Allan Stevens knew how to get someone to click. Getting a jar onto a grocery shelf required a different education. Before KOS became a plant-based food brand with national retail partners, Stevens and his business partner, Tony Stahl, worked in online marketing. They brought the habits of internet merchants into a business where the product eventually had to sit under fluorescent lights and persuade someone pushing a shopping cart.
That journey gives Stevens's career its particular shape. The familiar founder story starts with an expert who knows an industry intimately. His starts with a merchant learning another trade. There were customers to understand, packaging to get right and, eventually, experienced people to bring into the room. The website could open the conversation. A buyer at a grocery chain would have questions of their own.
Stevens was KOS's co-founder and co-CEO at its February 2022 funding announcement. He now describes himself as chairman and co-founder. Between those titles sits the part of his working life that makes this story interesting: learning how much of an online business could travel into the physical world.
A jar with a sense of humour
In an early founders' photograph, Stevens wears a dark jacket and an open-collared white shirt. A KOS container appears suspended above his outstretched hand. Beside him is Stahl. Around them, illustrated leaves, smiling characters and handwritten speech bubbles turn the white brick backdrop into something closer to a school notebook than a corporate boardroom. The suits are doing their best. The doodles have other plans.
The visual joke belongs to the business. KOS gave its products names such as Holy Cacao! and A Whole Latte Gold. These are names that can survive a conversation without requiring anyone to consult a spreadsheet. They made room for a lighter voice in an aisle where a great deal of packaging appears to be applying for a laboratory position.
There was practical work behind the drawing. In 2018, Stevens approached Tofu Design about KOS's website. The designers worked on the account through 2020, bringing together ecommerce, illustration and interaction. Their brief involved an ordinary commercial requirement with a less ordinary presentation: make shopping familiar while giving the brand its own visual world.
For someone coming from online marketing, that was recognisable territory. A product page has to explain, reassure and invite a purchase. Distinctive characters can earn attention; the shop still needs to work. KOS's early design put those jobs beside one another, allowing an imaginative surface to sit over a usable store.
The customers who did not mince words
Stevens and Stahl had previously co-founded Installerparts, an online IT marketplace. KOS took them into a very different kind of product. When it came to taste, they enlisted their own children and friends' children as testers. Stevens valued the children's frank responses. An adult can be diplomatic about a sample. A child is less likely to protect the feelings of a powder.
It is a small episode, but a useful one. The founders were asking people to eat something, repeatedly, and taste would be part of that decision. A promising description could earn a first try. The next purchase would involve the memory of what happened after the lid came off.
KOS's early commercial launch is generally dated to 2018. Chocolate and vanilla were among its starting flavours. By September 2020, Stevens appeared on the AMZ Innovate speaker programme, identified as KOS's CEO and an eight-figure Amazon seller. The context was ecommerce: the community in which his experience already had currency.
Moving beyond that community would ask more of him. Online experience offered a place to start, customers to listen to and a way to put products in front of people. Physical retail added distributors, stores and a different set of relationships. The business would need fluency in both.
January 2020: the shelf becomes real
In January 2020, KOS products began appearing in more than 400 Whole Foods Market stores across the United States. The assortment included chocolate and vanilla protein powders, Show Me the Greens and Love You Berry Much. UNFI, KeHE and C&S Wholesale Grocers were among the distributors involved. Behind the cheerful labels was an increasingly substantial commercial network.
For Stevens, the Whole Foods expansion created a national route to new customers. It also gave KOS a public milestone that could be counted in actual stores. The distinction matters: later distribution figures described points of distribution, a measure that should not be casually substituted for a count of unique shopfronts.
In August that year, KOS announced a $2.1 million funding round involving Springdale Ventures, former Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb and Horizon Bank chairman Jim Schneider. The intended uses were straightforward: develop products, strengthen marketing and extend distribution. The founders had recruited people whose experience reached beyond the screen.
