YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Woolverton

lines on the record: 126
first: 2023-04-17
most recent: 2023-04-17
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

“I think that it was somewhere pretty close. I don't remember it being quite that dramatic because we did have a steady climb in store growth. I couldn't tell you what percentage of stores.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Sprouts was my crown jewel before when it was just me, and we got kicked out. We just didn't sell enough for him. Yeah, it was very demoralizing.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so every negative stereotype and every fear I had about working with a VC firm came true indeed when we got their offer sheets. And worse, they thought the product should be marketed toward the senior citizen market just like those insure protein shakes. So that certainly wasn't my vision for Halo Top. The fun thing is to say, yeah, the company would have sunk. That's so dramatic. But really, we would have just taken money from An entity that would have steered us in a very weird direction.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's kind of a mixture of the two. I still really believed in the stuff that I was, I don't know if I ever would have been able to give up on it. I just thought it was such a slam dunk. It wouldn't be so much that the company would go under, but we would have had to get in bed with the wrong people. An example is I don't want to sell them out, but the founders of a major, major company that everybody's heard of met them for lunch and they were going to invest a million in the company, which would have saved the company. But of course They wanted control. I'm a control freak, 100% control. I didn't want to give up any control. You know, these guys are sharks. That's their business. You can't hate on them. This is just what they do”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're mostly friends and family. And I didn't want to give up control of the company whatsoever, so we did not want to get in bed with venture capital firms unless we absolutely had to gun to our heads, you know.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so we actually raised our first round and we raised two rounds of money, totaling a million, which is really not a lot. And it was a combination of that was kind of all we could get. So for example, we raised a little bit of money in 2013 and we raised money in 2015.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The entire company was funded by my legal salary and my credit card debt. And the good thing about being a lawyer is that you have high income and you get huge credit limits. I guarantee you my credit card companies really regretted that. But I was funding it through my legal salary and through about $300,000 in credit card lines, credit card debt. And as could be expected, that eventually ran out. You know, we were kind of hanging by a thread in a number of stores. Your sales are just on the cusp to where we could almost discontinue you or lower your skew count. So, yeah, it was not a runaway success by any stretch.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took about six weeks, all of these things in the food business. It moves like an aircraft carrier, not like a little boat. By the time we were able to make it and by the ingredients for it, put in a packaging, get it into stores, you know, it took nine months. So even though that was done in 2014, the new recipe didn't hit until 2015.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were trying to use different ingredients and adjusting some ingredients just to make it more resilient through the supply chain. And the big challenge too was we had to use quote-unquote all-natural ingredients, which is, again, a problematic term. But what I mean by that is Whole Foods approved ingredients. They kind of set the bar for what all natural is. And there were some ingredients that would have been simple additions to make Halo top more resilient, but that I wouldn't be able to stay in Whole Foods if I had used that ingredient.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, yeah. I went up to good old Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It's really cool. They have a dairy science department. We signed an NDA. I went up there with my recipe and doing the testing at this place was just so seamless. And it was a pretty funny experience. Like when I went and parked by the dairy science building, I almost hit a cow. Like I pulled into the spot and this cow's snout was hanging over the curb and I almost ran into the poor guy. Very agricultural, you know.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was kind of like starting to be a come to Jesus moment where it's like, I do not understand why this stuff is not selling the way it should sell. And especially with how good it tastes off the line. And really it just came down to this supply chain issue to where you never knew what you were going to get. Like half the pints were rock hard, another 20% were chalky and just kind of ruined. So that was the big, that's why 2013 and 2014 was by no means a runaway success. There were some financial difficulties, especially with cash flow. But it really, I think, came down to the fact that we didn't have much of a marketing budget and the product just needed to be more resilient through the supply chain. And it was at that point I realized I need to get serious with a food scientist here.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, no, let's do Halo top, end of story. And the funny thing is, in retrospect, even my close friends, when I'm like, you know, the top is a lid. So it's like a gold lid. So it's like the top is a halo. They're like, I had no idea that was even the case. I had no idea. And 50% of the population still calls it halo anyway, like Halo ice cream. So this whole fight over Halo Top was pretty much for nothing.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When they sent me the cease and assist, my marketer said, okay, let's stay with the heavenly angelic concept. Eden is four letters. Why don't we just go with Halo, H-A-L-O creamery? I said, well, okay, first Halo to me is a video game. You know, second, maybe there's some trademark issues with that because it's a very basic name. And I thought HaloTop rolled off the tip of the tongue and the gold lids were kind of like the top was a halo. So I was like, let's do halopo.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I deserve it. It was very, very stupid of me. Was a very stupid thing to do. And then when it happened, I was like, you know, maybe I can fight this because Eden Creamery, you know, they don't make any perishable or frozen products. And I was like, this is going to cost $100,000 at minimum just to fight. And again, this thing is bootstrapped. No chance. Yeah, I had to cave. And yes, it was very stupid to pick that name”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know what? This is actually back in 2012, right after I got that first distributor. So it was an absolute nightmare. I mean, thank God it came earlier rather than later. But they basically said, look, you can't use the name Eden. We make Eden chili and Eden pasta and Eden soy and all of this stuff.