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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, the little we called it the yogurt works, the little shop. You know, it was a drafty old barn. We needed to switch over from wood to oil. We needed to just get more modern. We needed to get the warehouse, the barn made sanitary. We had to get real floor drains. We had to stop being a kind of a kitchen operation.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My mother in law, excuse me. And I started raising and I got to about $275, $300. This is sort of a month or so later. She said, well, I think we can increase. And so she increased to 100. And eventually I got across the finish line, got the 500.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we began courting and Thanksgiving that year in 84 Meg introduced me to her family and her mom had been the Deputy Commissioner of Agriculture for New York State. So she had a kind of an ag orientation. At one point she kind of whispered to me that she'd be okay with if I needed some money with lending me some. Well, of course I needed money. So she loaned us $50,000. And now we're heading into 1985, we've now launched small cups of flavored yogurt. I now needed to raise about 500,000 because we needed to buy more cups, more fruit. You know, people expected us to pay. So Doris had loaned us the 50 towards the 500,000.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So a month after that fateful meeting with Bread and Circus, we had our summer NOFA conference, Northeast Organic Farming Association Conference. And as it turned out, I was the keynote speaker. And so I started talking about this enterprise, this business that was now a year old. And, you know, all of the dreams of organic farmers, we were sort of like, I didn't talk about our financial problems. I just showed that this is possible, that if you build it, they will come. And right after I finished my speech, this very adorable organic farmer from New Jersey, who was running her own nonprofit farm down there, waited patiently to ask me a question. Well, that turned out to be what is now my 31-year wife, Meg.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, actually, by the way, the six kids were the secret weapon because it was sort of indentured servity. I mean, you know, it was hard, if they were going to have dinner that night, it was hard for them to say no to milking or making. And by the way, several of his kids are just absolutely astonishingly good yogurt makers. They had their father and mother's sense of pride in the product.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About a month later, we were her number one selling yogurt. She took us in the other two bread and circuses, and off we went. But it was my frisbee team. I mean, you know, that's what it takes. I always say we can ship the yogurt 3,000 miles. It's the last 18 inches that makes all the difference. You get it in people's mouths and then they're going to ask for it.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So until July of'84 I had my thirtieth birthday at the farm and I had my old ultimate frisbee team come up to visit me, most of whom lived in Cambridge, as you might imagine. And I said, look, it's wonderful you've all come. If you want to give me a really good birthday present, go under bread and circus on prospects in Cambridge and ask for my yogurt. That was on a Sunday. On Wednesday, Mary Carol Skinner, the buyer of bread and circus, called and said, Gary, I don't know what's going on, but demand has suddenly gone through the roof. We're getting all kinds of requests for your yogurt. Get it. When can you get it in there? Well, I got in my car and I made the first delivery that afternoon.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those days, Whole Foods didn't exist yet, but the holy grail for natural products was a little three-store chain called bread and circus, which eventually became part of Whole Foods. And they had one store in Cambridge on Prospect Street. And you know, we were selling now to Dumulus Market Baskets. This is now, I'm talking July of 84. And we were desperately trying to get down there because we knew that if we could crack bread and circus, every other little natural foods co-op in New England would then take us in. And we kept going down there and they said, no, no, no. We've already got hippie yogurt made by somebody in Vermont in their tepee with their wet goat. You know, they didn't need another, you know, organic yogurt from some crazy people in New Hampshire.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my god, you have no idea. Yeah, we were burning. I mean, I kept not weekly cash flows, not daily cash flows. I kept hourly cash flows. I knew on a Wednesday morning how much money had to come in that afternoon. In order for us, because by then the cup guy had figured out, you know, Samuel wasn't paying him. So now we were on very short terms with everybody. I mean, my fundraising skills turn out to be, you know, I mean, we were on fumes”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six packs. Six packs of quartz. So by the end of 84, we're our run rate was headed in the sort of half a million dollar range.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be honest, Mr. De Millis, we don't have enough cows. He said, well, get some more goddamn cows. And he slammed the phone down. And we took that as very good business advice. So we went out and grew our herd even further. And so we now realize we needed to get serious about this. And so we managed to lease a small refrigerator truck and started delivering actually to the market basket warehouse.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, by eighty four we were starting to push the boundaries. We're selling to about 20 stores. And eventually we started selling to an independent grocer who had seven stores called Alexander Supermarkets, now part of Hannahford in the northeast. And this will give you the real flavor for what was going on here. So one Sunday night we were having dinner at the Caymans after milking. And the phone rings and Jack Demoulis, the nephew of the... Owner of the Demullus market basket chain, Mr. Calls and says, Samuel, why are you selling to my competitor? This little seven store chain of Alexander's and not to me? Now he had 34 stores at the time, and Samuel said, well,”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we thought we were going to value it at a million dollars. By then, in nineteen eighty four, our sales were up to around $250,000 a year.