The money was accompanied by commercial momentum. Sales had risen 271 percent year over year through July 2020, and the business had added 5,400 points of distribution during that year by the August announcement. These are historical snapshots of a young company in motion. They describe the pace of that particular stretch of Stevens's career.
Giving experience a seat at the table
KOS announced two significant executive appointments in October 2020: Derek Dearwater as chief revenue officer and Kevin Dalaeli as chief marketing officer. Dearwater had been president of Naturade. Dalaeli had spent more than thirteen years at Nutrabolt, including work leading its digital business. Together, they brought experience in the consumer goods trade the founders were entering.
The appointments help explain how a founder's job changes as a company grows. Selling the first products and building the organisation that sells the next several thousand are different assignments. The founders were adding people with a longer view of retail, marketing and operations. Their own commercial knowledge could now work alongside careers spent inside the category.
By January 2021, KOS had announced further relationships with retailers including H-E-B, Harris Teeter, Raley's and Vitamin Shoppe. Its online distribution was expanding too, with outlets including iHerb and Thrive Market. Stevens spoke about continuing product development and building relationships with both new and existing retail partners.
The flavour range reflected that appetite for experimentation. Blueberry Muffin and Salted Caramel Coffee joined the protein line, alongside an unflavoured, unsweetened option. The names are a reminder that product development also involves ordinary preferences. Some customers want breakfast in the title. Others would prefer the ingredients to keep their voices down.
What Stevens wanted from $12 million
On February 15, 2022, KOS announced its $12 million Series A. Clayton Christopher and Brian Goldberg led the round, with Springdale Ventures investing again. Christopher joined the board. Stevens's response emphasised the incoming investors' experience of building brands, suggesting that the working relationship mattered alongside the financing.
“These guys come from our world, being operators”
Allan Stevens, February 2022
That short observation captures a preference for practical experience. The next stage involved more than introducing products. Stevens wanted KOS to spend more time with retail category managers, strengthen relationships and make better use of merchandising opportunities. Plans included adding a national sales director and regional sales managers, as well as marketing and ecommerce staff.
It is an unglamorous shopping list for a financing announcement, which makes it revealing. Someone has to visit the account, understand the assortment and follow through after the meeting. The distance between getting listed and becoming a dependable retail business is filled with work of that kind. Stevens's ambitions had become specific enough to require additional colleagues.
A second count running alongside sales
In November 2020, KOS launched Project 10 Million Meals with Feeding America. The programme linked purchases to funding meals through the nonprofit's network. Its initial pledge was to help provide at least 1.5 million meals over twelve months, with ten million as the longer-term goal. The arrangement gave the company's stated interest in food access a measurable form.
The mechanism deserves precision. The launch announcement used Feeding America's calculation that a dollar could help secure at least ten meals through member food banks. The programme supported food distribution through donations; a KOS jar sold did not mean that a jar was being handed across a food-bank counter. By January 2022, KOS reported helping provide more than two million meals.
Meals KOS reported helping provide by January 2022 through its Feeding America partnership.
The person beyond the purchase button
There is another glimpse of Stevens in a professional recommendation from Dustin Runnells. Runnells credits him with helping his company over a trademark obstacle by writing a letter to the US Patent Office. It is a modest act compared with a national retail launch. It also shows a kind of usefulness that a funding total cannot capture: taking time to help another business get something done.
KOS subsequently appeared at number 502 on the 2022 Inc. 5000 and number 1,578 in 2023, with Stevens listed in its leadership profile. Today his public professional profile places him in Charleston, South Carolina, and identifies him as KOS's chairman and co-founder. Those facts add a later chapter to the co-CEO years without turning an old funding announcement into a current job description.
The memorable image remains the founder with the open hand and the jar above it. It makes the product look almost weightless. Stevens's working story supplies the weight: an online shop, a national shelf, distributors, experienced hires, investors and the patient business of keeping relationships alive. Even a brand covered in smiling doodles needs someone willing to deal with the paperwork.