Unfinished Business · 2026-07-14 · 31 min
Katie Lefkowitz was a lifelong Snickers fanatic when a colon cancer scare and a doctor's orders to cut sugar should have ended that relationship. Instead, she went home and started experimenting with date-based caramel in her own kitchen. Katie is the founder of Harken, the better-for-you candy brand now in nearly 7,000 stores including Walmart, Costco, Sprouts, and Kroger, with Whole Foods launching this fall. Before Harken, she was COO at CAULIPOWER, the original cauliflower-crust pizza brand, and that food-world network is how a printed-out prototype with stickers on it turned into Harken's first national retail deal. In this episode of Unfinished Business, she walks through how that deal happened (including a calendar invite with no explanation attached), why she skipped the usual direct-to-consumer playbook entirely, and what she's learned running a five-person team through a Costco launch.
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