How Building Protein Popcorn Empires Teaches You More About Business Than Any MBA

Written By Law @ Tocoba.ga

by Law Smith

You know that feeling when you're standing in the cereal aisle of a Publix on a Tuesday afternoon, staring at a "Protein-Enriched Lucky Charms Bar" wondering who the hell greenlit this abomination? It's the same sensation you get watching a magician reveal his tricks—equal parts fascination and disillusionment. The industrial food complex has caught on to our collective protein obsession, but they've done it with all the grace of a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving trying to use TikTok. They slap "PROTEIN" on packages filled with garbage-tier ingredients and hope we don't flip them over to read the fine print. It's marketing theater at its finest, and we're the captive audience holding our wallets.

But then you meet someone like Tim Rexius—entrepreneur, grandfather, serial bench-presser (475 pounds, for those keeping score), and the man who turned popcorn into a legitimate performance nutrition vehicle—and suddenly the protein snack industrial complex doesn't seem so inevitable. His story isn't just about building a better mousetrap in the form of hydrolyzed protein-infused popcorn sold across fourteen countries. It's a masterclass in stubborn persistence, family-driven product development, and the kind of counter-intuitive business wisdom that makes MBAs uncomfortable because it can't be reduced to a PowerPoint deck.

Meet Tim Rexius: The Man Who Wakes Up at 4 AM Because Silence Has ROI

Tim Rexius doesn't fit neatly into entrepreneurial archetypes, which is precisely what makes his approach worth studying. He's the CEO and founder of the Rexius Nutrition store chain, spanning seven states with franchise locations. He co-founded Iron Heaven Gyms, operating three major fitness facilities in Omaha, Nebraska. He founded and mentors Vital Health International, distributing nutraceutical supplements in three countries. And he's the founder and CEO of Omaha Protein Popcorn Company, currently distributed in fourteen countries after expanding to approximately 30,000 new retailers this year.

Oh, and he does business coaching and keynote speaking internationally across the US, Mexico, and Canada, specializing in "business operations, motivation, how to scale brands without money." As he puts it with characteristic bluntness: "I basically talk a lot and businesses that are associated with it."

When asked what time he wakes up, Rexius doesn't hesitate: "Four." Why? "You know, with that many companies, it's the only time I really get silence where I can really hammer through stuff."

There's something deeply unsexy about this answer that makes it profoundly true. We live in an era drowning in productivity porn—morning routines dissected to the second, ice baths and red light therapy, supplements stacked like Jenga towers. But Rexius's approach strips away the performance: wake up early because nobody else is awake, work when it's quiet, and build multiple eight-figure businesses while your competitors are still deciding which meditation app to download. The global high protein snacks market was valued at $5.38 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $11.91 billion by 2033, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 9.3%. Rexius didn't wait for market research reports to tell him this opportunity existed—he was already three countries deep in distribution by the time the analysts caught up. grandviewresearch​

The Advice He'd Give His 13-Year-Old Self: "Don't Listen to the Haters. Do the Opposite."

When asked what advice he'd give his younger self, Rexius delivered a line that should be embroidered on entrepreneurial throw pillows: "Don't listen to the haters. Ever do exactly the opposite. Whatever they say to do."

This wasn't abstract motivation-speak. It was tactical guidance born from a lifetime of being told his ideas wouldn't work. His mother, in a moment of accidental prophecy, told him: "If you ever use your mouth for business, you'll be very successful, because your mouth is either going to enter you up in jail, or it's going to get you well paid."

Rexius elaborated: "And every idea I had, oh, you're not studious enough, your grades aren't good enough, whatever it might be. And even when I started my first retail business, my dad said, No, I think it's a terrible idea. You're making a terrible mistake."

The psychology here is counterintuitive. Most business advice encourages "listening to feedback" and "understanding your market." But Rexius identified a pattern: the people telling him something wouldn't work were often the same people who'd never done it themselves. Academic performance became a red herring. Conventional wisdom became noise.

