Four Australians launched a premium meat bar into the middle of the vegan boom, then spent five years refusing every shortcut that would have made it sell faster. A decade on, Chief Nutrition is in roughly seven thousand stores, and its founders talk like they have only just started.

7,000+ RETAIL DOORS

$35M ANNUAL REVENUE RUN RATE

2015 LAUNCHED

THE MESSY ORIGIN

Chief did not begin in a food laboratory. It began in a backpack.

Nutritionist Veronika Larisova, known as Vee, was preparing for a ten-day trek along the Kokoda Trail. She needed something portable, savoury and made from ingredients she recognised. “Every snack that was healthy was sweet,” she recalls. “I couldn’t bring a piece of steak or an egg with me on a hike.” So, she packed dried meat, nuts and berries. It tasted good. It also became a soggy mess that spread through her bag.

Back at the Sydney gym where she worked alongside Libby Babet, the trail mix became a conversation about a problem both women knew well. Libby’s experience of chronic high blood pressure had led her into food and fitness. She knew the importance of eating well, and how far that knowledge gets you in a life already full.

A self-described “professional life over committer”, Libby is frank about her limits. “It’s very nice to tell me to cook a nice little frittata, but it’s never going to happen,” she says. “I’m not going to prepack my food. I’m not going to do meal planning.”

Around them were women and men asking for the same thing: a better choice that did not require a perfectly organised Sunday.

THE SENTENCE THAT MADE IT A COMPANY

Libby’s husband Justin heard the story and supplied the sentence that turned frustration into a company.

Standing at the gym counter, Justin said: “Let’s make a meat bar.”

Brock Hatton, already working in natural-health distribution and product development, knew there was nothing quite like it on the Australian market, and understood what it would take to turn the idea into something shelf-stable, scalable and saleable. His conviction led Brock to roll his health food distribution business into Chief Nutrition and take the role of CEO.

It is a wonderfully unpolished origin story: one practical need and four complementary people. Their conversation in Chief’s office still has the rhythm of that early friendship. They interrupt, correct details, finish one another’s stories and laugh often.

Ask what Chief would be missing without each of them and the jokes arrive first. Libby brings “entertainment”. Justin brings “grumpiness”. Then the answers get serious. Vee brings nutritional expertise, exacting standards and a knack for connecting people, now channelled through Chief’s podcast and practitioner community. Libby brings the energy and communication skills to make complicated health ideas useful to busy people.

Justin is the operational engine, turning ideas into ecommerce, marketing and the systems a growing company needs. Brock works through formulation, manufacturing and the supply chain. Each depends on the others: a good product needs a story people understand, and community trust needs a product worthy of it. On the ingredients, all four have held the same line.

FIVE YEARS TOO EARLY

Chief’s first products arrived in 2015, just as the wellness conversation swung hard towards plant-based eating.

Cafés and health-food shelves were filling with vegan everything, and retailers did not know what to do with a premium meat bar.

Vee remembers the disbelief she met trying to sell it to a Bondi health-food store. Meat was a difficult pitch. So was the price: the founders were asking shoppers to spend around six dollars when other bars cost four. Their raw ingredients cost more, and drying the beef reduced its weight, not its cost.

“Don’t ask why health food is expensive. Ask why regular food is cheap.”
JUSTIN BABET

For Chief, explaining the price meant explaining what went into the product, and what they had chosen to leave out.

The founders found early believers among CrossFit and paleo communities, travelling to events, handing out samples and explaining the product one conversation at a time. Vee and Libby were often out front, meeting the people they hoped to help. Justin and Brock worked behind the scenes on operations, product, distribution and the mechanics of keeping the business alive. For years, each of them was also carrying other work.

It was expensive, repetitive and deeply unphotogenic work, the kind that disappears when growth is retold as a clean upward line. Chief was a company they kept choosing before the evidence made choosing it comfortable.

“We cared more than our customer cared.”
JUSTIN BABET

The line lands with a laugh, but it captures the central tension. Their standards increased costs, complicated manufacturing and narrowed margins. More than once, they wondered whether they were being too pedantic. The simpler commercial choice would have been to loosen the rules. They did not.

There is something almost tender in the way they remember it now: the recognition of how long they worked without proof. They never wanted Chief to become a mascot for whichever diet was rising fastest. Paleo, keto and carnivore have each had their moment. Real food, they believe, will always be in season.

THE SHORTCUTS THEY REFUSED

Their resolve was tested while developing Chief’s collagen bars. The process took two years.