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we did because one of the things I did was I hired a lawyer because I knew we didn't know what we were doing. And the first thing this lawyer said to me was he said, Gary, what percentage of the Rural Education Center's revenue is coming from the yogurt? Well, at that point, it was getting close to 75%. And he said, well, guess what? You've got to spin it off because under IRS rules, that makes you a business, not a nonprofit. So Samuel and I realized we're going to have to buy this from the rural education center. So we agreed to a split in the company, essentially fifty fifty, and then I went out to our lenders of the $125K, and I said, look, will you take stock in this company? And we did our first private placement, you know, threw a dart at the wall figure. Out the value of the business”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know high net worth individuals out there. Look, what I told them was very simple. I said, you know, the first 10 years of our work was all about proving that you can grow food organically. But if we're going to be successful with this revolution, I said to the funders who had gotten us there, then we're going to have to prove that you can actually make money doing it. And we're going to have to build a model enterprise that will show that you can avoid the use of pesticides, avoid the use of hormones with cows, support family farmers, not depend on fossil fuels, etc., etc. All the things that we were doing in the nonprofit context, I said, you know, this is, I'd like to ask you to join us in the next phase, which is helping us to build a successful business. And instead of asking for a grant, I'm asking you for a loan. And I wound up borrowing $125,000.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, Samuel had a handful of folks who had been his funders. Like I said, he raised $125,000 a year. So they were probably 20 or 30 wealthy individuals. And then I had raised a million dollars a year. So I had...”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I did what any self respecting entrepreneur does. I called my mother. And I borrowed $30,000 from her, which she could ill afford as I told you before. She was her own businesswoman with four family. But, you know, I had a good fundraising skill. So I went to many of my former funders and many of his, and I said, look, can we? Can we borrow”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yes, the farm, sorry, yes, of course. And it's still there. So I spent the morning separating, I thought, the checks from the bills. The only problem was there were no checks. Samuel, any money that had come in, he had used it to buy feed or lubrication equipment, fuel, wood, whatever. And by 11 a.m. that morning, my first day, I calculated that we were $75,000 in the red.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, he had to pay for grain to feed the cows. He had to pay this guy to drive the cows. and bring the yogurt, as I told you before, he wasn't paying for his cups, but he had to pay people to help. And the $35,000 had sort of disappeared overnight. Honestly, I don't know how he got through five months because when I arrived on september fifteenth of 83, Samuel had these old army surplus desks in this farmhouse. The three desks were piled high with envelopes, unopened mail. I said, okay, I'm now the executive director of the Rural Education Center, and the vice president of Stonyfield Farm. And I'm going to spend my first”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my gosh, the product was selling through, but he couldn't keep up, and he was out of cash, and of course he wasn't paying bills.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And eventually, the hardwoods people called and said, Gosh, you know, this is good. It's selling. By the way, way below the price that we could afford. So Samuel said, great. So we eventually hired a young local guy to drive a van. We couldn't afford a refrigerator van, so we just told him to drive fast. But yeah, so by the time I got there five months into this thing, Samuel had probably about fifty thousand dollars of sales.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And drove down to the local supermarket to Harwood's and said, would you guys sell this stuff? Well, they didn't know what the heck this was. And they said, what price should we sell at it? And Samuel said, I don't know, whatever price you think. I mean, we were not business people. Started selling at $1.49 a quart, which is the same price Danon was selling for. By the way, he was only making quarts, six packs of plain cream on top yogurt. It was like ambrosia guy. It was the most incredibly perfect product still the best thing we make.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we started with one cow. Sammy used the money to buy six more cows. So now he's milking seven. He finances this little tiny factory in a tiny little room that you could only really describe as a closet in a seventeen ninety two barn with a wood-fired boiler. And the way it worked was he put in a 50 gallon stainless steel tank. We bought plastic cups and Samuel was a very charming and persuasive guy and after paying for his first shipment of cups he managed to somehow get continue to get shipments for five months without paying for any more. He started producing April 9th, 1983 and took his first six packs of yogurt.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I moved into a three story wood heated log cabin with no plumbing, and I put solar cells on it and And the Cayman family lives there, and our interns are there. It's one big kind of happy, crazy cow milking yogurt making operation.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the Sisters of Mercy, which you'll hear in a moment, the appropriate name, they were taking mercy on these two crazy entrepreneurs. They were selling their monastery, and they were wanted to turn their principal into local community action. And Samuel used that money to build the first yogurt works. And about the time that the money came in, which was April of'83, when we opened, I decided that I was pretty interested in joining him full time, not so much to run the yogurt, but I thought that I could help him run his farming school while he did this little fun yogurt venture. So I said, look, I'm going to join you in September.