How do you stay competitive in an increasingly crowded market, one that you helped create?
That’s been a burning question for breakfast food-brand Kodiak, which two years ago realized it needed to adapt — or risk falling behind.
While protein-rich foods have become more popular recently, the brand, which is best known for its whole grain pancake and waffle mixes, launched its signature protein pancakes in 2010.
But to remain a step ahead, the company eventually realized it would need to invest more seriously in its ability to create new foods.
Enter Sonali Dalvi, who in 2024 packed up her life in Chicago and moved west to Park City, tasked with creating a research and development team that could help the brand navigate the market’s more crowded waters.
“Kodiak, before I joined, there was no R and D. They were doing product development, but they were heavily dependent on the co-manufacturers where the products are made,” Dalvi said. “When Val Oswalt, our CEO, hired me, she told me, ‘You’re going to build R and D from the ground up. … Building a team from the ground up? I mean, that’s exciting. So I jumped on it.’”
Dalvi officially joined Kodiak in January 2024, bringing decades of experience in food science and consumer packaged goods. Originally from India, she earned an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering before moving to New York City for a master’s program in food science. She later relocated to Chicago to work for PepsiCo, where she spent 14 years in research and development roles across brands including Quaker, Tropicana and Gatorade.
“I grew up there, in a sense,” Dalvi said. “You start as a scientist, and then senior scientist, manager — you develop.”
After leaving PepsiCo, Dalvi briefly worked on the ingredients side of the industry with Olam Food Ingredients. The experience helped clarify where she wanted to focus her career.
“My heart is in (consumer-product goods),” she said. “Once you get used to developing products and launching in the market, see the consumer reaction; when you walk in the grocery aisles and you see, ‘Oh, that’s the product I launched!’ That feeling is different than behind the scenes.”
At Kodiak, Dalvi was given the mandate to create a centralized R and D hub — one that could create what the consumer wants, and could serve as both an innovation engine and a bridge between branding, marketing, operations and manufacturing. Today, that team has grown to 10 people, all working out of Kodiak’s Park City headquarters.
For Oswalt, who took the CEO position in late 2022, bringing on Dalvi was essential for navigating the future of the Park City brand.
“Kodiak has seen tremendous growth over the last few years,” she said. “We recognized that to sustain this momentum and remain the leader in our space, we needed a leader who could evolve alongside our brand and our consumers’ ever-changing needs.”
Those customer demands are steadily growing for protein-forward items, Dalvi said, especially with the surge of GLP-1, a hormone supplement designed to curb hunger for weight loss.
“With GLP-1 coming in, protein is becoming important because it’s a dense nutrient. If you eat that, 10 grams, it satiates; it’s great for your body. You don’t have to eat anything else. … So the entire food industry is focusing on protein, like, how do we cater to these GLP-1 users?” Dalvi said. “We are the OGs of protein in pancakes and breakfast. And now these players are coming who don’t even know protein. … You’re at the top, right? And sustaining there becomes a challenge.”
So, how to stay at the top of the game? Aside from the collaboration between brand, sales and marketing, Davli said her work starts with a chef, the dreamer.
“Product developers (think), how do you commercialize it? Will this product be able to run on the machine, on the line? Versus chef is, like, create and plate it. The scale is small,” she said. “Chefs are very creative. They are looking at only the culinary products and how to make it tasty.”
Merging the tasty with the practical leads to a more successful product, Dalvi said, especially as high-protein and whole-grain-centric products can seem less appetizing.
But Kodiak has always been dedicated to sneaking those high-health ingredients into breakfast items in ways that keep customers loyal, she said. Breakfast is their space because the cliche is true: It’s the most important meal of the day. And for the brand built around “Feed Epic Days and Wilder Lives,” that starts with breakfast.
“If we can fuel with the right nutrients in our body, then that will encourage us to do wilder things outside of our homes,” Dalvi said. “What should that breakfast be? Obviously, it should be protein and whole grains. Whole grains give the fiber element, as well as the satiation. Protein gives what you need to get going.”
Dalvi said from the research and development perspective, they pack as much protein as possible into those items, from pancake mix to granola to, most recently, overnight oats, which have between 16 and 20 grams of protein per serving.
When it comes to designing high-protein foods, Dalvi said there are a few considerations.
First, they choose the best protein type for the product. Milk or whey proteins are neutrals that work well, but there’s also wheat, oat or pea proteins they can choose from. The selection is made not just by taste, but also in search of complete protein.
“Any protein has amino acids, and there are 11 amino acids that are essential for our body, which meat, dairy, egg, poultry and soy, they give us,” Dalvi said. “But if you use wheat or pea, they might lack some protein. So then you use the combination protein in the sense: Maybe this protein lacks this, but this protein has that, so they complement each other.”
And thirdly, Dalvi said the form of protein will also inform their choice. Protein can be added in the form of powders, which works well for the pancake mix, for example. But adding powder to products like the trail bars is difficult because they become too hard and the texture suffers. So instead, they can use a crisp form of protein.
Part of what has also made the brand so successful is the dedication to high-quality ingredients, Dalvi explained. Since its beginnings, Kodiak has committed to using “pantry-based ingredients” and avoids using chemical-sounding items, she said. Often it’s done at a cost to the company, where a recipe may require modifications to production equipment, or simply the real-food option is more expensive than the lab-made alternative.
Dalvi gave the example of the Kodiak trail bars that are made with real chocolate chips and a coating of chocolate.
“If you go in the market, any bars that are completely enrobed (in chocolate), they are not real chocolate; they’re compound. Because it melts: The chocolate has cocoa butter, and the melting point of cocoa butter is, like, 80, 85, max 90 degrees,” she said.
With such a low melting point, it becomes difficult to ship and distribute those products, so other companies add palm oils to increase the melting point. But it sacrifices both the flavor and the health benefit of the real thing, Dalvi said. So rather than cutting those corners, Kodiak committed to the real ingredient and ships the trail bars in refrigerated trucks in the summer months.
Dalvi said in addition to following that pantry-based ingredients guide, her team also relies on feedback from real people, a critical research and development step called “sensory.” This step provides essential information on how to better adjust a product for the consumer experience.
During taste panels led by a sensory scientist, Dalvi said people are brought in to sample the products and fill out a survey on the experience and narrow down the most popular flavors. At this stage, Dalvi said, her team needs to have more flavors than they want to release.
In many cases, flavors like maple and brown sugar, chocolate and cookie butter, which Dalvi helped develop, stay consistent across the brand’s oatmeal, granola and bar products.
Most recently, Kodiak in December launched an overnight oats line with 20 grams of protein. Dalvi said the product — developed from idea to production in just eight months — was especially exciting for the team, and already has seen a positive response from customers. For that product line, they started with a focus group to determine everything from the type of protein to the type of packaging.
When released, the first month of a product is critical as customers see something new, try it and then write reviews. But Dalvi said the team won’t react to something until after about six months, but so far, most releases have gone well with the usual buyers.
Dalvi admitted that most product development doesn’t happen as quickly as the overnight oats, with her team mapping out releases far in advance. For development happening in 2027, they lay the groundwork at the end of 2025, for example.
“We create not a one-year pipeline; we have three-to-five years pipeline,” Dalvi said. “And then every year we evaluate because things change.”
Macro effects are even tied to the changing federal administration, and Dalvi pointed to the Make America Healthy Again initiative as a possible impact on sales. Oswalt said, on the whole, the current trends are great for their growing brand.
“Consumers are more globally influenced than ever with how they fuel their body. This is exciting for us because at our foundation, we know that real fuel comes with real ingredients,” she said. “Over the next five years, we’ll look to continue to listen to our consumers and innovate for their needs.”
Currently, the research and development team works out of a kitchen and store-closet-turned-lab at the headquarters, but not for much longer. Soon, Dalvi will have everything she needs, with construction on a new, state-of-the-art lab starting this year.
“We want to own the breakfast space,” Dalvi said. “Once R and D comes in, it’s a hub. It’s a growth engine for the company. That’s when everything comes centralized. … It’s my job to show them the world.”