Failed batches separated, leaving oil stains at the bottom of cartons. Justin and Brock spent hours in a warehouse sorting through pallet after pallet of stock. Manufacturers repeatedly suggested the same solutions: add a filler, a processing aid, something that would make the product easier to produce.

The easier option was right there, but Vee and Libby had spent years putting these products directly into people’s hands. “I couldn’t do it if I didn’t believe in the product,” Vee says. Justin and Brock faced the same responsibility in manufacturing: if Chief was asking people to trust packaged food again, the back of the pack had to hold up to scrutiny.

“We view Chief as an extension of ourselves.”
BROCK HATTON

It is not brand language when he says it. Around the table, the others immediately agree.

The turn came in January 2020, when the distribution side of the business was sold. The sale provided capital and freed Brock and Justin from the demands of running distribution, giving them more time to focus on Chief. Weeks later, COVID hit. They had just let go of a source of cash flow, and suddenly the decision felt frightening.

But the previous five years had built a foundation. As the team could afford to give Chief more time and attention, product development expanded, online revenue grew and retail opportunities followed. Practitioners began recommending Chief to their clients, bringing trust that had been earned through years of conversations.

The first Woolworths order landed in November 2023. Today, Chief is in roughly seven thousand retail doors. Sales are split about evenly between online and bricks-and-mortar, and annual revenue run rate has grown from around one million dollars to about thirty-five million.

THE TEAM BEHIND CHIEF

The founders are careful not to tell that chapter as a four-person triumph.

They repeatedly return to the people who joined when the outcome was far from guaranteed. Jack, Chief’s head of growth, is singled out for bringing focus and urgency to sales and helping open major retail doors. The wider team is spoken about with the kind of gratitude that catches in the throat. Some joined when Chief could offer little more than belief, work and the possibility of what it might become.

“We could only afford to pay ourselves peanuts. He took peanuts too. He may not technically be a founder, but he’s part of the family,” Justin says.

The gratitude runs outward too: to the CrossFit and paleo customers who tried the first bars, the practitioners who recommended them, the independent retailers who made space for something unfamiliar, and later the larger partners who put Chief in front of a much wider audience.

Justin describes the early years as paddling for a wave that had not yet arrived. Its founders spent years in the water, exhausted, building the products and knowledge that allowed them to catch it.

WHO IT IS REALLY FOR

That sense of responsibility stays close to home.

While Justin and Brock are more often behind the scenes, Libby and Vee are still out in the community, hearing how people use the products. “Every day the real customer is in front of us,” Libby says. These are people she knows through her gym, not an imagined audience on the other side of a sales report.

That ordinary usefulness keeps Chief’s purpose from becoming abstract. Their tagline, Real Feels Better, works because it does not ask people to become someone else first. It recognises work, children, training, travel and the days when convenience wins. Chief’s proposition is not perfection. It is that convenience can still carry standards.

Parenthood has deepened the stakes for the group. Their products are now judged against the simplest measure they have: would they feel proud serving this to their own families? “What do we actually want to leave?” Brock asks. The question moves Chief beyond snacks and supplements. It makes the business a legacy project, one built around what kind of food they want their children to inherit.

“It’s not just about revenue metrics for us; it’s about how many people can we impact.”
BROCK HATTON

AUSTRALIAN AT CORE

Chief’s next chapter reaches beyond Australia.

The founders see opportunity in the United States, Southeast Asia and Europe. They are expanding beyond snacks into whole-food supplements, while holding onto the same question: is this a genuinely better option?

Global ambition has not diluted their sense of home. Brock jokes that they want Chief to become the “Chris Hemsworth of the food industry”: unmistakably Australian, even on the world stage. They believe Australia’s reputation for high-quality food gives Chief a story with value well beyond its borders.

“We’re never going to lose our Australianness,” he says. “We want to be uniquely Australian, but we just want to be successful on a global scale.”

What stands out after an hour with the four founders is not a perfectly polished business mythology. It is the continuity between the messy backpack, the failed pallets, the gym conversations and the company they are building now. They disagree, talk over one another and laugh at the hardest parts. But on the essential things, the quality of the product, the health of the person eating it and the responsibility that comes with trust, they do not move.

Growing awareness of ultra-processed food may make Chief feel timely now. But its founders spent five years paddling before they caught that wave. And if the energy around the table is any indication, they are not speaking like people who have arrived. They are speaking like a team that has barely begun.

WORDS: SUSANNA STANG-HOLM