David Founder Peter Rahal Wants HallPass to Be the Coke Zero of Candy. It Hits Walmart This Week
After building David into one of the fastest-growing CPG brands in the country, Peter Rahal is betting HallPass can remake the candy aisle with 1 gram of sugar, 70 calories, and big box store-scale distribution.
David Protein and Hallpass founder Peter Rahal. Illustration: Inc; Photo: Hallpass
With his new brand HallPass, David Protein co-founder Peter Rahal says he aims to create “the Coke Zero of candy.” The initial lineup consists of peanut butter cups, peanut butter wafer sticks, and chocolate candy pieces. What makes them different? They are “near-substitutes” for the sweets that have lined supermarket and drugstore checkout aisles for decades, with significantly reduced sugar and about a third of the calories.
David—which has expanded beyond protein bars to ice cream, tinned cod (!), and new shakes—launched in September 2024 through direct-to-consumer sales and TikTok shop marathons before expanding to mass retailers. But HallPass is going wide first, launching in Walmart nationally on August 30.
The brand has three pillars: great taste, low
“The brand has three pillars: great taste, low calories and sugar, and pricing that competes with the national leading brands,” co-founder Michael Tierney says. “To accomplish the last point, we need scale out of the gate.”
Tierney, who began working on the brand with Rahal last November, started his career working in fine dining at places like New York City’s Eleven Madison Park before helping create the healthy frozen food brand Mikey’s. At the same time, he worked on the concept that would become Stuffed Puffs, which are marshmallows with chocolate on the inside.
The daily digest for entrepreneurs and business leaders
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
He realized very early on that, while a lot of people had the same idea over the years, no one had developed a successful, scalable recipe. Once he had the formulation down, he knew he’d need to move fast to outrun the inevitable competition. So, he built his own production facility for Stuffed Puffs, and launched in Walmart in 2019 back when “everyone was still Whole Foods–obsessed,” Tierney says.
Better Candy Through Chemistry?
His strategy paid off, and during its second
His strategy paid off, and during its second summer in business, Stuffed Puffs was the top-selling marshmallow by dollars at Walmart. In 2024, the company was bought by El Paso–based Mount Franklin Foods for an undisclosed sum.
With HallPass, he’s pulling out that playbook again—with the added advantage of building on David’s success. The David protein bar is considered one of the fastest CPG launches ever, reaching $100 million in sales in the first year, and it’s on track to bring in more than $300 million in revenue in 2026, the company says.
Source: www.inc.com
