RED Episode 319 Founder of Atlas Bars, James Oliver

RED Episode 320

SHOUTOUTS 

Thanks to Alison Bourey who shared her story with us of a struggle turned into triumph.  Here is the link to the story of the students and faculty who saved her: irstalert4.com/2025/11/03/parkway-north-teachers-revive-woman-who-collapsed-while-running-high-school-track/.

Thanks to Dawn Broussard who shared:  “There are definitely lots of days that I don’t want to get out there so I just say I’ll give it 10 minutes and most of the time it’s enough time to start wanting to move more. Now eating junk is another story.  I’m not sure I can ever give up my sweets and snacks.

Springtime Surprise in 2024 was so difficult.  I didn’t want to leave the hotel room after I found out my sister had died, but my family didn’t want me to give up on things I enjoy doing and now usually do all my miles with those who can’t in mind.” 

If you want a shout out for you or someone else you love on the show,  email us at info@runeatdrink.net or call us and leave a message at 941-677-2733

RUN, EAT, AND DRINK with Founder of Atlas, James Oliver

We recently tried Atlas Bars for the first time and these are a clean source of great protein for us as we train.  They are also delicious!  We love the Salted Peanut Butter the most! 

We were lucky enough to sit down with founder of Atlas, James Oliver, and he told us all about starting Atlas, his inspiration, his challenges, and all about the bars themselves.

Try them here:

https://amzn.to/4j52dY4 

https://amzn.to/495CwCj 

https://amzn.to/491V0DA 

Find out more about Atlas here:

https://atlasbars.com/ 

https://www.facebook.com/atlasbars 

https://www.instagram.com/atlasbars 

https://www.tiktok.com/@atlasbars 

Chapters

• 2:47 Meet James Oliver Of Atlas
• 5:00 The Atlas Formula: Low Sugar, High Protein
• 9:40 Breaking Into A Crowded Bar Aisle
• 13:40 Entrepreneurship Is A Multi‑Sport Marathon
• 19:06 Running Ultras And The One‑More‑Step Mindset
• 23:13 Real Runner Feedback And Flavor Talk
• 27:40 From PB&J Vibes To Dark Chocolate Almond

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 1:42

Dana, we are gonna talk about food. Yes, we are on this episode. And we are joined by James Oliver, founder of Atlas. Welcome to our show, sir, and thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_00: 1:57

Thank you for having me to your show. I'm very glad to be here.

SPEAKER_01: 2:00

And we're so excited to talk to you. We have been enjoying your product for a couple of months now. And I can tell you that it is my bar of choice when I'm headed out for a long run. So what it's yeah, I can tell you it's rather tasty.

SPEAKER_00: 2:21

That is the goal. You do want to make tasty food. If you're gonna have a company that sells food, you definitely want it to be tasty.

SPEAKER_02: 2:26

Yes, indeed. And before we dive into what exactly Atlas is, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, where you're from, what you're drinking as we're chatting this evening? Anything?

SPEAKER_00: 2:36

Yeah, sure. So I I grew up in the Boston area. So uh grew up in a family of seven, which is fairly large for the Northeast. I was youngest of four boys, and then I had a younger sister, so I was thienup in the lineup, went to school there, and now I live in New York, so I've been in the Northeast my entire life. Always was very into nutrition, was just very curious about nutrition and was also outdoors a lot doing athletics. I did, I was kind of a master of none. I did every single sport like throughout my childhood from tennis, sailing, lacrosse, football, baseball, everything. And then I also spent a ton of time outdoors because me and my three brothers were all in the Boy Scouts, and we all actually became Eagle Scouts. So we spent a lot of time outdoors hiking. That was where I started my long-running journey of like ultras that really actually started when I was in the Boy Scouts, and I would, because I was the youngest of four brothers, I would always be like tagging along on the hikes that they were doing. So they would be like in high school and I would be like eight years old doing some hikes that were like pretty pretty challenging for an eight-year-old to do. And then that kind of planted the seed for stuff that I've done later in life. But yeah, just a lifetime of being interested in nutrition, health, wellness, just how the body moves and how what you put into it impacts what you're able to do. And I'm drinking a spindrift right now. Oh spindrift?

SPEAKER_02: 4:03

Yeah. Sparkling, sparkling beverage.

SPEAKER_00: 4:06

Yeah, yes, sparkling beverage. Yes.

SPEAKER_02: 4:08

I like it. I have another question. And and I do too. That is really gonna let everybody know what's going on. I think the using the context clues of what we've been talking, we're gonna be talking about a protein bar of some sort. Tell us a little bit about Atlas itself. What is it? And uh then we'll get into the questions about what inspired you and what you're trying to do.

SPEAKER_00: 4:30

Yeah, sure. So the goal of Atlas was to make uh convenient a source of nutrition that was very easy to just bring around with you and to have in your daily life. And specifically, what Atlas was designed to do was to have very low sugar. So each bar has uh one gram or less um high protein. So each bar is 20 grams of protein, and it's all clean ingredients. And that combination, um, Atlas, to my knowledge, is the despite the fact that there are hundreds of bars, it's the only one that doesn't compromise in that you can get high protein, very low sugar, and clean ingredients all in one product. There's some that have uh there's some that have one, a couple that have two, but there are none that have all three of those things, which is it's always been surprising to me. And I think as I've gone through this journey, I've realized that it's because it's really challenging to do that. It's challenging to make a product that has a lot of protein taste good. And then it's challenging again to do that uh without using a lot of sweeteners and sugar. And then if you layer on top, okay, well, now you can only use clean ingredients, so you're gonna take away basically 90% of the ingredients that others can use, it makes it even more challenging. That's what we spent years doing is really trying to create a product that doesn't compromise along any dimension, and that makes it easy for people to go throughout their life and to have this portable, clean nutrition. When I tell people, like if I'm demoing the product in person, I'll tell people that real food should be your first choice. If you, if it's an option, you should have real food. But this is a very good backup option if for whatever reason life happens, you're on the go, you don't have the ability to make real food. This is made with you could make this in your kitchen. It's that simple. You could get the ingredients from a grocery store and make in your kitchen. And that is, I know for a fact, that is not something that you can say about many products in this space.

SPEAKER_02: 6:22

No, it is absolutely not. As I've been on a quest over the last year and a half, two years to to clean up what's going into my diet. This was such a refreshing change of pace to find.

SPEAKER_01: 6:34

Yeah. Yeah. It's so hard to, I would think it's so hard to break into a field like protein bar or so. So because it's so saturated that field. So how did you get started to break into it?

SPEAKER_00: 6:49

I would say that this is something that I've really thought about since the first week that I started, which is that just because there's a lot of competition in a given area, it doesn't mean that there's a lot of quality competition in a given area. Like I could say similar to like podcasts, like there's a lot of podcasts out there, but there's not necessarily a lot of quality podcasts out there. And if you really care and if you feel that you have a quality product, whether it's a show or a physical product, and that you're meeting an unmet need for a specific group, then um there's no reason why you can't be uh successful, especially in a large market like bars or podcasts. That's true.

SPEAKER_02: 7:29

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: 7:29

That is true. We target back of the pack runners.

SPEAKER_02: 7:32

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 7:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 7:33

And speaking of, back of the pack runners tend to have uh I don't want to say more challenges, different challenges than your middle of the pack and your elites. But uh give us an idea. What are some of the challenges that that you faced in bringing this product to market?

