We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Emily Ferrara. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Emily below.
Hi Emily, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
My Co-founder Joe and I have always been the kind of people who care about what we put into our bodies. Health and nutrition weren’t trends to us, they were part of how we lived long before we ever thought about starting a business.
For me, that obsession started early. I was the person who knew every “healthy” CPG product on the shelf, constantly reading ingredient labels, researching nutrition, and trying every new wellness brand or healthier alternative that came out. I became a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition because I genuinely loved learning about how food impacts the body and mind. I was ready for a career shift to and help others live a healthy lifestyle.
Joe grew up in an environment where holistic health was just normal life. He was raised vegan, surrounded by things like green juice, saunas, and biohacking habits before “biohacking” was even a mainstream term. He had a sauna in his garage growing up. Wellness wasn’t performative – it was deeply ingrained in how he lived.
Ironically, both of us ended up working in finance. And that’s really where the idea for The Forward Bar started to take shape.
Joe needed something healthy and satisfying he could throw into his bag and eat during long days at the office. On paper, there were already endless protein bars on the market, but in reality, none of them felt right. Everything seemed to fall into one of two categories:
High protein, but packed with artificial ingredients, fillers, sugar alcohols, or ingredients we would never normally eat ourselves, OR
“Healthy” bars that were low in protein, high in sugar, and left you hungry an hour later.
We kept thinking: how is there not a bar that actually bridges this gap? Something made with real whole-food ingredients, enough protein to truly satisfy you, and clean enough that you’d feel good eating it every day. We both lived a whole-food based lifestyle, we didn’t want to compromise when it came to a convenient snack.
That frustration became the spark.
We started making bars in our apartment kitchen using ingredients we already consumed daily and trusted ourselves. It wasn’t some grand business plan at first… it was honestly just us trying to solve a problem we personally had. We tested recipe after recipe, tweaking texture, sweetness, protein content, and ingredient combinations until we created something that felt different from what was already out there.
Then something interesting happened.
Joe started bringing the bars to work, and his coworker became our first customer before we even considered ourselves a real company. People kept asking for more. We’d walk around the streets handing out samples and strangers would stop us asking where they could buy them. People were trying to purchase the bars before we even had flavors planned, packaging finalized or a manufacturer lined up.
That was the moment where it stopped feeling hypothetical.
The logic behind the business became incredibly clear to us: if two people as immersed in wellness as we were couldn’t find a truly clean, satisfying protein bar, there had to be millions of other consumers feeling the same frustration. We weren’t creating something just because the category was trendy, we were creating the product we genuinely wished existed.
What excited us most was that we felt we could bring a different philosophy to the space. The goal was never to create the highest-protein bar or the lowest-calorie bar. We wanted to create a bar built around ingredient integrity first… something made from whole foods, with enough protein to keep you full and energized, without compromising on taste or quality.
That balance felt missing in the market.
From there, things snowballed. We moved from apartment recipe testing to working with a food manufacturer, refining formulations, selecting flavors, learning the operational side of building a food business from scratch, and slowly turning this idea into a real brand.
What started as two health-conscious people trying to make a better snack for themselves became The Forward Bar… a company built around the belief that convenience food shouldn’t force you to compromise your standards… and whole food snacking does exist.
Emily, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
Joe and I are the founders of The Forward Bar.
We created The Forward Bar because we genuinely couldn’t find a protein bar we wanted to eat ourselves.
Both of us have always been deeply immersed in health and wellness. I’ve spent years obsessed with nutrition, ingredient quality, and the health food space — constantly researching products, studying labels, and understanding how food impacts the body. I eventually became a certified health coach through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition because wellness was something I cared about far beyond just personal interest.
Joe grew up immersed in holistic living. He was raised vegan and surrounded by wellness practices long before they became mainstream — green juice, saunas, biohacking habits, functional nutrition. Health was simply embedded into his lifestyle from an early age.
At the same time, both of us were working demanding jobs in finance, which exposed us to a very real problem: there were almost no convenient snacks that aligned with how we actually wanted to eat.
The protein bar market was massively oversaturated, but everything felt compromised. Bars were either packed with protein powders, fillers, seed oils, artificial ingredients, and “natural flavors,” or they were marketed as healthy but loaded with sugar and left you hungry an hour later.
We kept asking ourselves: why does a protein bar have to feel so processed?
That question became the foundation of The Forward Bar.
We started making bars in our apartment kitchen using ingredients we already consumed every day and trusted ourselves. What excited us most was the challenge of creating something the industry said was nearly impossible: a protein bar with substantial protein that didn’t rely on protein powder or ultra-processed ingredients.
Today, The Forward Bar contains 12g of complete protein alongside the nutrients most bars process out — magnesium, omega-3s, and fiber — all from real whole-food ingredients. No protein powder. No seed oils. No refined sugars. No “natural flavors.” Even our chocolate is sweetened with dates.
We’re especially proud of the fact that we refuse to cut corners on ingredients, even when it would be easier or cheaper to do so. In the food industry, there’s enormous pressure to optimize for margins by using lower-quality oils, artificial flavor systems, cheap sweeteners, or highly processed proteins. We’ve made the conscious decision not to compromise.
Transparency is one of our core values. We say “transparency tastes better” because we believe consumers deserve to actually understand what they’re putting into their bodies. Every ingredient in our bars serves a purpose and is something we feel good about eating ourselves daily.
What also makes our brand unique is that we’re not trying to create another extreme functional product. We’re not chasing the highest protein count at the expense of ingredient quality, nor are we creating something that feels like “diet food.” We focus on balance: a bar that’s genuinely satisfying, nutrient-dense, convenient, and delicious.
What validated the idea early on was how naturally people responded to it. Joe started bringing the bars to work and coworkers immediately wanted to buy them. We handed out samples on the street and strangers kept asking where they could purchase them — before we even had packaging or manufacturing figured out. That organic excitement told us we weren’t the only people frustrated with the existing options on shelves.
Today we offer four flavors, all built around the same philosophy of uncompromising ingredient quality and whole-food nutrition.
What we’re most proud of is that The Forward Bar has stayed true to its original mission as we’ve grown. The product started from a genuine personal need, and that authenticity still drives every decision we make. We’re building a brand for people who care deeply about what they eat but also live busy, modern lives and need convenience without sacrifice.
At the end of the day, we want people to know that The Forward Bar isn’t just another protein bar company. It’s a rethink of what convenient nutrition can look like when you refuse to compromise on ingredients, transparency, or quality.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
We manufacture The Forward Bar with a trusted manufacturing partner in New Jersey, but the product actually started in our kitchen in South Florida.
When we first had the idea, we began recipe testing with ingredients we already had in our pantry: pumpkin seeds, hemp seeds, flax seeds, almonds, dates, honey, and psyllium husk. We spent countless hours experimenting with different combinations, trying to create a bar that delivered more than 10 grams of protein while still tasting great and having the right texture. We weren’t willing to compromise on ingredients, so every adjustment was intentional.
Once we felt we had something special, we started researching manufacturing partners. We spoke with founders, leveraged word-of-mouth referrals, and met with numerous manufacturers. Along the way, many people told us that what we were trying to create wasn’t possible…a truly clean, whole food protein bar without protein powder, no seed oils, no natural flavors, and no ingredient shortcuts. We took that as a challenge.
Finding the right manufacturer was one of the hardest parts of the process. We quickly learned that manufacturing capability alone isn’t enough. We needed a partner who understood what we stood for as a brand and shared our commitment to quality. When many manufacturers suggested using natural flavors or other common industry shortcuts, our answer was always the same: absolutely not.
After nearly three months of searching, touring facilities, reviewing certifications, evaluating ingredient sourcing, and understanding production capabilities, we found the right partner. From there, we worked closely together to adapt our kitchen recipe for commercial production, test it on large-scale equipment, develop unique real food flavors and source high-quality organic ingredients that met our standards.
We launched just four months later.
One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that creating a great product is only half the battle. The right manufacturing partner should understand your brand, your values, and your long-term vision. If they’re only focused on producing the product and not protecting what makes it special, it’s probably not the right fit. For us, finding a manufacturer who believed in our mission was just as important as finding one who could make the bar.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
What has helped us build our reputation is simple: we do exactly what we say we’re going to do.
From day one, we’ve believed that people deserve to know exactly what’s going into their bodies. That’s why transparency is at the core of everything we do. Our tagline is “Transparency Tastes Better,” because we genuinely believe it does.
In an industry filled with ingredient lists that consumers can’t understand, hidden additives, and marketing claims that don’t match the product, we’ve taken the opposite approach. No shortcuts. No compromises. Every ingredient in The Forward Bar serves a purpose, and every ingredient is there because we believe it belongs.
One of our favorite things to hear from customers is that when they open a Forward Bar, they can actually see the ingredients they’re eating. You can see the seeds, nuts and dates. You can taste real food. There’s no mystery, no artificial flavors, and nothing hiding behind complicated labeling.
We think consumers are becoming more informed and more intentional about what they eat. Rather than trying to out-market our competitors, we’ve focused on earning trust through honesty, ingredient quality, and consistency. When people try the product, they understand immediately what makes it different.
At the end of the day, our reputation has been built by staying true to our values and never compromising on the standards we set from the beginning.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://theforwardbar.com
- Instagram: @theforwardbar
- Facebook: @theforwardbar
- Other: TikTok: @theforwardbar
