Family Dinner Recap: Jonathan Miller

Many founders, whether they realize it or not, have experienced what serial entrepreneur Jonathan Miller '02, '08 MBA, calls the “raisin moment.”

At Family Dinner on Tuesday, Miller – the CEO of custom whole-food bar brand Element Bars – shared with Residents how one of his business partners wanted to make a bar with raisins, an ingredient he hates.

“The pain point is, I can’t find a bar that’s right for me. The extension of that is the raisin moment, which is: Maybe you like something that I don’t like,” Miller said. “So what can we do?”

That disagreement became the foundation of Element Bars, a company built on the idea that customers should be able to customize their own bars with ingredients they can pronounce.

What started as a personal frustration turned into a business that now produces between 250,000 and 350,000 bars per day.

Miller, who graduated from Northwestern in 2002 with a B.A. in Computer Science and Economics and later an MBA from Kellogg, emphasized to Residents to do work at the intersection of “what you think you’re good at and what the market needs.”

“My area of expertise is operations. Believe me, this is actually clean,” Miller told Residents with a smile, gesturing to his hands. This is a mechanic’s hand.”

Miller’s strengths in operations ultimately led to a strategic pivot for Element Bars. While his original vision focused on selling directly to consumers, he recognized a greater opportunity in contract manufacturing—producing custom bars for other brands, including those now found on the shelves of Target, Costco, and other major retailers.

Miller put his business to the ultimate test, pitching Element Bars on Season 1 of Shark Tank. He played the pitch for Residents to watch.

“The actual negotiation on Shark Tank was an hour and a half – probably the hardest hour and a half of my life,” Miller said. “They’re looking for how you answer the question as much as exactly what the answer is.”

Although Element Bars has been Miller’s focus for the last 17 years, he began his first venture as a sophomore in college. Like many great ideas, this one was born out of convenience. He said he dreaded trudging through the snow from his Allison Hall dorm to buy textbooks, so he built a price comparison website called GetCheapBooks.com.

While Miller joked that the venture provided “beer money” as an undergraduate, he grew it so much in the coming years that it began to pay more than his post-graduate salary as a consultant.

“Undergrad is the perfect time to be able to start these businesses,” Miller told the Residents.

With a previous background in technology, Miller is no stranger to the added complexity that comes with making a physical product. A baker once warned him to rewrite ounces as pounds on an ingredient list to avoid confusion. He didn’t.

The result? Workers added 8.8 pounds of his most expensive ingredient to the mix instead of 8.8 ounces.

“Physical products are hard. There’s no question about it,” Miller said. “But I would argue it’s way more gratifying than pure tech. Whoever’s doing a physical product in here, I congratulate you.”

He also left Residents with another piece of advice, based on a famous quote attributed to Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés. To signal that there is no going back, Cortés is said to have told his troops after arriving in the New World: “Burn the boats.”

“There comes a time in a business, especially as a leader, in which there may be a path backwards,” Miller said. “There are definitely times in which you’ve got to put your foot down and say ‘This is it. We’re not going backwards. We have to keep going forward in order to actually make it.’”

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