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nigh impossible to raise money during that period. And, you know, seemed like a pretty good idea. So Samuel was able to get some Catholic nuns to provide a $25,000 grant”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From his one cow, and we would sit at these board meetings eating bulls of this absolutely incredible plain cream on top whole milk yogurt. And just to back up one step, Samuel is originally from Brooklyn, grew up very poor in Flatbush, but he got to know a lot of these old Jewish yogurt makers down there. And they taught him yogurt making. And what they explained to him is it's very simple. It's all about the Veda, meaning times and temperatures. It's about the weather, the humidity, the temperatures, and he and so Samuel for his family and for the school experimented with yogurt for many years. And one day, and unfortunately none of us can remember who, but one of us said, gee, why don't we start selling this stuff to make up for the lack of grant money?”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, right about that time Ronald Reagan came into office and essentially cut off the lifeline for sustainable energy research, sustainable ag so essentially money dried up. for these nonprofits and so we would sit at Samuel's board meetings up at the Rural Education Center and by the way critical to this whole story he had one cow named Lillibel and Samuel was experimenting with yogurt and he was a fermentation nutcase I mean he made sauerkraut beer wine kimchi if it fermented he made it and when I say he made it he made incredible foods and he made this wonderful yogurt”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh yes, he's about sixteen years older. Samuel At that time had six kids. I was a single guy. But, you know, we became fast friends, and he asked me if I would join the Board of the Rural Education Center to help him with his money raising.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, it was a nonprofit. So we were each running nonprofits, but I got really excited by his work, and of course he was back here in my native New Hampshire, which I loved.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, so he was mostly teaching organic farming methods, raised beds, biological pest controls, greenhouse season extending, basically kind of back to the land type stuff, but with an organic focus.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at the time there was a little ecological research institute on Cape Cod called the New Alchemy Institute, and they were advancing the idea of using wind and solar power, building really sustainable food systems long before those words were in our vernacular, and I went from a windmill apprentice to windmill technician to executive director. And I saw them on the cutting edge of how we were going to need to grow food in the future.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but stick with it because it turns out that it was probably the best training for an entrepreneur that there is, because this is a school that has no credits, no requirements, no grades. You only pass matriculate through by contracting and making progress with individual professors who take you on their. Essentially apprentice and in many cases the funding of work. I mean, I wound up diving deep into ecology and environmental sciences. And turns out I was though hating business still and thinking, you know, again, now I thought getting educated, I realized, my God, we're warming the planet, we're toxifying, we're depleting water, we're disturbing biodiversity everywhere. It's all because of industry. So I was sort of radicalizing in my environmental beliefs, but actually getting business skills all the while.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went off to a college that was just an overtly liberal arts sort of non-business environment. It was Hampshire College. Oh, yeah.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I started to think about running as far as I possibly could away from it. You know, obviously the bankruptcy didn't happen overnight. It was a result of a steady decline and my grandfather, my father, and my uncle were all in the business. And I used to sit or work there, and I would listen to them screaming at each other. They were arguing passionately about what to do, about this downturn. And so to me, business was this thing where people yelled at each other. People hung up phones on each other. People were stressed. Employees lost their jobs. And on top of that serious pollution. Led me to really pursue a career in the sciences, environmental sciences.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, so curse again because my dad's business was gone now, so you know there was a huge amount of attention, there was lots of battling over alimony, which for money that didn't exist. So she wound up becoming a buyer for a local family-owned hotel chain actually close friends of ours, which eventually sold to Sheraton. And gradually she parried that into becoming ultimately the senior buyer for Sheraton worldwide. And then from there, she became the senior buyer for Disney for the Epcot Center. Wow. When they built that, so yeah, she was like literally, you know, a mom with five kids running a little general store part-time as kind of a hobby to becoming a global executive.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they were certainly comfortable. I was a ski racer. I wasn't ever worrying certainly about the next meal. And we traveled up north on weekends for skiing. We had a home on a lake. But yeah, the world, I mean, I think everybody at 14, any conscious being starts to, that your life undergoes changes. But in my case, they were kind of expedited. My father began drinking. And so I had to sort of confront all of that. Watched sort of all the rocks just suddenly turn to mush. You know, my mom became a single mom with five kids. I was the oldest.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was really a threefer. The family's business went bankrupt. My parents got divorced. And my sort of childhood role model died suddenly of spinal meningitis. So it was a wake-up year.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These were true company towns. Of course, in those days, manufacturing was, you know, the state was built and the region and the country were built on things that we made. And the dark side of that is that when essentially because of cheaper labor from abroad, when the domestic shoe industry collapsed, all these communities did as well.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it was in those days, they were probably 50 shoe manufacturers in New Hampshire alone and probably 150 in New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On many occasions, I would 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 one night I heard the click click of Carl waiting on my mother-in-law's phone, and Meg was calling from the house to say, Mom, don't do this. Wait.”
2017-10-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT