This is the story of Quest, the protein bar that went from a side hustle to a billion-dollar company in under five years. Its also a tale about women, weights, and the terrifying power of Instagram to make and transgress a brand.

How it all began …

Ashley Hooman started her Instagram account when she was 13 and retrieving from anorexia. It was 2010 Instagram was brand newbut Hooman detected hundreds of other women whod also battled eating disorders. She made friends with many of them, and the support they dedicated her pulled her through recovery. She noticed many of them were really into weightlifting. When Hooman was healthy enough to exert again, she got a gym membership and picked up weightlifting too.

Pump so good it hurt to drive home trying to take advantage of all the food while I still can

A photo posted by Ashley (@ nothingisimpossiblex) on Jul 5, 2016 at 6:34 am PDT

The Quest bars started appearing in her feed in early 2013. Everyone was raving about how good they were, so she went to a nearby GNC and bought two. The Chocolate Brownie was the first one I tried, she told. I absolutely fell in love with them.

By this point Hooman had an Instagram account dedicated to food and fitness, @nothingisimpossiblex, with thousands of followers. She started posting daily close-ups of her Quest bars, usually with nut butter slathered on top. The photos were getting 400 -5 00 likes.

Hooman didnt care that Quest bars were cleanfree of added sugar and gluten-free, with a relatively short ingredient list. She simply believe they savoured good. But a lot of other people cared. Most other bars on the market were calorie bombs full of unpronounceable ingredients. Quest had somehow made a unicorn: a product that was both healthier and more edible than any other protein bar out there.

Behind the bars

Everything else on the market was a candy bar in disguise, told Tom Bilyeu, Quests president and co-founder. Bilyeu got his start in Silicon Valley and speaks like hes devoting a TED talk at all days. He calls Quest a transformation company and once kept an alarm in his phone that said have the intestines to be poor.

Bilyeu ran a successful software company but sold it in 2010 to start Quest. We were standing in this beautiful conference room overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and I turned to my partners and I said, Im wholly miserable. I had heroism to say, Im going to make the demand in my life that I enjoy and believe in what Im doing.

For Bilyeu, who grew up in a morbidly obese family in Tacoma, WA, that meant starting a company with the goal of aiming metabolic diseases, like diabetes, that are linked to obesity. All our products are designed from the standpoint of how they impact your blood panel, Bilyeu said. Metabolic diseases like diabetes are thought to be caused by spikes in blood sugar.

For Quest that meant added sugar was a no-no , no matter how natural. The second aim was to construct food that people would choose because it savoured good , not because it was better for you.

Food is the center of our social lives and it has a drug-like quality that induces it so much fun. But such relationships quickly turns abusive, he said. I wanted to acknowledge the wonderful way it feels to sit around with your family and share in a gorgeous dinner, but make it good for you.

Most people dont gather around a table with their loved ones to feed protein bars. Bilyeu started with bars to gain cred in the fitness and nutrition world. If Im overweight, Im going to turn to someone whos in shape and say, What do you eat? he said. We wanted the answer to that to be Quest.

He and two partners started testing recipes for protein bars, rolling out the dough by hand with rolling pins and knives at night while still running the software company. None of them knew much about industrial cook; there was a lot of trial and error. We couldnt even give the bars away back then because people were remain convinced that protein bars were just junk, he said. But by 2011, they were getting an order or two a day. Then, Bilyeu tells, it went bonkers.

After a few months of posting Quest bars and gaining adherents, Hooman got Quests attention. A Quest employee commented on a photo she posted of a Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough bar( known among fans as CCCD and the best-selling Quest bar of all time) asking for her shipping address. For about a year after that Id get boxes of bars every few months, told Hooman. She got products to do giveaways on her Instagram page and new flavors before the latter are released.

How Quest grew in merely five years

In the early years, sending people free bars was Quests biggest marketing strategy. The company targeted people with big followings on social media who were already very fit because, as Bilyeu told, People with six packs are walking billboards.

The companys timing couldnt have been better. The fitness industry was in the midst of a sea change: Females like Hooman were entering the weight room in droves, and they were talking about it on Instagram.

Women have always been Instagrams power users, forming vast communities across the platform, and a lot of their interactions have to do with fitness, food, weight loss, or all three. You could argue that weight-lifting started trending because of Instagram. It was a place for women to share tips-off and bond outside of the testosterone zone of bodybuilding websites and their local gyms.

Trends spread like wildfire in this community, and Quest was one of the first and biggest. Before Quest, the dominant aesthetic in muscle-building products was what Bilyeu calls veins and chainsbarbells and dudes with explosion muscles looking very intense. Quests packaging is gender neutral and brightly coloredgiant cinnamon buns drip with icing and Oreos float on rivers of milk. Its indulgent and decadent and women responded.

Quest was also one of the first companies to use social media to interact with people rather than to tell people to buy somethingwhich is why youll probably never find a commercial for a Quest bar on TV.

The company created and popularized hashtags like #chunkporn and #cheatclean, sent free products for giveaways, and reposted peoples quest creations. The strategy worked. In its first three years, Quest grew by 57,000 percent. For a while, revenue was doubling from one month to the next.

I ate my first Quest bar in 2014, when I was writing about women who compete in bodybuilding rivalries and trying to put on some muscle myself. The wet-cement texture was embarrassing at first, so was the fake-sugar savour.

When you don’t know what to pack so you bring everything. #FridayFeeling

A photo posted by questnutrition (@ questnutrition) on Aug 12, 2016 at 11:56 am PDT

But the bars maintained me full for hours, and I believed the protein gospel that if I feed enough of it, my butt and biceps would finally emerge, glorious and fully formed. For a couple months, I was eating three or four Quest bars a week.( Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Cookies and Cream, and Double Chocolate Chunk were my go-tos with a White Chocolate Raspberry now and then .) Then I got tired of force-feeding myself protein and started feeing what I wanted again.

By late 2014, Quest mania had hit a fever pitch. Jada Pinkett Smith was feeing them. Demi Lovato was eating them. BuzzFeed offered 14 Signs You Are a Quest Bar Fanatic. If you followed any of the trendy fitness people on Instagram, you couldnt scroll an inch without assuring a Quest bar, despite their being the least photogenic food product on earthbeige or nearly black, often with unidentifiable lumps and chunks. Hooman was feeing two, sometimes three a day, funding her habit with a job at GNC, which gave her an employee discount. She discovered cooking them so theyd get warm and gooey. She called her bars bae and used the heart-eye emoji a lot.

Other people were get creative too, cooking with Quest bars and posting their #questcreations on Instagram.

One of them was Kim Capella. Capella had been overweight the majority of members of her life until she discovered that she loved to cook and bake healthy desserts. She lost over 60 pounds and made an Instagram, @pbeechie, and a blog, The Coconut Diary, to showcase her recipes. She posted her first Quest bar recipe in 2013, a chocolate chip cookie dough poptart, and has constructed close to 100 Quest recipes sinceincluding pancakes, mug cakes, and French toast. Her recipes were so popular that Quest flew her to Las Vegas for the Olympia, the biggest fitness expo in its own country, and paid her to work at their booth.

We had mutual adoration toward each other, told Capella. I always had this sense that I was part of the family. When Quest was testing a line of protein powders, they hired Capella to create recipes that were printed on the containers.

And then, unavoidably, came the backlash.

In October 2014, a health and wellness blogger named Ksenia Avdulova published a post on her website Breakfast Criminals titled, Stay Clear Of Quest Bars( and Delicious Whole-Food Alternatives ). Avdulova isnt a nutritionist, but she said she wrote the post based on her its own experience trying the bars.

I kept considering people on Instagram post Quest bars in their yoga clothes and their sexy abs, she said. So she tried one. I felt like I had a stone in my belly for the rest of the day. Her post called out Quest bars for using highly-processed whey protein, a fiber called isomalto-oligosaccharides that can cause indigestion for some people, and sucralose, a fake sugar also sold as Splenda.

Within days, Avdulovas post had gone viral. Hundreds of people commented and emailed. So many people who are die-hard Quest bar fans have attacked me personally, she told. One person told her that protein bars werent for vegan “girls ” like her.

The wellness and fitness industries have always been unusual bedfellows, and Avdulova is clearly more in the wellness camp. Her website promotes Nourishing your body with mindful motion and delicious healthy foods as well as Following your souls deepest desires.

For people like her, Quest bars would never be considered healthy because ingredients like whey protein and sucralose are highly processed. They have a dead taste to them, as one commenter set it. On the other hand, people in the fitness camp, like Hooman, are typically less worried about ingredients and more concerned with the nutrition labelcalories, fat, protein, and carbs.

Are Quest bars hear to remain ?

In the last year, the tide has moved in Avdulovas favor. Some of the alternative bars she recommended like Rise and GoMacro are depicting people from the fitness world, and new competitors are trying to do what Quest does but better. Bars like FitJoy and Good2Go have similar ingredients but their simple, clean packaging attain Quest bars seem dated.

Earlier this year, Hooman noticed that her Cookies and Cream Quest bar tasted different. Her customers at GNC told her the same thing, so she checked the label and realise the ingredients had changed. Soluble corn fiber had replaced isomalto-oligosaccharides, which people were saying dedicated the bars a different texture and a more artificial savor. She stopped feeing Quest bars cold turkey and posted about her frustration on Instagram along with hundreds of other people.

Are Quest bars making a comeback? Check out the full story on Bon Appetit .

Read more: