The Montreal siblings who turned a refrigerated chocolate square into a national grocery brand by filming every day of the grind

A kitchen in Montreal, a candy aisle problem

Mid-Day Squares began in 2018 in the kitchen of Lezlie Karls and Nick Saltarelli in Montreal. Lez had been making batches of a refrigerated chocolate square for friends and family. It was a soft, nut-butter-and-chocolate snack that was closer in texture to a truffle than a candy bar. The recipe worked. The question the three co-founders kept asking was whether anyone would buy it at scale, and where it would sit on the shelf.

The candy aisle was a non-starter. Shelf-stable chocolate is a saturated category with deep-pocketed incumbents and almost no room for a new entrant to win on shelf placement alone. The refrigerated cooler was something different. Yogurts, refrigerated snack bars, and grab-and-go single-serve items lived in the cooler, and the shopper standing in front of that fridge was making a different decision. They were not picking a treat, they were picking a snack. That single positioning decision shaped everything else: the formulation, the packaging, the distribution strategy, and the argument the brand would make to grocery buyers.

Jake Karls, Lez's brother, joined as the public face and growth lead. Nick Saltarelli ran the business and operations side. Lez led the product. Three co-founders sharing one household, two of them married, two of them siblings, was the operating structure from the first day.

Why refrigerated was the whole strategy

From a product engineering perspective, a refrigerated chocolate square is harder to make than a shelf-stable one. Texture, fat crystallization, oxidation, and packaging all behave differently when you commit to a cold chain. Mid-Day Squares accepted that difficulty because the cold chain solved three different problems at once.

First, it created shelf space. The refrigerated cooler at most Canadian grocery banners is dominated by yogurt, refrigerated meal kits, plant-based dairy, and a small number of refrigerated snack brands. A new functional chocolate brand could fit there without competing against Hershey, Mars, or Nestlé for facings. Second, it allowed the formulation to skip preservatives and emulsifiers that shelf-stable chocolate often relies on, which let the brand commit to a short, recognisable ingredient list. Third, it justified the price. A refrigerated cooler shopper expects to pay more per gram than a candy aisle shopper, and the price band lined up with the unit economics the brand needed to support its own manufacturing.

The refrigerated commitment also forced operational discipline early. Cold-chain distribution requires temperature-controlled trucks, retailer cooler space, and inventory turn that does not tolerate the same slack as shelf-stable. The brand had to get that pipeline right before chasing scale, which is one reason the early years looked slower than a comparable shelf-stable launch.

Documenting the grind in public

The most visible part of the Mid-Day Squares story is the founders' decision to document everything in public. Jake Karls in particular became known for near-daily content across Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube: factory tours, retail wins, fundraising wins and losses, product development, and the unglamorous logistics of running a refrigerated CPG brand. The Mid-Day Squares feed at @middaysquares is one of the most consistent founder-led brand accounts in Canadian CPG.

The strategy is intentional and well documented. Founder-led transparency content gave the brand free organic distribution at a stage when paid acquisition would have been impossible to justify on a refrigerated chocolate square. The audience compounded. Demand that started as people following the founders turned into people asking grocery stores to stock the product. That, in turn, gave buyers at Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, and Walmart Canada a defensible answer to the question every category manager asks: who is going to move this off shelf if we list you.

That same content layer has stayed central as the company has scaled. It is the source of awareness for new flavour launches, limited editions, and US market expansion. It is also the place where the founders post the hard parts (capacity issues, retail misses, supplier problems), which is unusual at the brand's current scale and is part of what keeps the audience engaged.

The Chocolate Factory: vertically integrating production

The single most consequential operational decision in the Mid-Day Squares story is the choice to build their own manufacturing facility in Montreal, which the brand calls the Chocolate Factory. The decision is unusual at the brand's stage for a few reasons.

Co-packing for refrigerated chocolate is scarce. Most Canadian and US co-packers are set up for shelf-stable bars and confections, not refrigerated chocolate squares with a short, clean ingredient list. Outsourcing production would have meant accepting formulation compromises, quality variability, and slower iteration cycles on new flavours. Owning the facility removed those constraints. It also gave the brand control of margin. Refrigerated CPG is a thin-margin business, and the third-party co-packer markup is one of the largest line items in a typical P&L.

The Chocolate Factory has since become part of the brand's external story. The founders regularly film inside the facility, show the lines running, and walk through the supply chain. For retail buyers, the facility is a credibility signal. The brand can scale production, control food safety, and innovate on new SKUs without going back to a co-packer queue. For consumers, it is part of the transparency narrative that defines the brand. Vertical integration is rarely a marketing asset in CPG; Mid-Day Squares has made it one.

What is actually in the lineup

The current Mid-Day Squares range at middaysquares.com is built around five core flavours: Fudge Yah! (a dark chocolate base), Almond Crunch, Peanut Butta, Cookie Dough, and Brookie. The lineup rotates with limited editions through the year, which the brand uses to keep its audience engaged and to test new flavours before deciding whether to put them into national distribution.

Each square is plant-based and gluten-free, made with real chocolate, nut butters, organic cane sugar, and plant-based protein. The single-square format is a 33 gram unit; multi-packs are sold for both retail and direct-to-consumer. The packaging is bright, distinctive, and designed to read clearly inside a refrigerated cooler full of yogurt and snack containers, with high contrast, single-flavour identification, and the brand's recognisable colour system.

The functional positioning matters for shelf placement and for shopper intent. Each square has protein and fibre and is positioned as a mid-day snack rather than a dessert. That framing is what gets the product into the refrigerated grab-and-go set instead of the confectionery aisle.

How Mid-Day Squares stacks up in the snack aisle

Mid-Day Squares competes across two adjacent categories at once: the refrigerated snack cooler and the shelf-stable better-for-you bar aisle. Here is how the options compare for a Canadian shopper:

Formats and sizes reflect each brand's standard flagship SKU per publicly available product listings. Retailer availability reflects Canadian market presence as of June 2026.

What this table makes clear is that almost no one is competing in the same shelf space as Mid-Day Squares. RXBAR, Made Good, and Simply Protein all live in the shelf-stable bar aisle and compete on macros and price. Perfect Bar is the closest format comparator (refrigerated, whole-food, US-based) but has limited and uneven Canadian distribution. Mid-Day Squares is the Canadian-built, refrigerated, founder-led brand sitting alone in the functional-chocolate cooler set.

Why this brand keeps getting retail buyer attention

From the perspective of a grocery category manager, Mid-Day Squares is an unusually low-risk listing. The brand drives its own organic demand through founder content, which means listings tend to turn on shelf without needing heavy retailer-side promotion. The format does not cannibalize an existing high-velocity SKU, because the refrigerated functional chocolate set is mostly empty in the average Canadian banner. And the brand owns its own production, which reduces the supply-risk concern that comes with smaller challenger brands.

That combination (pulled-through demand, low cannibalization, controlled supply) is what has gotten Mid-Day Squares onto the shelf at Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, Whole Foods, Walmart Canada, and Costco. It is a different argument than a typical emerging brand makes to a buyer, and it is the one most independent Canadian CPG founders would benefit from being able to make.

Where the brand lives online

Mid-Day Squares' primary social home is Instagram at @middaysquares, with a parallel long-form presence on YouTube and Jake Karls' very public LinkedIn. The feed mixes product photography with documentary-style behind-the-scenes content from inside the Chocolate Factory, retail wins, and the day-to-day of running the company. Recipes, limited-edition reveals, and collaboration drops sit alongside founder-on-camera content. It is one of the most consistent founder-led brand presences in Canadian CPG and is worth watching for any emerging brand trying to figure out how to build organic demand without paid acquisition budget.

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes directly to a Mid-Day Squares retailer search or the brand's own catalogue (not a homepage), so you can find it without hunting:

For the full lineup, including limited editions and bundles, visit middaysquares.com.

Frequently asked questions

Bottom line

The Mid-Day Squares playbook is one of the clearest case studies in Canadian CPG for building a national refrigerated brand without a traditional category playbook. The three co-founders picked a harder format (refrigerated, not shelf-stable), committed to a harder marketing model (founder-led, daily, in public), and made the hardest operational call available (build the factory, own production). The result is shelf placement at Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro, Whole Foods, Walmart Canada, and Costco for a single-flavour chocolate square that did not exist in 2018. If you are in Canada, Mid-Day Squares on Instacart Canada is the fastest way to taste what they have built.