Bakeworks Trailnuggets
Simple, honest nutrition for adventures.

Stephen Fitzgerald, founder of Rodeo Labs, makes sleek, rugged adventure bikes and rides them in challenging environments. His brother Zac runs Bake Works, a bar and cookie manufacturer. Stephen asked Zac to make his team “a bar that we actually like to eat. Because we’re eating a ton of bars.” Zac’s answer: vegan, gluten-free Trailnuggets, energy snacks that reviewers call “zesty,” “bright,” and “a refreshing departure from other bars.”

Why spend on doing quality right: "You're either going to spend the money before something happens or after it happens."

THE FIRST TIME

"I prefer to put the resources into doing it right, so there are less events where you’re spending the same or potentially far more fixing something after the fact."

“We play the long game. We want to be much larger than we are, so the entire management here is thinking big. If QA asks for the resources to do something better, I have to step up. You have to make really hard decisions, watch costs carefully, and always be improving. You’re never done improving your systems.”

Bake Works is a family-owned business started by Tom Fitzgerald in 1998 to make individually packaged cookies for the school and coffee shop markets. Today, in addition to Trailnuggets GO and Trailnuggets PRO bars, they manufacture cookies, energy bars, protein bars, cereal bars, and cold form extruded bars, both for their own brands and as a co-manufacturer. Zac Fitzgerald has been the CEO since 2013.