Our Beginnings
Before there was Legendary Foods,
there was Quest Nutrition.
And before Quest Nutrition, there was Shannan and Ron Penna. Two people who were very serious about health and nutrition, loved food, and weren’t willing to make nutritional compromises.
In 2009, they found themselves frustrated and dissatisfied with the market of protein bars. At the time, most were made with low-quality ingredients, incorrect nutrition labels, and many with more sugar than candy bars. To make matters worse, every bar felt boring, unoriginal, bland, and tasteless.
Needless to say – they struggled to find options that were both enjoyable to eat and met their needs for a healthy lifestyle.
Fed up with the compromises, Shannan set out to create the perfect protein bar in her own kitchen.
After many months of relentlessly testing hundreds of recipes, she finally had a bar made of high-quality ingredients with incredible taste. In addition - this wasn’t your ordinary protein bar - her recipes were very high protein and were full of inclusions such as zero-sugar chocolate chunks and almond pieces. Each of which had to be crafted separately as they couldn’t be purchased on the open market. It all led to something just as delicious as it was nutritious.
The Penna’s ate their homemade bars for months, frequently sharing with friends at the gym and work. Almost immediately, they were inundated with requests for more. After witnessing the overwhelming feedback and demand from their community – Ron decided to turn it into a business and founded Quest Nutrition.
Out of the gate, they were met with
enormous challenges and learning curves.
Making a homemade recipe in your kitchen is one thing, but cooking in a commercial facility was an entirely new obstacle – and one that usually requires compromising on ingredients. When reviewing the recipes, every manufacturer claimed that their bars would be impossible to make. The formula couldn’t be made on their equipment. They were told that they’d need to add some kind of sugar to make it work. The inclusions would add too many challenges. These obstacles were what limited the other companies and caused other bars to be similar unoriginal products. That wasn’t going to cut it.
Ron and his team held firm on their recipes, standards, and vision – eventually engineering custom equipment to bring their bars to life – something the industry had never seen. They wanted their bars to be different and weren’t going to accept the limitations that everyone else had settled for. No compromises.
Over the next decade, it would prove to be
exactly what the world was craving…
What started in a household kitchen grew into the #2 fastest growing business in the Inc. 5000. As founder and CEO of Quest Nutrition from the very start, Ron created a strong company that grew to over $400,000,000 in revenue with about 1,400 team members. Quest manufactured its own products in Los Angeles within its almost 750,000 square feet of production and warehousing facilities.
In 2019, the Simply Good Foods Company acquired Quest Nutrition for $1Billion.
Typically, this is the happy ending to the story. In this case, it’s just the beginning.
Aiming to take things to the next level, Ron and his business partner, Michael Veni, founded and started Legendary Foods – to serve an even greater purpose.
Just as Quest changed more than just the protein bar space, Legendary Foods is changing the way people eat in many food categories. With a mission to re-build the world’s favorite junk food into healthy and delicious options, Legendary takes the snacks we all love and re-imagines them with incredible high protein nutrition. Whether it’s delicious baked goods, mouthwatering crunchy chips, or the new products (that you’ll see soon) – everything is on the table.
It’s not easy, and that’s why nobody has done it before.
Not like that ever stopped us, though…
-Team Legendary