

Over the next 18 months, Kettle & Fire used that cash to expand from 3,000 grocery stores to 10,000. Sales topped $35 million as the business grew to encompass a line of soups as well as a Keto-friendly line that’s high in protein.

Helped by these broader offerings, Kettle & Fire first became profitable in 2020. Over the next two years, the brand launched at Costco and Walmart, causing sales to rocket.

Kettle & Fire’s core line is a beef and chicken bone broth. There is also a “regenerative” line of chicken and beef bone broth launched in 2021, which touts the environmental benefits of the farms where the bones come from. Regenerative has no official definition when it comes to labels regulated by the federal government, but Kettle & Fire uses it because its chicken and beef suppliers utilize five principles of soil health, including keeping living roots in the soil and growing a diverse range of crops. (The suppliers are certified by Whole Foods as well.)

“It’s not our most profitable line. But we want to be one of the first brands actually moving the food system in a good direction,” says Mares. “I want to find more opportunities to invest in this idea of nutrient density.”

Then there’s the just-launched line of venison bone broth with Maui Nui—which its cofounder and CEO Jake Muise describes as “way more akin to wild salmon fishing than ranching.” Kettle & Fire is looking for more collaborations like this—including bison broth—going forward. These new products and others will all soon be made in a facility Kettle & Fire owns, once the brand’s first manufacturing plant opens in Lancaster, Pennsylvania this spring and hires 150 new employees.

“One of the biggest opportunities in the country is building a better type of food company that thinks about human health,” Mares says, “and does not look at how we make the most addictive, high-margin, hyper-palatable product that may have a lot of health consequences.”