Jake Karls dates the start of Mid-Day Squares to August 4th 2018. In a post marking seven years in business he described what the three of them actually had at that point: a condo kitchen, a simple idea, and almost no experience in the food industry. He put it plainly, writing that they had "no customers or audience" and a level of conviction that bordered on delusion. He was building the brand with his sister Lezlie Karls and her husband Nick Saltarelli, out of Montreal, making a refrigerated chocolate square that was supposed to replace the 2pm snack.

The first year of work looks nothing like the numbers that came later. By his own account they were up at 5am making 50 chocolate bars by hand, and out from 5pm to 10pm driving around the city delivering those bars themselves. Most days people said no. Some days people laughed. One night at 2am their industrial fridge broke with orders due the next morning and nobody to call, so they got on the floor and fixed it themselves rather than let the product spoil. Another time they flew across the country for a buyer meeting that could have changed the business and the buyer never showed up, so they got back on the plane.

The first outside yes came from a bagel shop. Karls has told the story twice on his own feed: the owner, Jeremy, agreed to put the bars on his shelf with no sales history and no data behind them, just a cooler bag and a story. He calls it the first time someone outside family and friends believed in the thing. That single shelf is where the retail motion started, and from there it was door to door, many no's and a few yes's, building on top of the yes's.

Volume came faster than the founders expected. Looking back six years later, Karls wrote that in the early days they were hustling to sell 5,000 bars a month. Then on August 8th 2019 he posted the milestone this story is named for: Mid-Day Squares had officially sold 500,000 bars in its first 11 months.

There is a discrepancy worth flagging, because both numbers come from Karls himself. In February 2022 he posted that January 2022 alone had outsold the entire first year, giving the two figures side by side: over 400,000 bars in January 2022 against 275,000 bars in the entire first year. That does not match the 500,000 figure from August 2019. The same 2022 post notes that the production team made over 800,000 squares to ship those 400,000 bars, which suggests the counting unit changed somewhere between the two posts. We record both statements and resolve neither.

On revenue, the cleanest anchor is a post Karls wrote much later. On May 8th 2023 he announced a $20,000,000 run rate, defined in the post as the last three months of top line revenue averaged and multiplied by 12, and added that four years earlier to the day they had a $400,000 run rate. That places an annualized $400,000 at May 8th 2019, which is 277 days after the August 4th 2018 start date he gave, and that is the milestone recorded on this story. There is no founder stated date for the very first sale, so no first customer milestone is recorded here.

After that the numbers compound. The millionth bar sold in April 2020. In April 2021 they moved over 100,000 bars in a single week. In March 2022 Nick Saltarelli posted a $13,000,000 run rate with trailing twelve month revenue of $11 million, and said he would document the road to $100 million publicly. By May 2023 the run rate was $20,000,000 on only 4,500 stores and four flavours. In September 2024 Karls compared the 5,000 bars a month of the early days with 1.6 million bars sold in the previous month. By August 2025 he was reporting more than 60 million bars sold, 9,500 stores across North America, their own factory producing over 135,000 bars a day, and a team of 50. By June 2026 the count was over 85 million squares.

The growth engine was the founders themselves on camera. They filmed the hand made production in the condo kitchen and kept filming as things went wrong, publishing the good, the bad, and the ugly rather than a highlight reel. That content ran on Instagram and Facebook first, later TikTok, and eventually on Karls' personal LinkedIn, which is where most of the sources for this story live. Retail buyers and investors were watching the same feed as customers.

The retail side was less romantic. In a 2025 post Karls listed what actually earned new shelf space: tracking real velocity in units per store per SKU per week and using that to argue for placements, proving the product was incremental and brought new buyers into the category, building enough interest through storytelling that buyers and shoppers cared, and showing up consistently in stores, in meetings, and online. His summary of it is that getting listed is step one and staying listed is how brands are built.