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's really hard to make money. The real money is made in the Kroger's and the Walmarts, you know. But it's very cool to be able to say that you're in Whole Foods, and it definitely helps the brand image”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of 2012, I basically somehow convinced Sprouts not only to carry me, but that I could make enough ice cream for them. They were like, can you make enough to handle 300 more stores? And I'm like, of course, I could do it tomorrow. And then I was told by Whole Foods and Norcal in your region, actually, that they were going to bring me in. And I just realized at that point, I physically couldn't do it alone. So I started kind of looking to bring on somebody out there. And Doug was obviously from riding me and from already being in LA and with his legal background was definitely on my radar for the first person I would bring on.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in late 2012, through 2012, I had basically gotten into about 80 stores, like I said, and I still thought I could do it myself. But at the end of 2012, I had a little miniature boom. In the natural foods world, there are kind of two major store chains. It's Whole Foods and it's sprouts.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, he kind of worked at a firm similar to mine, and he actually emailed me for two reasons. Number one was he was leaving his firm to start his own law practice and he was pitching me as a client, which was actually very, very intriguing because I was going to need investment pretty soon. And the second thing was he was involved with a startup that was at the spot that I was in like a year, year and a half prior, and was looking for advice on like, hey, how do you get into a store, kind of the basic questions?”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, alright, so you've got now this label, this Eden ice cream. And it gets around this time. This is around 2013. You bring on a partner, because you were doing this by yourself more or less up to this point.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And that's the big catch 22 of starting a food beverage company is in order to get a store, typically a store chain, you need a distributor. And in order to get a distributor, you need a store chain. So what you really need to do is convince some store chain that they really want your stuff so much that they force the distributor to basically take it on. And that's what happened.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Until I got a distributor, which came a few months later, which was crucial, obviously, I was literally hand delivering ice cream all the way up in some cases to a store called Lassen's Inventura. So I would seriously just have, I had so many coolers in my house at this point. I never thought I'd own so many coolers, but I would have a big cooler of ice cream load it into the back of my trunk, put a bunch of dry ice in the cooler because it had to stay perfectly frozen and go make deliveries around LA. And so I'm just basically cold calling everybody. And I reached a point, I think I got into about just like 20, 25 stores on my own. And then I got into a certain chain that was big enough that they then forced their distributor to take me on.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I varied between the two, you know. Because low calorie is more accurate, but healthy. The words were always awkward to say. How do you actually term this stuff?”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Vicky's there, and that was my first sales meeting. I realized how long they can be. I was probably sitting there for like an hour and a half, two hours while everybody in the store kind of came around and tried it. But they were absolutely awesome. And it was a small chain. It's not like a big chain where it's like, we're going to take you and you hit shelves in four months, so get prepared. She was like, yeah, we'll take it. We'll give you all four flavors. You could put it on the shelf next week. And so literally, in the span of a week, I was now selling ice cream on the shelf. And like two days later, I had a little folding table and an apron on, and I'm scooping ice cream for people saying, hey, try healthy ice cream that doesn't taste healthy or some cornball thing like that.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I started with vanilla bean, chocolate, strawberry, and lemon cake. Got it. Because it was kind of received wisdom back then that, of course, you do vanilla and chocolate, then you do a fruit, and then you, for your fourth, you do an experimental flavor. Mine was lemon cake, and it was actually the most popular flavor for a long time”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, that's not the way that it went. So I'm making this nervous phone call, and I remember her name was Vicki at Erewhon, and she was just fantastic. She's like, oh, honey, just come in every Tuesday from 2 to 4 p.m. and we'll try it. And that was how it worked.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the hell to say on the phone just like how do you even broach the subject? And number two, in the back of my mind, I'm like, I just devoted six months to making this stuff. What if nobody wants it? What if nobody will carry it? Because, you know, I couldn't go to a store ahead of time and say, hey, I've got this concept. Would you carry it if I made it? It doesn't work like that. And I didn't know any store buyers.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Natural food store. Natural food store bougie $25 salads, all that. And I called, and I'm so nervous for this call because number one, I don't know.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, I thought that that would be too slow, so I just called stores directly, not really very, very nervously. I remember my first sales call. It was right at the start of 2012, and I called it a store club.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, I did. Just during this whole process of going back and forth and seeing how well it froze and all of that. But I realized that Stevie alone kind of has this weird black licorice taste. And so I would add, I always added a little bit of sugar, both for taste and for performance, but also to cut that Stevia taste.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And I wasn't in stores until early 2012. So during 2011, I didn't even need to deliver ice cream. I was just going up there with my ingredients, taste testing the batch, making notes, going the next day with ingredients, making the new updated recipe. The issue was with this equipment, I had to make like 80 to 100 pints at a time, and I really only needed one pint to test. So it was a total waste. But the machine was too big.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It took about two months, I would say, before I was like, okay, there's a little bit of tweaking to do, but once packaging is done and everything like that, I'm ready to start selling in stores.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep. And I spent like five days researching if I could do that without, you know, can I put alcohol and ice cream without declaring it, all that stuff.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. But the biggest issue is when you take out a lot of the sugar or almost all of the sugar out of ice cream, it loses all of the solids. And the salt, what I mean by solids is everything that's an ice cream that isn't water. I mean, that's even fat particles, but sugar is the easiest one to understand. And if you remove that, it will freeze hard as a rock unless it has enough solid”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you know on the internet you can figure out how to make everything now. And I basically took my little recipe and just that night started researching, became like a little miniature food scientist and started researching what did I need to have in there? And then I started to realize proportions of solids and all these things I won't bore you with Greatly revise the recipe overnight.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I talk to some ice cream experts, and there were some movie moments where they were like, you know, give it up, kid. And a food scientist who was like, this just can't be done and things like that. So one of the virtues that I had at the time was just utter sheer, overwhelming naivety to where I didn't realize how hard it would be to eventually make this stuff.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're not a food scientist, of course. Nope. Right? This is not your background, but you're kind of dabbling. And there's clearly a reason why up until that point there was nothing like that on the market because probably if anyone had attempted it, the same thing happened, that it just didn't come out good.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ice cream needs a lot of salt. I couldn't actually pinpoint exactly why it didn't work, even though it was just me sticking a bunch of ingredients in an ice cream machine and expecting it to spit out ice cream. But to be more precise, ice cream needs a certain level of solids like sugar and fat in that to give it body. And I didn't have enough of that. It worked on my little cuisine art ice cream maker at home, but on this professional equipment, it didn't work at all. So it was like back to the drawing board. Either give up the dream or it's back to the drawing board.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But why didn't it work? I mean, it's the same principle. It's spinning and freezing the ingredients. And when ice cream is ready, it comes out of soft serve, and then you freeze it. So I don't understand why it didn't work.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I run my little batch On the machines, and it could not have gone more horribly. The machine basically spit out something that looked like a liquid burnt marshmallow. I mean, it was just like a white river. It was so demoralizing. It was foreseeable, of course, that my little home recipe wasn't going to work on professional equipment. But it just absolutely didn't work. I mean, I'm demoralized almost to the point of tears because I was so gung-ho on this thing.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So the whites add a little protein, and if you want to nerd out about ice cream, they have emulsification properties. So it actually is a good thing to put into ice cream in terms of performance.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stevia, yep, I can't give away the recipe too much. There is a little Coca-Cola to this stuff. Okay, I got you. Obviously, these are the basics, yes.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm so naive it's my own recipe that I made on my whole ice cream maker and it's got all of like five ingredients and I'm actually sitting there doing the blending and putting it in the machine and learning how to”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's why he thought, oh, I'm pretty sure it does. He thought that was why I was being all cagey. And it was like, man, you're making a healthy ice cream. Give me a break.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, and this is what I'm getting at. He said, what are you making? And I was, of course, paranoid about every entrepreneur is a little too paranoid about someone's going to steal my idea. And I was a lawyer, so I had a bunch of NDAs at my disposal. So I had him sign an NDA And he was really curious what the hell am I making? And this guy was, he was really cool. He was old school LA and wore like big aviators at all times. He must have been 70. Just a cool guy. So I show up like a couple days later with my little recipe and my ingredients that I bought from Smart and Final. And he's like, so what are you making? And I'm like proudly like, I'm making the first all-natural, healthy ice cream. And he just looks at me and is like,”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literally will call and be like, Hi, I have an ice cream idea I was wondering if I could pay you to use your equipment. If it needs to be on nights or weekends, I'm willing to do that. And I called all ten of'em these companies and nine said no. And some of them said no angrily. Like, what are you even doing? And this is actually, this is not an exaggeration. Literally, I had nine scratched off my list and the tenth one. Was a guy in Ban Eyes.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is delusional in the story of what I did is exactly what anybody who doesn't have a clue would do. Like everything I'm about to do is like, yeah, I guess that's what I would do too if I have no experience and I was naive. Literally what I did the next day was Google ice cream factories near me. To figure out where I could go make it on professional equipment. In my head, this ice cream was going to be ready to go. I was going to have packaging in maybe three to four weeks, and I would have it on store shelves, you know, within two months. Very naive. I had no idea what I was doing in food and beverage, but that was my thought process, literally. It did not go that way. It did not go that way.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when you say you found a company, you're a lawyer, so you filed like an LLC and just kind of set up a company, what you call, I think you called it Eden Creamery initially, right? So then what do you do? What's the first thing you do? It's kind of delusional, let's be honest.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Immediately to me, the ice cream was so good, this thing I've been tinkering with, and the concept was such a slam dunk in my naive head that, yeah, between the time I bought an ice cream maker, I founded a company within three days. I was just that convinced on the concept.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I'm trying to figure out how you go from making being a lawyer having no never because there have been people on the show like I was always dreaming of the business I wanted, always thought I had this job, but I knew that I was going to start something and my mind and you're going from a guy who never even thought about a business at all to like a few days later saying, you know what, I'm going to make a business. I'm going to sell this.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT