Jake Karls
Co-Founder
Mid-Day Squares
On Jake Karls
ake Karls is the Co-Founder and Chief Excitement Officer of Mid-Day Squares, the Montreal-based functional snack brand he built alongside his siblings Nick Saltarelli and Lezlie Karls. Mid-Day Squares is now one of Canada's most closely watched consumer brand stories — not because of its product alone, but because of the method by which the founders chose to build it: in public, without a filter, and with a commitment to showing the full reality of what it means to start a company from nothing.
The thesis behind Mid-Day Squares' approach to marketing is deceptively simple: people do not connect with brands, they connect with people. From the earliest days of the company, Karls and his co-founders documented their journey — the failed batches, the investor rejections, the family arguments, the production crises — in real-time across social media. This was not vulnerability deployed as a marketing technique. It was a calculated strategic bet that the audience they were building before they had distribution would prove more durable than any placement they could buy after.
The bet paid. Mid-Day Squares built an audience of hundreds of thousands before the product reached major retailers. By the time the brand achieved national distribution — Costco, Metro, Whole Foods — the community already existed, constituted not as customers but as witnesses to a story they had followed from the beginning. It is an architecture that most consumer packaged goods companies cannot replicate because they are unwilling to accept its essential cost: genuine openness, sustained and ongoing.
In conversation on The Montreal Entrepreneur Podcast, Karls speaks with the urgency and conviction of someone who has willed something into existence through force of belief. He is candid about the economics of building a food brand — the brutal margin structure of a $6 chocolate bar, the gap between retail presence and retail profitability, the capital requirements that most early-stage founders underestimate — but he refuses the posture of complaint. Every obstacle he describes is narrated as information, not grievance.
What distinguishes Karls within Montreal's entrepreneurial community is the way he has modeled a different relationship between founders and audiences. His company did not ask consumers to trust the brand. It asked them to witness its becoming. The distinction matters: one earns goodwill, the other earns genuine investment in the outcome. The latter is rarer, and it compounds in ways that conventional marketing expenditure does not.
The broader lesson — that radical transparency is a competitive advantage, not merely a virtue — is one that applies well beyond the consumer packaged goods sector. It is the argument Karls makes most compellingly, and the one that will outlast whatever comes next at Mid-Day Squares.
We didn't ask people to trust us. We asked them to watch. That's a different ask — and a harder one.
— Jake Karls
Key Takeaways
Radical transparency is a brand architecture, not a personality trait — Karls built an audience of witnesses before he had retail distribution, and that audience became the brand's most durable competitive asset.
Consumer brands are built on narrative as much as product — the $6 functional chocolate bar succeeded because people invested in the story of the founders making it, not just in the bar itself.
Food brand economics are brutal at every stage — the path from retail presence to retail profitability is longer than most founders anticipate, and the capital required to scale CPG is routinely underestimated.
Building with family introduces pressures that most business relationships cannot withstand — the Karls siblings survived by defining clear decision rights and accepting that the working relationship and the personal relationship would sometimes be in conflict.
Authenticity at scale requires ongoing commitment, not a one-time posture — the founders who document the good moments only are eventually exposed; the founders who document everything earn something different.
The worst thing you can do with a food brand is hide the mess. The mess is the story.
— Jake Karls
Authenticity isn't a strategy. It's a constraint. It means you can't say things that aren't true, even when it's inconvenient.
— Jake Karls
About Jake Karls
Jake Karls is the Co-Founder and Chief Excitement Officer of Mid-Day Squares, a Montreal-based functional snack company he built alongside his siblings Nick Saltarelli and Lezlie Karls. The brand is recognized both for its products and for its approach to building in public — a social media strategy that documented the company's journey from kitchen operation to national retailer in real-time, accumulating an audience of hundreds of thousands before achieving major retail distribution. Karls is a frequent speaker on brand-building, consumer culture, and entrepreneurial transparency, and is widely regarded as one of the most distinctive voices in Canada's consumer brand community.
Affiliations
- Forbes 30 Under 30 Canada
- Mid-Day Squares — National Retail Distribution
- Featured in The New York Times, CBC, and BNN Bloomberg
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