"And so getting to have those scoreboard moments for all the people that told me I couldn't do shit and then just crush it," he continued. "And I always told my kids the same thing, you live for the scoreboard moment, right? Because everyone who said you couldn't do it will tell stories about how they always believed in you and how they were your first customer 10 years later."

This observation cuts to something essential about entrepreneurship that business schools struggle to teach: the difference between constructive criticism and ambient noise. Rexius learned to distinguish between feedback from people who'd done the thing and opinions from people who hadn't. And he learned something even more valuable—that success rewrites history.

"I've done this five times now, and every time it's the same story," he noted. "And it's the best the scoreboard moment where they all of a sudden start telling stories about how they met you and how they were there are 1000 people that claim to be my first customer. My first customer was my mom. So I'm but, you know, I don't correct them, because I want their money."

The College Accounting Class He Failed Three Times (And Why That's Actually Relevant)

Higher education and Tim Rexius had a complicated relationship that reads like a rom-com where neither party really wanted to be there. He failed Accounting 1 at Wayne State College three times. Not because he couldn't understand debits and credits, but because the abstract widget-based pedagogy made zero sense to him.

"I failed accounting one three times. I just didn't get it the widgets," he explained. "Like, it's just so dumb. And then I signed up a four times. I had to have it for my degree. And the guy goes, you're coming back again. I go, Yeah. He goes, I'll give you a C not to come back in here. I'm like, I paid for this four times. I'm not leaving without a B, and that's how I passed accounting one at Wayne State College."

The punchline arrived years later: "And now I do accounting every day."

Not just basic bookkeeping, either. Rexius now calculates EBITDA, lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios, and complex financial metrics because the Omaha Protein Popcorn Company is "being groomed to be sold eventually." He called it "all the fun shit that I thought was boring as hell, but now you need to put your dollar sign and your money in front of it. Now it makes sense."

This isn't just a feel-good story about a guy who struggled in school but succeeded anyway. It's a case study in the difference between abstract knowledge and applied knowledge. Research on protein supplementation shows that dietary protein significantly enhanced muscle strength and size changes during resistance training in healthy adults, with the impact of supplementation on fat-free mass gains reduced with increasing age. But knowing that research exists means nothing unless you can translate it into a product formulation that actually works and a business model that scales. bjsm.bmj​

The widgets didn't matter because they weren't real. Widgets didn't have supply chains, shelf life considerations, international tariff implications, or FDA compliance requirements. Rexius's brain rejected the academic abstraction until he had skin in the game. Then suddenly accounting became essential—because now it was his money, his family's future, and his investors' returns on the line.

The Five-Year Disaster: How Omaha Protein Popcorn Lost $500K Before It Made a Dollar

Here's where Rexius's story deviates from the sanitized founder narratives you see on LinkedIn. Omaha Protein Popcorn, now distributed in fourteen countries with 30,000 retailers, spent its first five years as an expensive disaster.

"I know. It only took me eight years to become an overnight success," Rexius said with the gallows humor of someone who's stared at his bank account at 4 AM too many times. "The first five years was a disaster. Gents like I lost a half a million probably between different wrong bags, wrong formulas, wrong boxes, marketing. It Wrong used to be called the optimal performance popcorn. It was a sticker on a bag."

The original concept was sound: create a high-protein snack using hydrolyzed protein that digests in six minutes instead of the three-hour digestion time of typical protein supplements. But Rexius made a classic entrepreneur mistake—he designed the product for himself.

"I was just thinking the macros of it, right? The meathead, like, how much protein can I cram in a bag?" he admitted. One flavor contained 91 grams of isolated protein. "I had a lot of pro athletes eating it, you know, and a lot of bodybuilders."

They went to the Mr. Olympia convention, the bodybuilding Mecca, and "went through 5000 bags in a day." Rexius looked at his wife thinking they were "about to get rich." Then reality arrived: "And I realized the bodybuilders are broke and they don't have any money, and I was marketing it to me."

