How Khloé Kardashian’s snack brand Khloud got ahead of the protein craze: ‘The timing was everything’

Khloé Kardashian is off camera on Zoom, scrolling through her old emails. She’s looking for the date she started working on her protein popcorn brand Khloud, which over the past year has taken the snack aisle by storm. With pastel-colored bags and friendly clouds on its packaging, the product stands out both in the snack aisle and in a sea of bro-coded protein-maxxing. She finds the first emails: 2023. “It’s been a few years,” she says.

Of all the brands in the Kardashian-Jenner family—Skims, Kylie Cosmetics, 818 Tequila—Khloud may have had the best timing. Kardashian and her team started working on the brand before consumers’ protein craze really kicked off, and were ready to launch in spring 2025. “It just so happened that it was in this protein-frenzy era,” Kardashian says. “How long it takes to produce snacks and food and packaging and all of the really boring things—you can’t just wing that and get it on the shelves quickly.”

Last fall, the brand brought on Jeff Rubenstein as CEO; he’s an alum of Poppi who helped the soda brand secure a $1.95 billion acquisition b...