YouSaid · the spoken record

Gary Hirshberg

lines on the record: 91
first: 2017-10-02
most recent: 2017-10-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“And then his more middle class ones, Steve expects to make one point five million dollars just this year. His company is called Creative Home Engineering, and you can read more about it on our Facebook page, just search how I built this on Facebook. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. We love hearing what you're up to. And thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, you can go to how Ibuelbuiltis.npr.org. Please also”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can install one of these secret doors in front of your spare bedroom or a closet. You hide what you want, and then you trigger the door by remote control. And Steve says he's barely advertised, and he's already selling about one of these a day.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A custom made secret door starts at around $9,000, but Steve's recently introduced a cheap line of his secret doors just fifteen hundred bucks, and they're made to look like anything other than a door.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, Steve is suddenly in his dream job. He's flying around the world, he's working on palatial homes, putting in faults and fingerprint scanners and secret doors for people whose names he cannot reveal.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A hidden gun save. So at this point, Steve started to market his idea. He got a story in a local paper, and within a year, people started to find him.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Steve moved to his parents' place in Mesa, Arizona, and he started to tinker in his dad's garage. And it just so happened that an old high school buddy was building a house nearby, so Steve said, hey, why don't I build you a secret hiding place?”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, at the time, Steve was pretty bored at his day job, so he started to dream of creating a business that would build secret passageways. And he called up some contractor friends and he asked, would your clients possibly be interested in something like this?”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because let's face it, how awesome would it be to have a secret passageway in your house? And the more Steve mulled it over, the more he thought, you know, I bet other people would want one too. So the first thing he did was to Google Secret Passageway Building Companies.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he starts to scoot his chair to the only place that is not on fire, which is the stone fireplace. And then, and I think you know where I'm going with this, the fireplace suddenly spins, and Indiana isn't a whole new room. And this room is full of Nazis. So, this movie was kind of formative for Steve Humble. Steve is a mechanical engineer, and a few years ago he was living in Salt Lake City renting a big house with some friends.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decades, which is Megie, I'm a big girl. I know what I'm doing. It's going to work out. And she was right. Hirschberg, co founder of Stonyfield Yogurt. By the way, earlier this year, Danone sold Stonyfield to another company called Lactalis, one of the biggest dairy companies in the world. And the amount Lactalis paid for Stonyfield, $875 million, which is not bad for a yogurt business that began with just one cow. Please stick around because in just a moment we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And this week our story starts at the movies. So there's a scene in Indiana Jones in the last crusade, and you may have seen it, where Harrison Ford is stuck in a room that has burst into flames.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now realize I got from them was this belief in myself that it didn't matter what was going to happen if yogurt cups were leaking, if stores weren't accepting us, if competition was coming on, if I couldn't meet payroll, you know, there was always going to be a way. And I learned that from both of them. And your mother lies, she's still around? Sadly, she just passed a couple months ago. I'm sorry here. I'm assuming that her million dollars was in the end of very good investment. She did extremely well. She and I still kept secrets. I was she passed at nearly ninety seven, and I can tell you that the risk she took with Stonyfield was probably one of her greatest points of pride. You know, she and Meg used to always have this conversation and Meg begging and pleading our mother not to invest in Doris always had this one line which she had for”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All I wanted was my mother and my mother-in-law to get their money back. I could you not. Now, look, you know, we began this interview by talking about my father and his failed business and all the tragedy that came of that with all the people in my communities. And, you know, I was never a believer that making money was the holy grail. You know, I sit on many boards now. I work with Wall Streeters. And look, I know the best way to convince these guys to invest in organic and renewables is to show you can make a lot of money. And that's basically what you did. I mean, despite all these obstacles that you guys faced. Yeah, I often joke that we had a wonderful company just no supply and no demand. No one knew that there was such a thing as better yogurt, and certainly no one knew what organic was. And yet, it's interesting that my dad and my mom, by the way, in both cases what I now...”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh luck counts for a lot. I mean, I was lucky to meet my incredible wife and her amazing mother. I was lucky to meet Samuel. I was we were lucky to find people who would lend us money despite how silly this was. Skill helps. What made this possible was Samuel and his genius and his incredible skills. Without that superior recipe, none of this could have happened. You and I wouldn't be talking today. So, of course, skill counts, but there's plenty of fantastic entrepreneurs who've failed, who had wonderful skills, but just didn't have good luck.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Greek is not 50% of the yogurt category. The thick, unusual, creamy taste of Greek just caught on. It just simply caught on. I mean, we have a wonderful, incredible Greek line, but it's only for us about 15% of our sales. And while we're not the leader in Greek, we are the leader in organic. I mean, I think we're something like 80% of organic yogurt in the U.S.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my idea was I'll sell my company to you. You buy out all these shareholders and my partner, but you leave me in control. By then I was up to about twenty percent ownership through the earn out. And I said, you know, I have this commitment. I'll stay on for a really long time. But you got to let me keep running the shop. So I talked to 21 companies. 20 of them laughed at me. Actually even Danon laughed at me. The original head of M&A who came to see me said Gary, do you mean to tell me we're going to buy eighty percent of your company and you'll still be in control? And I said yes, and the banker and the lawyers, and everyone laughed. And, you know, two years later that's the deal we signed. I spent two years negotiating with them.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the answer is the 297 shareholders. I mean, some of these folks came in in 1984 without children. Now they have kids going to college, right? I mean, they do need a return on investment. I had no legal obligation, but I felt a moral obligation to. pay them back, and Samuel also was ready to retire.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We hit 44 million dollars in around ninety five. Now we've got stability and cash flow, and this gave us the courage to go back to our roots. Initially with one farmer and eventually now with $1,750 farmers, begin buying organic milk again. And of course, organic has evolved at this point. Whole Foods has become a reality. I mean, the organic sector is real. Yeah. So in 95, we converted back our plain whole milk quarts to organic 96. We converted our small cups. 97. We launched drinks. 98, we're at 78 million in sales. 99 were at 100 million in sales. And that's when I began negotiating with Denan to have them come in.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, by then Samuel and I were down to ten percent each in the company Now we also had stock options like we had an urn back. The end of 89 we began manufacturing in this facility. The business is now doing $3.4 million in sales, but we lost $1.4 million that year. The next year we did six point five million in sales and we lost nine hundred thousand The following year the second full year in the new factory, we did ten point one million and we made one hundred twenty five thousand dollars.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All told, including paying off the debts two and a half million dollars, and opened our new factory nine months later in Londonary, where we are today.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, and I knew that I had to come up with 20% of it with shareholder equity. And I said, I've got the $125,000 from the shareholders, also not quite true. Bill said, well, listen, Gary, if you've got the bank and you've got this plan and you've got the shareholders, then we'll happily do it. I drove from there to the Bank of New England. Sat down, I said, Look, guys, the SBA is going to provide the loan guarantee, and I got the shareholders. Will you do this loan? And they said, well, if the SBA will do it, of course we'll do it. And if you guarantee the equity will do that. Call the shareholders to a meeting in Boston the next night Gut together with as many of them as I could had my mother in law on the speakerphone I said here we are guys we got the bank we got the SBA all we need is your one hundred twenty five thousand”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we had figured out that we could build this factory for 597 thousand dollars. So I drove up to the SBA and I sat down with them and they never, normally you don't go to the SBA. You go to the bank who goes to the SBA, but I sat down, you know, Stonyfield's a pretty popular brand. We're well known in the state. I meet Bill Phillips, the head of the New Hampshire SBA office when he walked in at 7.30 and I said, Bill, here's the deal. We can build this factory for $597,000. We need an 85% loan guarantee. And guess what? We've got a bank, the Bank of New England's willing to lend us. That was a little bit of an exaggeration. This is stone soup. You know the story.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the car, we're driving in this. I'm driving, he's designing. We got back to the house about 10 30, 11 at night. He goes in to make yogurt. I go in to see Meg. She wakes up. The deal signed? Is it done? I said, no, no, no, no. That deal is not going to happen, but we've got a much better idea. I slept alone that night over in my office, and the next morning at 7 a.m. I was up at the SBA office in Concord, New Hampshire, the Small Business Administration. Remember, they will guarantee loans to businesses, so they make it possible for banks to lend to high risk, which we certainly were.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, this is the darkest of the dark of hours. We're burning $25,000 a week. We're taking money we cannot ever pay back. We have to go back to this farm. We have no solution. And so I turned to Samuel and I said, listen, Samuel, just for the fun of it, what would be the cheapest yogurt plant we could build somewhere that would actually cover our capacity? And he said, you know, I was thinking the same thing, so he flicked on the dome light in the car, pulls out his pad, and we start designing a yogurt plant.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, and he said, well, I guess I'll do something in sales. And my heart sunk, right? This is a guy who had created this incredible yogurt. I mean, he was a genius who was making the most perfect product, and now he's going to sell widgets.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're stealing it And all the while they're looking at me, and one guy's winking at me like, you know, do the deal, son, it's in your best interest. You know, your wife's back there desperate for you to solve this. Just be smart. Samuel had not even come into the room. I got up, uttered some things I can't say on public radio, and grabbed Samuel. And got in the car, and we started driving. Now, of course, as luck would have it, don't you know, an April blizzard has started, and so no cars are on the road. We've now got a two-hour drive back. And worse than that, one of us is going to have to make yogurt that night. And worse than that, I have to face my wife. And so we start driving. I turned to him, I said, what will you do now? Because I knew we were going to have to sign the deal. I knew it was over”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Take over what we're going to do is have all of your shareholders convert their stock into debt, and you are welcome to work down their debt with a credit of one penny per cup for every cup may. We figure it will take two years. At the end of the two years, we'll negotiate your future employment. So it wasn't a deal, it was a steal.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where the beginning of this relief is going to happen, I said, absolutely, we have nailed down every last detail, drove up to Vermont. When I got there, Samuel went into the restroom at their lawyer's office, and I looked at my seat instead of the two inch thick agreement that we were going to go over, there was a letter to me and said, Dear Gary, and bottom line is dear Gary and Samuel, basically they decided to trade to steal the company from us. They said we've decided that you guys need us more than we need you. We're going to...”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like money she could never afford to lose everything they had. And Meg comes to me at the door and as we're leaving, she says, you promise this is done, right? I mean, because I've been milking every other night, right? No vacations, no breaks, no nothing. So I'm leaving now to go sign this deal. Meg said, you promised me that all the details I worked out, that when you come back tonight,”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And we ultimately found one. It was a dairy in northern Vermont. And we negotiated for three months with this dairy in northern Vermont to become the answer to this whole thing, namely they would produce our yogurt. Samuel and I would focus on sales and marketing. And we would become partners. And they would get paid a price for every cup of yogurt. And just like the other dairy. But this was a much larger $70 million company. So D-Day comes in April of 88 to go up and get this deal signed. And we had negotiated a deal that was about two inches thick. And I went up. Sam and I left the farm. Now, at this point, Meg is pregnant with son number one. And of course, I've got now, I now have over a million dollars of her mother's money.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my summary of that story and so many others of this period is simply, if you don't ask, you don't get. And desperation breeds this thing where you just have no shame anymore. You have to ask. And now I'll just tell you the punchline of that story is those guys have sold us in the 30 years since they've sold us probably 250 or $300 million worth of fruit.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“$50,000 a year customer for you within six months. So here's what I'm prepared to do. I would like to see if you would advance us another $125,000 of fruit. I will pay you back starting at six months at your interest rate, whatever you want to charge, which is a joke because nobody, no commercial bank would even lend to us. I said, I will pledge my stock as collateral, which was a joke because it was a liability, not an asset. And finally, I said, and I will pledge that I will buy exclusively from you, not from anyone else. Well, that was a joke, because no one else would ever sell to us. And they said, well, Gary, that's an interesting offer. They said, could you mind if we go up and talk? And they went into the back room, and son of a gun, half an hour later, they came out and said, you know what, we believe in you. We're going to do it.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I stayed in constant touch with every single shareholder. I was in constant contact with my creditors. I couldn't pay fruit suppliers, I couldn't pay you know our fruit supplier had lost seventy five thousand dollars when that dairy went chapter seven. And somehow they had not been paying attention and they continued to ship us fruit back up at the farm. So they figured it out three months later that they were now into us for $125,000. And I said, look, I can't pay it, but can I come out and talk to you? And I borrowed a credit card from a friend and flew out because we certainly had no credit, flew out to Cleveland and met with the fruit people and I said, look, here's the bad news. We owe you $125,000. But here's the good news. They said, at our current growth rate, if we can meet orders, we will be a 200.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Every one of them, and you know what you have to know at the punchline of this story is that I wound up by the end of this period with 297 individual investors. There was no way to find common ground with an institutional investor, right, a venture capitalist. Believe me, I knocked on every door.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, by Christmas of 87, you know, running this factory for two months, I can tell you we were already $600,000 in debt by Christmas of 88. We were one point nine million dollars in debt. Of the next year, we were 2.7 Million dollars in debt”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Embrace yourself for this. We started burning $25,000 a week. On top of the two hundred thousand that we had borrowed. So now I am in deep, you know what?”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At risk. So Monday morning we begin production again at Stonyfield Farm. Now the problem is in order to keep up, we have to produce 24 hours a day. Seven days a week. Samuel or I had to make yogurt every other night, and Guy this began and continued for twenty months, and we started burning”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. But that didn't daunt us. That weekend, Samuel and I put on our carpenter's aprons, went out and kicked the roosters out and restarted the old yogurt factory. Fortunately, the equipment was still there. And by Monday morning, so it was $100,000 that we had to borrow to pay off the dairy, and then we had to put about $100,000 into getting this place up and running again. We borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. And, you know, I went to all the shareholders and, you know, of course, they had no choice but to lend because everything they had ever put in was.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have no yogurt. We have what was in the factory. So, what could we do? We took a look at the old yogurt works up on the hilltop farm. Where the roosters were now living and said, son of a gun, we got to come back here. Now, by then, our volume had grown to 100% more when it had been exceeded.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it came to a screaming halt. Worse than that, I had to come up with a hundred thousand dollars to take my inventory out of the building. Because again, we owed them co-packing fees. Now the bank's the owner. And so I had to call my shareholders and find $100,000 within hours. And so I did. We got our inventory out. But now we have no factory.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Producing our yoga. And I said, no, we don't have the cash to buy their dairy. And I said, why? Are you asking? She said, well, they're in their third year of their small business administration loan guarantee, and the SBA has announced they're not going to renew it. And therefore, our bank, my boss, is going to have to pull our loan to him. And that means that he's probably not going to make it. The next morning at 7 a.m., their bank went in and put them into Chapter 7. Padlock the place, locked it up, my cups, my lids, my fruit, my yogurt was in there. But suddenly this thing is in receivership”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. But now we round the bend into the fall of eighty seven, October of eighty seven, a fateful weekend, the weekend of the crash of eighty seven and Wall Street. But what happened for us was on the Thursday night of that weekend, Becky Capeless, the banker for our manufacturer's bank, called me up at the farm and said, Gary, would you like to buy this dairy?”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so spring of'86 we are out of capacity, we contracted with a little dairy in western Massachusetts, Greenfield mass. We were desperate. We did not do any of the financial due diligence one would normally do. We just got our way in there and we started making yogurt. And boy, it was great. I mean, all of a sudden paved roads. Regular power, dairy, and we thought we were coming out of the woods. Yeah.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so now I'm going to jump a year and a half. We've now expanded the plant. We're buying milk from ten or twelve farms. I'm going to guess, let me just tell you the number. We are at about a 1.3 million dollar a year run rate. Wow. And we have maxed out this little farm. There is no, you cannot squeeze another drop of yogurt out of this place.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here. Well, I'll say this. Meg, you know, fortunately loved me, even more fortunately probably loved the yogurt. And we had nowhere else to go. She had given up her job down on her farm in New Jersey and signed on to this crazy damn enterprise. But here's where the story, if I know that you think it couldn't get worse, but as... Lily Talman says it got a lot worse before it got worse. Okay, what happened?”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, because Look, she's living in a nightmare. I mean, she saw how crazy it was. I mean, we had chimney fires. We had the well pump would go out. The power would go. I mean, we're on this hilltop farm a long way from anywhere.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. You know, what happened in this farmhouse, I always had payroll on Thursday mornings. And by this point, it was a half a million dollar business. And I never had cash in the bank that night before payroll. Never. This became our way of life. And so thinking Meg was asleep in our bedroom, which was about 50 feet from my office. on many occasions tiptoe over to the office to call my mother-in-law To have a chat to see if I could borrow another $3,500 or $2,500 to make ends meet. And eventually, Meg got onto this. And one night I heard the click click of Call waiting on my mother-in-law's phone. And Meg was calling from the house to say, Mom, don't do this.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, you know what? That makes a guy pretty practical. You know, venture capitalists, the reason they want what they call F&F money first, friends and family money? Is because they know that you might as an entrepreneur if things get rough, you might just get up and walk away if it's some Harvard MBA with a tie. But if it's your mother's money, uh-uh. And so, no, we worked for our moms.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, honestly, we had no conditions. We were beggars, not choosers. At this moment in Stoneyfield's life we briefly departed from organic.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so the next morning we reached out to a local jersey farmer because we were using all Jersey cow milk at that point. And said, Look, will you buy our cows and start selling us milk? Well, he said, I'm not going to have anything to do with that organic stuff. And he was fine with hormone free, antibiotic free, but he didn't want to feed his cows herbs and biorganic feed.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, at that point, we were up to 19, but. One night in this same era, Samuel was out milking. He had milked the first of the nineteen cows and the power went out. Samuel came in and said, you know, I need help because he has these electric milkers. So Louise and I went out and started milking. Well, you know, it was freezing. The cows hated it. If you haven't hand-milked, let me tell you, it was a nightmare. The cows were kicking over the buckets. We had these kerosene lanterns in this fire trap barn. You know, every once in a while the cow would kick one over and the milk would spill on the lanterns. And we finished milking the last cow at about 3 a.m. in time to start milking the first one. And that was the night when we realized, you know what, we got to sell the cows.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT