UNREAL Snacks CEO, Kevin McCarthy on leading a movement, not just a company

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Kevin McCarthy was just 24 years old when he became CEO of UNREAL, a chocolate company on a mission to change the way Americans think about candy. A decade later, he’s still at the helm, leading a fully remote team spread across the country and helping turn what began as a passion project into the largest better-for-you chocolate brand in the United States.

Today, UNREAL products can be found in more than 35,000 retail locations, including Target, Costco, and Whole Foods. The company has carved out a place in one of the most competitive consumer goods categories, challenging established candy brands while staying committed to its original mission of making chocolate with less sugar and better ingredients.

But building a successful brand over ten years comes with challenges that go well beyond getting products onto shelves. For McCarthy, it has meant learning how to lead a growing organization while growing into the role himself, maintaining a strong company culture without a traditional office, and figuring out how to build something sustainable in a business world that often celebrates working around the clock.

In this episode of Next at Work, McCarthy joins host Brendan Jeannetti for a conversation about leadership, entrepreneurship, and the realities of building a mission-driven business. They discuss why feeling ready is often a myth, how to protect employees and leaders from burnout, what it takes to build trust across a remote team, and how to turn an ambitious idea into a business built to last.

Insight 1: Readiness is a Trap

When asked if he felt ready to run the company at 24, McCarthy was honest: “I don’t think you’re ever, like, ready ready.” He had two years in the business, understood the operations, knew the supply chain, and had worn multiple roles. But ready? That’s a different question.

Most leadership advice tells you to wait until you’ve checked every box. McCarthy’s approach: believe in the mission and prove it works. Credentials and experience get you considered. Genuine belief in what you’re building is what gets you through. He had both, and the board saw it.

His Advice

Stop chasing roles. Find something you genuinely care about solving. Put the pressure on yourself to deliver for that mission, not for a title. Your career takes many turns. If you care about the problem and the impact, the trajectory usually follows.

When McCarthy hired his first ten people, he looked for the same thing the board saw in him: entrepreneurs with hunger. People willing to risk stability for a mission. People with no ego about the work. Eight years later, those same team members are still there. They shaped where the company is today.

Insight 2: Burnout is a Leadership Problem

Hustle culture celebrates burning the midnight oil. McCarthy has watched it destroy good people and good companies. “There’s a lot of celebration of the grind and working super hard. That’s not sustainable. That can be a sprint, but everything is a marathon in life.”

The trap: if you’re the leader absorbing pressure, your team isn’t doing the same. They are. They’re watching what you model.

What Works

McCarthy focuses on situational awareness. How do you serve the company and the mission? When that’s the question, protecting boundaries becomes strategic. You need your team healthy. You need yourself to be healthy. Burnout costs people and execution.

Practically: hire people better than you at things you’re weak in. Build mentorship around you. Stay clear about whether you’re having fun and being challenged. Look ahead at what the company needs in a year or two and build capacity now.

Insight 3: Culture Follows MissionVideo Embed

UNREAL’s core mission is to create a world where all food is 100% real. That’s the operating principle, not marketing. When McCarthy joined as an employee twelve years ago, he found a dark office with no energy. He spent his decade rebuilding the culture to match the brand’s actual promise: fun, transparent, mission-driven.

The Famous Policy: Chocolate Expensing 

UNREAL allows employees to purchase and expense chocolate from any brand. Just seven months after rolling out the policy, employees had purchased more than 3,900 pounds of chocolate in 2025. But the point isn’t the chocolate. It’s about making sure the team understands the category, tastes the competition, stays close to the customer experience, and remains connected to why the work matters.

Remote Culture

UNREAL went fully remote with roughly 100 people scattered across the US. McCarthy admits it’s harder to build culture this way. You can’t grab lunch. You can’t read the room on Zoom. Communication gets distorted.

His answer: you have to put real effort in. You can’t declare it solved and move on. Technology and people are always changing. Remote culture requires continuous intentionality. Leaders have to model it. When McCarthy protects boundaries, his team sees it’s permissible to do the same.

What It All Comes Down To

Over the past decade, Kevin McCarthy has built UNREAL by staying focused on what matters most: the product. He’s spent less time worrying about his personal brand or the attention that comes with being a young CEO, and more time asking the questions that actually matter to the business. Do people buy the product again? Do they recommend it to others? What’s the repeat purchase rate? Those are the metrics he pays attention to.

Along the way, he’s learned to approach his career as a marathon rather than a sprint, surrounded himself with people who genuinely believe in the company’s mission, and built a culture that reflects what the brand stands for. That approach has helped take UNREAL from a struggling startup to the largest better-for-you chocolate brand in America, with 15% year-over-year growth in mainstream retailers.

McCarthy’s perspective on the growing emphasis on personal branding among business leaders is straightforward: “It shouldn’t be about any one person. It’s about how you build something serving consumers.”

As more consumers look for indulgent products made with simpler, recognizable ingredients, UNREAL has positioned itself to capitalize on that shift. And while McCarthy’s story is certainly compelling, he’d rather the attention stay on the company, its mission, and the products people keep coming back to.

For leaders navigating a business culture increasingly focused on visibility and personal branding, McCarthy offers a different perspective on what deserves their attention.

Listen and Connect 

You can hear the full Next at Work episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. The podcast is produced by Workable, an all-in-one talent platform for hiring and managing teams with clarity and speed. Workable combines recruiting, employee management, time-off tracking, and payroll all backed by AI. It serves over 30,000 companies across 100 countries.

Connect with Kevin and UNREAL on LinkedIn and Instagram. Grab a snack at unrealsnacks.com.