I wanted a protein bar that wasn’t full of rubbish.

I didn’t start Standards because I thought the world needed another protein bar.

I started it because I was tired of buying products built around a protein number while everything else—the ingredients, the nutrition, the taste and the basic fact that it was food—was treated as negotiable.

I wanted the protein. I just didn’t think getting it should require me to overlook the rest of the product.

So I started making my own.

At home. Batch after batch. I wasn’t trying to reinvent food. I was trying to make a protein bar as though the fact it was food still mattered.

That meant 20g protein, but not at any cost. It meant ingredients I recognised and genuinely wanted to eat. Nutrition that made sense. A bar that tasted good and that I would choose again, rather than tolerate because it hit a macro.

Six months and hundreds of bars later, Dark Cacao became the first product I was prepared to put the Standards name on.

Standards has started with protein bars because this is where I first saw how low the accepted standard had become—and where I knew I could make something genuinely better.

But I don’t want Standards to make products simply to have more products to sell. I want us to look for products and categories where convenience, margin or a marketable claim has been allowed to compromise the whole thing, and ask whether our approach can materially improve it.

Sometimes that will mean another protein bar. In time, it may mean something else entirely. The category is not the point. Making truly excellent products—and raising what people should expect from them—is.

If we believe we can raise the standard, we have a reason to make it. If we cannot, we should leave it alone.