SPEAKER_00: 7:48

I think the hard part with something like this, I actually I remember speaking with somebody who had started a tech company, a software company, and they had sold that company. So they're a successful tech entrepreneur, and then they decided to start a food company, a beverage company. And I remember talking to them and they're like, this is so much harder than a tech company, because from his perspective, with something like technology, you just you have software and you need to build out the platform. And yes, you need somebody to help you grow it. You need marketing team, sales team, whatever. But with something like a food product, you need to build the supply chain, you need to um create the product. And the product is it's changing, meaning that once you make it, it starts to degrade over time, which is very different than something like software. Like when you write a line of code, it doesn't start like falling apart over time. But when you make whether it's a like if you right when you pick an apple, immediately after you remove the apple from the tree, it begins basically like dying over time. Same is true of any food product. So there's so many different pieces that you have to get right. You have to get the supply chain right, you have to get the product right, you have to get the financing aspect of it so that you're actually able to support a sustainable business. You have to get the distribution part of it right. How are you going to get it to people in a cost-effective way? You have to get the marketing part of it right, the positioning part of it right. So there's so many different aspects, but you're really just like a conductor of an orchestra, and you're just trying to conduct all of these different components so that they play together well. And that's the challenging part.

SPEAKER_02: 9:19

And you don't have immediate control over all of them.

SPEAKER_00: 9:22

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01: 9:24

It's like training for a marathon in a way, because there are several different moving parts, and you have to get the speed right and you have to get the the distance and then you also have to get the nutrition right.

SPEAKER_02: 9:38

And the rest and the recovery. Yeah, and the strength training.

SPEAKER_01: 9:43

You I feel like there are several different moving parts, and then you can never tell on race day when you cross the finish line, like the weather that you're gonna encounter. And it doesn't yeah. So I but there is nothing like crossing the finish line when you get there and that first major success in that first major race. And as an entrepreneur, that first major success, can you talk a little bit about what your first major success was and how that felt for you and oh uh how it differed from those first challenges that you faced?

SPEAKER_00: 10:22

Yeah, it's funny because I I I don't know if I just didn't appreciate it at the time, but I really didn't there was no like single event where I was like that what I would compare to like crossing the finish line because unlike unlike a race or a marathon 26.2, once you finish that 26.2, you're done with that race. There's no unless you step away from the company or you sell it to somebody, there's no necessarily finish line because you just you keep going. But there were points where I remember like early on, I had started the company, and then this was about a year and a half in, and the company had grown from like five thousand dollars a month to 120,000 a month within 10 months. And I remember being like, wow, that's cool how quickly like that had grown. And wow, this is like a seven-figure company now. But I it still didn't occur to me because it was my first company. It still didn't occur to me like, wow, that's not normal. That's something that you should appreciate because that's a challenging thing to do. So I think that if there was a moment, it would probably have been that moment where I stepped back and yeah, a year and a half in, it had grown so quickly into something that was a legitimate brand.

SPEAKER_01: 11:31

You're a runner, you do ultras though. Like you talked about your history, you're into ultras.

SPEAKER_00: 11:38

Yeah, it's funny because as I mentioned before, I grew up doing a lot of hiking. And technically, an ultra is anything that's longer than a marathon. So I had done, I think I dumped six or seven quote unquote ultras before I even knew what an ultra was, because I would do these hikes that were like 30 up to 40 miles with my brothers or with with Boy Scouts. And those things, they technically like I've done some ultra marathons now, and I was I've done them and I was like, this is pretty much just like what I did growing up. But a lot of yeah, a lot of those types of things really enjoy doing. I like going low and slow for long distances. That's yeah, I just it puts me in a place like mentally that's hard to get to with other things that I do. And I think what I like about it is just you push yourself to a limit that it's hard. I've done like CrossFit, I've done like heavy weightlifting, and just nothing compares to pushing yourself to the limit and just seeing just seeing how far you can go. And with something like a hike or an ultra marathon or even a marathon, what I've always told myself is you uh you just need one more step. And as long as you can take one more step, then you can keep going because you can take one more step and then another step and then another step, and you can just keep stringing steps together and you can keep keep putting miles together. And it's yeah, to me, it's much more of a mental game at that point than it is a physical game.

SPEAKER_01: 13:01

And you've probably met some runners that have tried your product at some of these events where you've been. Is that right?

SPEAKER_00: 13:10

Yeah, I definitely have.

SPEAKER_01: 13:11

And what kind of feedback have you gotten?

SPEAKER_00: 13:13

I've gotten, we actually, so we had a partnership with do you know what Ragnar's are? Ragnar running races.

SPEAKER_02: 13:19

We have a friend who who does them on the regular.