This is where most entrepreneurs would pivot or quit. Rexius chose option three: stubborn recalibration. He got "voluntold" into being President of the local Chamber of Commerce in Ralston—an experience he describes as "95% of my time is listening to other people. Just want to hear themselves talk out loud with useless and pointless shit"—but it connected him with a local grocery chain called Hy-Vee Foods.

When a health market executive from Hy-Vee suggested selling the popcorn, Rexius was skeptical: "I told him, I go. It'll never work. Let's not do it."

They did a consignment deal anyway. That one grocery store "outsold all of my own nutrition stores times 10."

The Little Old Pink-Haired Ladies and the Six-Year-Old Test Market

Rexius sent his oldest daughter to spy on who was actually buying the popcorn, because "she doesn't, you know, look, she's not a bodybuilder." She reported back: "All the little old pink haired ladies, you know, with the hair dye, and the little kids are buying your popcorn like it's going out of style."

This observation unlocked everything. The dietitian at the grocery store explained: "Your snack is the only snack I can get my Silver Sneakers, my 70 plus crowd, to actually eat. Usually, what they do is, she goes, I'll write a diet plan with insure shakes and some of these crappy protein bars, and they'll buy it. Then they'll drive down the street to the next grocery store and return it, because they're all so cheap."

Popcorn is "the number one confectionary snack item in the world every country," Rexius noted. Seniors would eat popcorn. Kids would eat popcorn—"they have no idea it's flavor. The protein powder is 100% flavorless."

Within months, the cheddar flavors got recommended by OB-GYN associations for nursing mothers. Suddenly they were "selling to 200 hospitals a month." The product was "in 14 countries before I ever ran an ad."

The protein snacks market overall is experiencing explosive growth, with the global market valued at $24.0 billion in 2024 and predicted to reach $74.1 billion by 2034, growing at a 12.1% compound annual growth rate. But what's driving this growth isn't just gym rats slamming shaker bottles—it's the mass market discovering that protein actually matters for everything from weight management to blood glucose control to reducing hypertension risk. insightaceanalytic​

Rexius stumbled into this realization by accident, which is perhaps the most honest version of product-market fit: you think you're building for one customer, the market tells you you're wrong, and if you're paying attention, you listen.

His real test market became his six kids. "That's why I test everything on if I can get six kids to agree on a flavor of something which, if you have kids, you understand, getting them to agree on anything is insane, but if I get them to agree, I know that the product will sell globally."

Currently, they're testing spicy dill pickle protein popcorn because his 13 and 18-year-old "are obsessed with spicy dill pickle." The logic is airtight: "If they like it, then other kids do."

The Sweets and Snacks Convention: When a Hershey's Executive Gave Five Minutes of Brutal Honesty

In 2023, after expanding to ten Hy-Vee locations, Rexius attended the Sweets and Snacks convention in Chicago. He describes walking into the McCormick Center and seeing "200,000 qualified buyers" and "Hershey's chocolate has a 60 foot tall chocolate fountain."

"I wanted to jump in and get type three diabetes and just call it a day," he joked. "I was like, What am I doing here?"

Day one was humbling: "Not a single person stops by my booth, not one." He'd spent $15,000 on the booth, backdrop, and 15,000 samples. His wife asked what they were going to do. That night, she made an observation that would change everything: "Hey, bro, it doesn't say healthy or protein anywhere on our label."

"Because everything I sell my stores has protein, is healthy. That's what I do, is gyms and stores. And I'm like, shit," Rexius admitted. They went to Staples at 10 PM, "Pay 200 bucks for a one hour banner that says protein popcorn on it. Take safety pins and pin it on top of my brand new backdrop."

The next two days, they "had a line of three to 400 people."

"So five years of me blowing through money, not even realizing the fact that my wife brought up the fact she goes, you haven't gone grocery shopping in 10 years, and she's right, I haven't, cause I'll buy the cheapest shit and I'll buy by the palette," he said. His wife picks out his toothpaste and mouthwash. "Why the hell am I marketing it to me? I'm a cheap ass. I don't buy anything."

His daughters and wife redesigned the bags to be colorful, visible through clear packaging, with a popcorn mascot. They changed the name from Optimal Performance Popcorn to Omaha Protein Popcorn. "We relaunched in 23 and we were up 16,000%."

But the most valuable moment came on the last day when "a gentleman from Hershey's walks up and says, I'm going to give you five minutes of free advice." The executive explained that his entire booth staff was eating Rexius's popcorn. "And he goes, Are you easily offended? I go, No, I have six kids."

The Hershey's executive delivered the kind of feedback that only comes from someone who's seen thousands of products: "Your bag is ugly. Your name is ugly. You need a mascot. You need colors. The only good thing about your products how it tastes."

This is the difference between criticism from someone who knows and noise from people who don't. Rexius took every note, implemented it, and scaled accordingly. The result speaks for itself.

Why Tim Rexius's Protein Actually Works (And Why That Matters)

At this point, you might be wondering what makes Omaha Protein Popcorn different from the tsunami of protein products flooding grocery stores. The answer is technical and unglamorous—which is precisely why it works.

The candy-coated flavors use hydrolyzed protein, which is the highest grade protein available and "starts to digest in six minutes." For context, most protein supplements take three hours to digest. This matters more than most people realize.

As Rexius explained: "When you guys are done working out, for instance, let's put it this way, when you're done working out, you have about 45 minutes to get that protein digested into amino nitrates, to get to your muscle tissues to cause repair. If it's not there, you're going to put in lactic acid and you get sore."

The science supports this. Research shows that physiological hyperinsulinemia promotes muscle protein synthesis when it concomitantly increases muscle blood flow, amino acid delivery, and availability. The timing and quality of protein matters—not just the total grams consumed. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih​

"Well, the average protein snack in the US market, even though they're getting better, it's still really low grade protein. It's going to take three hours to digest, so it's not going to repair a damn thing," Rexius continued. "Where the protein I use, like, say, in ours popcorn, it's hydrosolated protein, highest grade in the world, starts to digest in six minutes."

This created a paradox in consumer education. Online commenters—Rexius calls them "Karens"—would complain about sugar content. His response cuts through nutritional pseudoscience with the precision of someone who has a biomechanical engineering background:

"Yes, Karen, it has sugar. Who told you sugar was bad? Well, everybody, no, you mean the internet told you it's bad from other people who didn't know what the hell they were talking about in the first place."

The key insight: "Sugar is not bad. Sugar and fat together bad." For post-workout recovery, you want "no fat, like, next to no fat at all, sugar, easily, additional sugar and isolated proteins that causes insulin mimetic response, causes your body to flood with insulin and growth hormone, and you recover, you'll burn up all that sugar anyways."

Insulin is 700 times more anabolic than testosterone, Rexius noted—a fact that explains why modern bodybuilders are dramatically larger than their predecessors. "Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1980. He won his last Mr. Olympia, six foot, three, 235 pounds" but if Arnold competed today, "he'd have to be 100 pounds bigger." barbend+1​

Research confirms that insulin exerts anabolic effects by increasing the transport of glucose and amino acids into skeletal muscle fibers, thereby increasing protein synthesis and decreasing protein degradation. But understanding the mechanism means nothing if you can't formulate a product that actually delivers those results without tasting like cardboard soaked in despair. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih​

The International Expansion Nobody Saw Coming

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Omaha Protein Popcorn's growth is how much came from international markets before domestic expansion. "We were in 14 countries before I ever ran an ad," Rexius explained.

The reason? International health standards are often stricter than U.S. requirements. "I'm one of the only protein snacks allowed to sell in the UAE, because I meet their health standards. Most of our protein snacks here are so low grade that they don't meet other countries health standards."

The UAE has implemented stringent food safety regulations requiring clear labeling in Arabic and English, strict hygiene standards, quality control with HACCP systems, and regular surveillance of imported products. These barriers to entry become competitive advantages for companies like Omaha Protein Popcorn that meet the standards from day one. vida-food​

"Overseas has expanded so easy, because overseas businesses, just to be perfectly honest with you, significantly easier than here in the US," Rexius noted. He tackled international markets first, then came back to the U.S.—a reverse-geographic strategy that few American food brands attempt.

The broader context matters: global cola sales dropped approximately 10% year over year, driving companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola to acquire protein snack brands aggressively. The alternative dairy and meat industry is developing at a yearly rate of 15.8% and is predicted to reach $1.2 trillion by 2030. This isn't a trend—it's a fundamental shift in what consumers want to put in their bodies. frontiersin+2​

Rexius positioned himself ahead of this wave not through market research but through necessity—he needed a snack his kids would eat that wasn't "in the form of a chicken nugget or chocolate milk."

The Multi-Business Empire and the 4 AM Advantage

Running multiple businesses simultaneously sounds aspirational until you understand the operational reality. Rexius manages the Rexius Nutrition store chain across seven states, three Iron Heaven Gym locations, Vital Health International nutraceutical distribution, Omaha Protein Popcorn across fourteen countries, and his business coaching practice.

His secret weapon isn't sophisticated project management software or a team of executive assistants. It's 4 AM.

"With that many companies, it's the only time I really get silence where I can really hammer through stuff," he explained. "Exactly, yes, no one takes your ball."

There's a broader lesson here about distraction costs. The grocery-anchored retail market continues to thrive, with vacancy compressing to new lows of 3.5% as of Q4 2024, and rent growth hitting 3.1% year-over-year—the highest among all retail subtypes. Grocers like Aldi remained the fastest-growing operator in 2024, adding over 2.3 million square feet through 105 new openings. But expansion requires focused execution, and focused execution requires uninterrupted time. jll​

Family involvement provides operational leverage that most corporate structures can't replicate. "Everyone's involved. My wife's a CFO, and we work together every single day, and it's awesome," Rexius said. His oldest daughter serves as one of his assistants. His son Tyler works the warehouse. His oldest daughter and son-in-law handle marketing and label design. His younger two kids are "technically my sponsored athletes or mascots, at least according to the IRS."

This isn't nepotism—it's strategic capital deployment. You can't offshore family to a call center in Manila, but you can build institutional knowledge and operational alignment that hired employees rarely achieve. When everyone has equity—financial and emotional—in the outcome, the calculus changes.

The Real Education: Why Scoreboard Moments Matter More Than Diplomas

Tim Rexius's story resists tidy categorization because it combines elements that business case studies usually keep separate: blue-collar work ethic and biochemical engineering precision, family business dynamics and international distribution complexity, bodybuilding culture and soccer mom consumer insights.

But the through line is remarkably simple: do the thing everyone says won't work, iterate until it does, ignore the people who told you it was impossible when they inevitably claim they always believed in you, and repeat.

"You live for the scoreboard moment, right?" Rexius said. "Because everyone who said you couldn't do it will tell stories about how they always believed in you and how they were your first customer 10 years later, and I never correct them, because, I mean, to me, it's almost funny."

The protein snacks market will continue its explosive trajectory—reaching $100.56 billion by 2032 according to some projections, with companies like Ferrero recently acquiring Power Crunch and Flowers Foods taking over Simple Mills for $795 million. But market size doesn't guarantee individual success. Execution does. Customer obsession does. Waking up at 4 AM when it's quiet does. fortunebusinessinsights+1​

Rexius closed with advice that sounds simple until you try implementing it: "Don't listen to the haters. Ever do exactly the opposite. Whatever they say to do."

In a business landscape drowning in consensus thinking and best practices guides, sometimes the most contrarian move is the simplest one: ignore the noise, build something that actually works, and let the scoreboard speak for itself.

The little old pink-haired ladies and the six-year-olds already figured this out. The rest of us are just catching up.

Law @ Tocoba.ga https://www.SolvingHow.com
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