Steve Hughes

BOULDER BRANDS

Chances are you’ve already had a taste of Boulder Brands. On the NASDAQ they’re known as BDBD, but they’re better known in the supermarket aisle for their Smart Balance butter spreads. For the past eight years, CEO Steve Hughes has brought different brands into the health food company like Glutino (2011) and Udi’s (2012), while recently relocating Smart Balance’s headquarters from New Jersey to their new offices in Boulder.

“This is a magnet,” Hughes says about the city, “for the young, authentic missionary folks that want to be a part of the natural foods industry.” There are about 250 food companies in what Hughes refers to as the “Silicon Valley of Natural Foods”—an industry that he’s seen grow from $3.5 billion in 1997 to about ten times that today. “The innovation has been incredible …Safeway is trying to get caught up with it.”

To that end, he mentions Steve Demos, who founded Silk in Boulder in 1978. Demos quipped about Silk as a “25-year overnight success.” “Our thing,” says Hughes, “is to change the way you eat one product at a time.” For some, that might include embracing a gluten-free diet, which for Hughes, comprises about 95 percent of what he eats. Now when he eats local, run-of-the-mill pizza, he sensitive to the point of feeling hungover the next day.