SPEAKER_00: 13:21

Yeah. Yeah. So I've done a couple of those and we had a partnership for about two years with them. And we were found because the director of them had been trying and using Atlas. So we were in like all of the goodie bags for every single race for a while. And yeah, people love them. People love them for the reasons that I said that it's it feels like clean fuel. Like you one of the things in particular, I think, that is really nice about them is that you don't feel bad after having them, which sounds like that should be it. Sounds like that's like that should just be the case with all food, but it's not like there are a lot of products, especially in this category that are bars where you have it and then you your stomach feels off, or just something feels weird after like an hour or two.

SPEAKER_02: 14:05

And especially when you're running.

SPEAKER_00: 14:08

Yeah, especially if you're running. Yeah. Yeah. And I've had three apps bars today, and it's what I like about it is it just feels like very smooth. There's no, I just feel good having it, and I can just keep going. There's no crash that you have to then like have coffee to to get back from.

SPEAKER_02: 14:25

However, your bars are fantastic with coffee. Yeah, they're very good with coffee. In fact, we're having probably the world's first Atlas bar and bourbon pairing tonight. And by the way, the salted peanut with bourbon is excellent.

SPEAKER_00: 14:39

I'll have to put that as a recommended pairing.

SPEAKER_02: 14:41

Exactly. I tend to gravitate towards like not the real sweet. And you mentioned it about some products that are out there. In fact, a lot of products that are out there. If you go to the store and you pick up a bar and you look at the back of it, and you look at the ingredients, and a lot of them you can't pronounce the ingredients that are in there. And then when you really break it down into terms of macros, it's essentially a Snickers bar with some protein thrown in in terms of caloric account and amount of carbs that you're getting. I love the fact that uh you have taken the route and I'm looking here and it's so simple. Peanut butter, tapioca fiber, vegetable glycerin. It's super easy. Whey and milk protein isolate, and the flavoring is sea salt and monk fruit. That's it. That's super easy. And I just mentioned that the salted peanut's my favorite.

SPEAKER_01: 15:38

I that's my favorite too, actually.

SPEAKER_02: 15:40

What are the what are some of the other flavors that you have or maybe have coming?

SPEAKER_00: 15:45

So peanut butter chocolate chip is that's the most popular historically. Salted peanut butter is becoming a close second. We actually just came out with that uh a couple months ago and it's grown really quickly. Peanut butter raspberry is one that we did a month ago. That's the one that I've had three of those today because I have um a bunch of boxes of them. That's that's like uh it's similar to the salted peanut butter, but we use freeze-dried raspberries in there so it it tastes like a peanut butter in jelly. Wow. Yeah, it's good.

SPEAKER_02: 16:15

That sounds really good.

SPEAKER_01: 16:16

Oh, we need some of that in our lunch, too.

SPEAKER_00: 16:18

We'll get you some of that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:19

We need that. Yeah, they're very good.

SPEAKER_02: 16:21

We'll have another pairing on the show.

SPEAKER_00: 16:23

Yay. And yeah, we have a couple more that are coming. We're working on right now. Dark chocolate almond is another one, which is supposed to have almost like a brown, it's almond butter with almond pieces in it with cocoa, and we actually melt, we take chocolate liqueur and then we melt it down so that it's actually like part of the part of the dough to have a really like real dark chocolate flavor. Um so yeah, I think what you mentioned is actually it's a very astute point that a lot of brands they start with a candy bar in mind and they're like, okay, how can we make this a little bit like better of a candy bar?

SPEAKER_02: 17:03

Greenwashing almost. Yeah, it's marketing.

SPEAKER_00: 17:07

Yeah, yeah, like Snickers actually, Snickers had a they did exactly that where they took a Snickers and then just added some protein to it. I haven't seen it, so I think it didn't do well because I saw it a couple months ago, but I haven't seen it since. But what we do is we started from the other end of the spectrum, which was like, okay, given if we just want to make like real food portable, and if we want to fortify it with more protein, but keep all the sugar out, like how do we do that with as few ingredients as possible? So you it's funny because everything is called a bar, but what the number of things that like qualify as a bar, it's such a huge definition. Like you can have something like a kind bar, which is like nuts put together and there's a chocolate drizzle on it, or you can have something that's like a candy bar that has a little bit of protein, or you can have something like Atlas, which is like real food ingredients. But because they all are a rectangle, they all just get grouped in as like bars. And I think that's why the category is so big because so many things can fall under the definition of a bar because you can put so many things into a rectangle.

SPEAKER_01: 18:06

That's true. That's okay. So you said you had you had three today, but there was a time where you ate only Atlas bars while you were training. It made me think of there was that guy one time that ate only McDonald's or 30 days.

SPEAKER_02: 18:27

Morgan Sperlock.

SPEAKER_01: 18:28

Yes, okay. So you so was it like that where breakfast, lunch, dinner, whatever it was, you were eating only the bars?

SPEAKER_00: 18:37

Yeah, exactly. And actually supersized me was the inspiration for it. Okay, yeah, yeah, because I was like, there it bugs me when there are companies where you know that the person who's leading the company probably wouldn't be comfortable consuming the products on a frequent basis, yet they're selling it to other people. And I remember thinking, like, would the person who's leading the company like McDonald's or fast food chain, would they be comfortable consuming McDonald's three three meals a day, which is what Morgan Spurlock did in Super Size Me, and probably not because he didn't have the best best health consequences from doing that. Yeah. Shocking. Say it isn't so and so I was like, what if I did the opposite and was like the person that is behind this actually believes in it and is actually the number one consumer of it, which is true. I think that I've probably had more bars at this point than anybody else. So I was like, what if I only had bars for a week? And I was like, that that wouldn't be too hard to do. So I was like, okay, how could I make it harder? What if I ran a hundred miles in a week and only had bars? And I was like, yeah, I think that would be a challenge. So that's what I did. So I did 100 miles and I did it in about six days. So I did it one day early. It was about 17 miles a day, but they were it wasn't just like pure 17 a day. It was bumpy in how I did it. I think the last day I did 26 just to to finish early, and I had about 80, 80 something bars throughout and no other food. I had electrolytes and water, but no other food besides the bars that I that I had. Yeah, that was a it was a challenge. And I think some people appreciated that I was willing to go to those lengths just to demonstrate the belief in the product.

SPEAKER_01: 20:23

Yeah, yeah. And did you take did you have blood work at the beginning and at the end, or did you just it was just the challenge of the bars and the mileage?

SPEAKER_00: 20:33

I didn't do any blood work at the beginning or the ends. I honestly I hadn't really I hadn't really delved too deep into the world of blood work at that point. But since then, we actually have we just did clinical research in September, or we just wrapped it up in September, which was the first, I think it's the first clinical research that's been done specifically on a bar, but it was looking at the impact of Atlas on blood sugar specifically. And so we ran it, we worked with a group who's one of the Leading groups in North America that does this type of work. And it was really cool because I had the suspicion that Atlas had a really low blood sugar impact, which for those who might not be too familiar, it's really important for your overall metabolic health. If you don't keep your blood sugar under control, you can end up with some negative consequences over the years. It's more and more in focus for folks who are looking to be proactive about their health. And we already had some customers that I knew were diabetics and some who were actually epileptic diabetics. So they actually had seizures if their blood sugar got too high. So I assumed that Atlas fell into this category, but we wanted to be certain. So we did this clinical study and it came back, and Atlas effectively had no impact on blood sugar. They tested it versus white bread as the control that they used to compare against. And compared to that, Atlas was 77% lower compared to that control, which is really cool to see. So if you look at the chart, you can see what happened to people's blood when they had white bread, and it was like this straight up and straight down. And for Atlas, it's just like this tiny little, tiny little blip, which is really cool to see. I'm glad that we invested in that. We're gonna we're gonna incorporate that more into our messaging moving forward that we actually we just really believe in the product that we make.

SPEAKER_02: 22:28

So do you have any plans on expanding into other products for runners? Or anything you can reveal?

SPEAKER_00: 22:34

We're currently working on a couple of other things right now. There's three other products that are currently in development, but it's a little too early to say which is going to come out first. Okay. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of exciting things that that we're working on, but not at the point yet where we can talk too much about it.

SPEAKER_02: 22:54

We'll have you back on to do an maybe an announcement from your test kitchen.

SPEAKER_01: 22:59

Yeah. That would be great. Can you talk about this?

SPEAKER_02: 23:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 23:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 23:05

And we're for those that aren't watching the video, Amy's holding up a bag of chocolate chips called anti. A N T I.

SPEAKER_01: 23:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 23:14

Yes. So for Atlas, we needed a very, as we've talked about, we're focused on very low, if any, sugar and clean ingredients. And so we needed a very specific type of chocolate chip, basically one that had only clean ingredients and one that had no sugar in it. And it was very hard, very hard to find it. So there were chocolate chips that have zero sugar, like Hershey's does have zero sugar options. But again, if you look at the ingredients, there's aspartame and a lot of other things in there that people probably don't want to consume too much of. And then there are other options which are more like natural, cleaner label, but usually those have sugar in it, whether it's cane sugar or something else. It's a form of sugar that has a better perception, but it's still sugar. And then there are some that are like Lily's is an example of a chocolate company that has no sugar and a better label, but it still has sugar alcohols and still things that we just don't really want to put in the product. So we found a product that fit exactly what we were looking for. There's a long story there, but I won't go too deep into it. And what we realize is that these are great for our bars, but uh we think that people would actually enjoy these as well. And so we started to bag them and sell them. And we launched it just a couple of weeks weeks ago, and people have really liked them so far. We've blown past what I expected our sales to be. And the name, yeah, anti is it's short for a lot of things like anti-sugar, anti, a lot, anti, a lot of the things that unfortunately the food landscape has these days, sugar, processed ingredients. And so I'm excited. It kind of started as a side project, but I'm realizing that it might become might become a bit more than that. So I'm excited to see where it goes.

SPEAKER_01: 25:03

Now, where can we get that? Where can we get Atlas Bars? Where can we get all of this goodness?

SPEAKER_00: 25:11

All of this goodness can be found either on our site, which is atlasbars.com, and anti right now is just on Amazon. And you can get both on Amazon. A lot of people like it because it's just it's very easy just to add to cart in your two-day shipping, next day shipping.

SPEAKER_02: 25:28

We will link to both your website and the product in Amazon in our show notes so that people can check that out. But uh we want to thank you for joining us. Congratulations on such a successful and delicious product. We're excited to be trying these. Everybody who listens to us, our Runcation Nation knows we don't do product endorsements if we don't genuinely believe in the product. And that this is fantastic. And I've just so people know, I've been using this to hit my my uh macro daily goals, and they're fantastic. And when you're trying to count grams of protein, yeah, it's hard sometimes to hit your goal, especially when you have a goal like mine, which is 180 grams a day. That's a lot of protein. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 26:15

I remember when I first learned about that and I started counting, and yeah, similar to you, it's like 180 close to 200 a day, and you start to add that up, and you're like, wow, I need to. It's really hard to passively hit that, and you have to really try every day to hit that. It's a challenge.

SPEAKER_02: 26:32

It's impossible to do without some sort of supplementation, whether it's bars, shakes, something for me anyway. I just I have a real hard time with it. But your product is helping me with that, so I'm very grateful. So thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 26:45

Yeah, yeah. I think you're I think you're not alone unless you're having a rotisserie chicken for every meal. Really? It's pretty hard to do.

SPEAKER_02: 26:51

Yeah, people look at you weird when you do that.

SPEAKER_00: 26:53

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the bourbon salted peanut butter uh pairing idea. It's a first. It is excellent.

SPEAKER_01: 27:04

It's a first. So, founder of Atlas, James Oliver, thank you for coming on the Run, Eat, Drink podcast. And we hope to accomplish, explore, and indulge with you really soon.

SPEAKER_00: 27:19

Thank you, Yen.