Melissa Bartow Net Worth & Shark Tank

Publish date: 2024-07-07

What is Melissa Bartow’s net worth?

Introduction

For many people, the idea of being the CEO of a company in their early 20s can sound like one of two things: a pipe dream or a nightmare.

That is why when people hear about the story of Melissa Bartow, they are instantly impressed.

At the age of 23, Bartow was the CEO of her own company, Wanna Date?

This company has quickly expanded to become one of the most popular of its kind.

They are a company that spends a lot of time building high-quality food products backed by the innovation and energy of Bartow herself.

This quick Melissa Bartow bio can help you understand why she is now one of the most recognizable CEOs in the world of food in America.

The Origin Story

One thing to note about Melissa Bartow is that she is not a person who puts a lot of personal information out there in public.

Almost nothing is known about her personal life, her birth date, or anything else really.

She maintains her life as a purely professional business owner, avoiding telling the world everything about her personal life.

As mentioned above, Bartow is the CEO of the Wanna Date. Company.

She hails from Kennesaw, Georgia, a small town in the state, before deciding to take the plunge and move to New York City.

Whilst in NYC, she attended New York University. Naturally, moving from such a small town to the major metropolis that is NYC was a major shock to the system for the young dynamo.

However, she quickly found that she was enjoying life in a whole new way. One thing that really sparked her future, though, was her introduction to the New York food scene.

Quickly after arriving, she began shopping at stores like Whole Foods, coming across foods that she had never heard of or tried in the past. One food that she came across, though, was sweet dates – a food that is increasing in popularity in America but is still somewhat unknown.

In trying her first sweet dates, though, Bartow was hooked – she loved them.

She thought they were incredible, and in her junior year of university, she came up with the idea of making her own company that sold dates.

Working within the food service industry at the time, Bartow came up with a pretty simple idea: why not combine something sweet with something healthy?

This was further cemented in her mind as the way to go when she noticed that a big seller in the food service industry was a mixture of acai and Nutella.

She loved the idea of adding the decadent sweetness of Nutella to the acai bowl. So, in her mind, why not try and do something similar with some dates?

Getting Ahead Of The Curve

So, having seen that many people were now enjoying eating foods such as avocado, Bartow was keen to work out how good for you a date actually was.

She knew that people were becoming more health conscious, and thus, she was eager to find a way to put together healthy foods with something that was genuinely tasty.

Looking around the food market as a junior, she started to see some great ideas.

One, though, was that dates were becoming more and more popular.

If she was going to act by taking her idea on the road, she would need to be quick. Having noted in the past that if she had failed to act on this, then she would “be kicking herself,” Bartow got to work on trying to create her dream business idea.

Working on her coursework at NYU, she also began to work on the mixture of blending dates.

These date spreads would be a sweet spread, not unlike something like a Nutella spread, that could be put on anything from bread and toast to bagels and more.

She even thought that some people, like Nutella, might just start eating the stuff straight out of the jar!

She started to add some other flavors and add-ons to the date spread.

This included adding things as varied as chocolate, cinnamon, and even vanilla.

This soon created a range of different flavors that would be very different from anything else on the market at that time.

Very quickly, then, the young university junior had come up with a business plan and an idea that, if marketed right, could be an absolute game-changer!

Commercial Success

What made Bartow become so well-known to the public, though, was an appearance on Shark Tank.

She found herself in front of some of the biggest names in US business.

One person standing in front of her was Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and one of the most recognizable faces on Shark Tank.

Cuban has been known for making ambitious offers to people in the past, and Bartow was soon to find out that Cuban could be a very interesting business ally.

Cuban offered Bartow $125,000 for a 33% stake in the company.

Luckily for Bartow, the episode aired just as the 2020 events hit. While it was a brutal time for us all, for Bartow, it helped to put her business on the map.

People were stuck inside looking for ways to pass the time, and plenty of people were looking for treats that they could enjoy that they would not normally have considered eating.

So, Bartow soon found herself launching her new product on a market that was very excited to see what her food would taste like.

Very quickly, she launched the Wanna Date? brand, and it was found in various stores – including in Whole Foods Market, where she had previously shopped as a university junior!

One of the stores that had given Bartow her inspiration was now stocking the very product that she was creating.

Very quickly, then, the brand spread and became a bit of a sensation during those times. Even after all passed, this date spread is still extremely popular – it offers a sweet, fun alternative to food products that people are already eating.

Bartow, then, is an example of a young entrepreneur who followed her idea to create a food product that quickly became very popular.

For that reason, she stands out as one of the leading young entrepreneurial minds out there, having taken a product that nobody else was creating to build a very popular brand of decadent treats that people can enjoy.