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- [00:02]
Diana Ransom
Diana.
- [00:02]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Christine.
- [00:03]
Diana Ransom
What's the most disgusting thing you've ever eaten?
- [00:06]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
I'm not proud of this.
- [00:08]
Diana Ransom
Oh, no.
- [00:08]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
But when I was in college, we didn't have plastic wrap or plastic bags.
- [00:15]
Diana Ransom
Like, you just didn't have them in your apartment.
- [00:17]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
We just didn't have them. We didn't actively buy things.
- [00:20]
Diana Ransom
Yes.
- [00:21]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
So I would actually put leftover pizza in a garbage bag and wrap it up. Not even in the box, in an actual garbage bag, put it in my refrigerator and eat it later.
- [00:35]
Diana Ransom
I hope it wasn't one of those, like, scented.
- [00:37]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
No, it occurred. It all dawned on me later. I was like, oh, my God.
- [00:42]
Diana Ransom
You're just, like, made of microplastics. What now?
- [00:44]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Oh, I absolutely am. I think I'm a superhero. This is from the ground up. Welcome to season four. I'm Inc. Executive editor Diana Ransom.
- [00:56]
Diana Ransom
And I'm editor at large Christine Ligorio Chavkin. Today's episode, a Sweet summer Second act. So, Diana, a couple of weeks ago, I spoke with the founder of Jenny's Splendid Ice cream, Jenny Britton. She is a super impressive founder. Jenny's is, if you don't know it, it's a certified B corp known for its social and environmental mission. But it also has close to 100 scoop shops all over the country. It's in grocery stores. And the thing that kind of differentiates Jenny's ice cream is its unique flavors. Like, there's one with. I believe it's goat chees and a berry. And there's these interesting flavor combinations. They're kind of wholesome and new at the same time. So tell me what. That was super interesting because she built this company for, like, 20 years and then stepped away.
- [01:46]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Wow.
- [01:47]
Diana Ransom
And she learned a few things during that time that we are gonna get into in our conversation. But I wanted to tell you, she has launched a new company that also makes a sweet snack. It also has unique flavor combinations.
- [02:03]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Okay.
- [02:04]
Diana Ransom
But it's totally different. The main ingredients in its new product are watermelon rinds, apple cores, and peels of otherwise used fruits and vegetables.
- [02:18]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Oh, sounds delicious.
- [02:19]
Diana Ransom
It is. Jenny was in our office when she was here. Did you try her new product?
- [02:24]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
I did try it. I thought they were pretty good. So they're what's called fruit leathers.
- [02:28]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [02:28]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Which was a new term for me, even though I give my kids this stuff all the time. It's called a fruit leather. You eat it. It's like a fruit roll up.
- [02:38]
Diana Ransom
Right. But natural, natural, healthy fruit. Right, Right. Like, if your parents like dehydrated fruits when you were a kid, you're kind of familiar with that. But I found her product, which is called Flora. I found it more squishy than a fruit leather. It was like. It had an interesting texture.
- [02:53]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Yeah, it's sort of like a granola bar meets, I guess, fruit roll up. Yeah, she's probably gonna use that in her marketing tagline anyway. So Flora, it's very exciting and so odd. She went from ice cream to fruit.
- [03:10]
Diana Ransom
Yes. And fiber and gut. Health. Yeah.
- [03:14]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Love it. And it seems odd. Why did she. Why did she do this?
- [03:17]
Diana Ransom
Well, she is going to explain that in this interview. I'll leave it for our conversation. But first, we started talking about the year that she left Jenny's ice cream, which she had been building for 20 years.
- [03:28]
Jenny Britton
Oh, 26 years.
- [03:30]
Diana Ransom
Forever @ that point. Right.
- [03:32]
Jenny Britton
I mean, from my early days in the farmer's market, my first company, my first little ice cream company, I mean, it was a. You know, and really starting it and building it from just. I always say, nobody starts from nothing. You always have your brain, your bra and your buddies. And that's what I started from.
- [03:44]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [03:45]
Jenny Britton
So by the time I was at, you know, it was. It was like 2019, 2020, turning over into 2020, and I was just completely shredded. And I'd had an incredible coach and business advisor while I was working at Jenny's, Mark and also Adrian, who are now my business partners, and they started kind of helping me with just physical health. So I had already been sort of working on all sorts of other sort of leadership coaching and things like that. But I started to get into physical health after I was able to step away from Jenny's and really started. I walked in the forest every day. That was just, like, where I knew to go because I grew up doing that. For whatever reason, I started eating blueberries and, like, pints and pints of them a day. Like three or four pints a day.
- [04:25]
Diana Ransom
That's good antioxidants, right?
- [04:26]
Jenny Britton
It is. And it's also incredible. Pectin, prebiotic fiber. I didn't know what was going on at the time, but I look back and credit those two things. Walking in the forest and eating blueberries with being this sort of spark that helped me understand, like, for the first time in my life, what health started to feel like, what it felt like to actually be healthy. I was also getting rid of cortisol in my system and adrenaline in my system, a lot of adrenaline. I started working with veterans. I started driving on the track. I started doing other things to help me sort of soak up the adrenaline that I just had extra in my body from being just driving forward so hard. But that was when I started to read then about fiber and what's going on. And my partner, Mark, my business partner now, he was my coach at the time, we agreed just to keep working together because we like working together.
- [05:07]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [05:07]
Jenny Britton
And he started sending me books about the microbiome, about fiber. And I started to understand what was then happening in my body. So then it starts to connect just like I just started reading about it. I couldn't get enough learning about it because I was feeling it at the same time too. So.
- [05:19]
Diana Ransom
Interesting. So just to back up a little, like when you say fiber, that's sort of synonymous with prebiotic. Right. Which we're hearing a lot about in new products, new beverages, whatever. And that's different than probiotic, which is sort of like the actual like gut bacteria. Like there's two different kind of gut bacteria. Right. And fiber really is the prebiotic. And that helps kind of lay the groundwork. Right. For healthy gut.
- [05:42]
Jenny Britton
I think a lot of people confuse and I did too. I didn't understand this at all either. But prebiotics and probiotics are very different. Prebiotics are the food that feeds probiotics. Probiotics are the microbes that live in your gut and really all over your body. And you want to feed them with prebiotic fiber, which is non digestible fiber. It survives the stomach, goes to the other side, which is where most of your microbiome lives. And then if you feed your microbiome the right stuff, it will flourish. And you can really think of it. The way I think of it is like code. It's actually like a language. It's the way of speaking with your cells. So when you eat diverse fibers every day, you're actually coding, you're giving information, instructions to your, the microbes that live inside of you, which then in turn give that to the, to the cells that make you you. And it's so far reaching.
- [06:24]
Diana Ransom
Okay, got it. So you just kind of underwent this like transformation. How did you. You just felt better? You were like, okay, well, I felt, eliminated some stress. I've got more fiber, I'm walking in the woods.
- [06:37]
Jenny Britton
Yes. And fairly quickly, people started to notice. Like on Instagram, people in my, in my realm, in my world, they started to notice. And I was just getting tons of comments like, what are you doing? You know, and all I was doing was walking in the woods. Some days I was walking 10 miles, but every day I was out Walking whatever I could and just making sure I got enough fiber.
- [06:58]
Diana Ransom
So neat. Okay, I wanna pause here and note something that you had said, which is that your business coaches kind of also became your health coaches. Like, how did that, how did that happen? I'm very familiar with the kind of intersection of therapy and business coaching in Silicon Valley. It sounds like your coaches were maybe even more than that.
- [07:14]
Jenny Britton
Well, I also, like, I brought in the calorie. I mean, I put people around me and I do this a lot. Like, if I don't understand something, I like the idea of coaching. I mean, we have, at Flora, we have a science coach, you know, so when we don't understand something, we can't read the. These incredible scientific papers. We can have her kind of sum it up for us. But the same was true at Jennie's. A founder has a different perspective than any other executive. In fact, we are not executives on our teams. As much as we would like to be considered another member of the team or that's kind of how I approached it. You never will be. When you walk into a room, you carry a certain power that you won't. It's actually sometimes very difficult to understand. And the feedback that you get from your people is going to be different because you can't be fired. Not in the same way. You have to be really aware of that. That was actually hard for me at Jenny's to understand that because I wanted to be the one who would always clean out the drain or do the worst job, whatever, you know?
- [08:06]
Diana Ransom
Right. It makes people uncomfortable. But this authority, you do this, this original inner authority.
- [08:12]
Jenny Britton
Yeah. So I, I had a coach that helped me understand that and he's really good at working with founders. So it's almost like when you're looking for a coach, as a founder, as an entrepreneur, you want somebody who understands there's executive coaching, but then there's also founder coaching, and that's a different thing. And founders, we have way different challenges. Of course, there's how we carry our power, but there's also how we hold onto health, how we nurture ourselves, which, as I mentioned, we often don't.
- [08:35]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah.
- [08:36]
Jenny Britton
Which doesn't set a good example for anybody and it certainly isn't good for you.
- [08:39]
Diana Ransom
And when you stepped back from Jenny is not entirely, of course, but like when you took that step, like, I'm going to focus on my health, was that intentional? Like, was health part of it?
- [08:48]
Jenny Britton
No, it wasn't. It wasn't. I just knew and the COVID was, was hitting and I just knew I could see that the team was doing so, and they're so good at it. And in fact, when I would come in, it would almost be disruptive, as founders tend to do too. And I just knew it was time. It just felt like the right time. And so it wasn't intentional. And certainly I was. I did not even realize how unhealthy I was. And when I look at photographs of me then I'm just like swollen. Like, my face is bigger. Like every. You can tell that I'm probably stressed out and not healthy. I don't glow. I don't have a sort of radiance or whatever that I just do now.
- [09:24]
Diana Ransom
I think I feel like that passion and that drive and as you said, that stress, you know, day to day for an entrepreneur, it often does. You know, it does help me out.
- [09:35]
Jenny Britton
I mean, I always said, like, we're like, I'm good at being a warrior. Like, I'm good at the hard stuff, and I am proud of that. But at the same time, I don't think we have to be warriors all the time. You know what I mean? I think we have to find now that I sort of have another business, and I see that there's another way to do it too.
- [09:52]
Diana Ransom
Yeah. Okay, so you're taking this health breather. You're learning, you're absorbing, you're actually improving many aspects of your own personal health. Why, why start another business now? Why throw yourself back into that role and that fire.
- [10:11]
Jenny Britton
In some ways, the answer to that question, and I don't think I've answered it for anybody yet, but the real answer is, it's the only thing I know how to do. It's the only way I know how to impact the world. It's just what I know. I didn't really intend to start this business. It was more of an exploration in my own world. And I think this is the way a lot of businesses start. I mean, Jenny started because I was looking for community. I was looking for my people. And I started an ice cream company and I found them and we built that world. And this started because I became enamored of this idea of what it feels like to be healthy. And I had never felt it before in my late 40s. To feel better than I ever have in my entire life was really spectacular. And I think a lot of people in America can relate to that, even if they're not a founder or an entrepreneur and haven't lived that life that I have, because we really don't prioritize health in Our country in a way that's actually doable for people. For most people.
- [11:05]
Diana Ransom
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I read something about watermelon rinds.
- [11:09]
Jenny Britton
It's our hero. Yes.
- [11:10]
Diana Ransom
Part of your journey and your research. Tell me about watermelon rinds.
- [11:14]
Jenny Britton
Well, first at Jenny's. At the Jenny's kitchen, we make water. We make a watermelon, like, every couple of years in the summer, we have a couple of different flavors that are so delightful. And so I have a lot of experience cutting watermelon.
- [11:24]
Diana Ransom
Okay.
- [11:25]
Jenny Britton
You know, with a giant knife, cutting off the edge of the watermelon.
- [11:27]
Diana Ransom
That sounds kind of exhilarating.
- [11:28]
Jenny Britton
It is. It's really fun. And, of course, as the company grew, you know, we had to do this more and more, and we just had so many watermelon in the kitchen. And when. What's so cool about working in the ice cream kitchen, the way that we do it at Jenny's, is that every season, the smells and the scents in the kitchen change. So you go from, like, pumpkins and this warm scent or caramel, and then you go into baked goods in the winter, and then you go into, like, you know, your mints and watermelons and berries in the summer. And so watermelon has that scent that carries everywhere. So it's a very fond and very potent memory. But we also had our compost out back from our. I call it the kitchen. It was like our. Our sort of small production plant. And putting those watermelon rinds out there and composting was just a memory that I had, a very fond one. And we also had these beautiful watermelons that were grown for in Ohio in our farms in Ohio. And so when I was sort of reading all this stuff and looking up, I subscribed to something, this app called Academias, where I can get all these academic articles. And I have searches for fiber and prebiotic fiber. And one of the things that showed up in one of these searches was watermelon rind. And that watermelon rind is really filled with L citrulline, which is really good for you, and also cellulose and some other items, which are prebiotic fiber. And so I thought, oh, my gosh, we've been, like, composting all this, and there's all this watermelon rind in the world. Then I started looking at how much watermelon there is in the world, which there is a lot, because 65% of the watermelon is actually the rind. That's, like, a lot of the weight, right?
- [12:50]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah.
- [12:51]
Jenny Britton
I don't know if your grandmothers or great grandmothers did this, but mine did. They would pickle watermelon rind. And, you know, I just was like, everybody, you know, our grandmothers, our great grandmothers, they had so much knowledge that we've lost so quickly that took so long to build and was just passed down for so many thousands of years, and we've just lost it rapidly. And watermelon rind is one of those things. So we were, Mark and I, we like to work with other entrepreneurs just casually just helping other entrepreneurs if they need it. And we were working with an entrepreneur who needed a produce company bigger than the farmer's market. And we toured this massive facility and then saw the watermelon rind going out. And they were cutting it off the watermelon rind, just like we did at Jenny's with their machete because you can't put it through a machine. So by the thousands, every day, they're just cutting these watermelon and then the rinds were going off and to be churned into the land. And that got me thinking, like, there's just so much of this. I wonder if we can actually do something with it that would be beneficial because it's good for you. So that's like my ice cream brain started saying, like, it's easy to make ice cream taste good, but can we do this with watermelon?
- [13:51]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you make it taste good? What does it taste like?
- [13:54]
Jenny Britton
It actually tastes like cucumbers. Okay, so it's actually really good. It's very simple. The problem is when you're eating the watermelon, the pink part is so sweet and so beautiful. And then you get to the cucumber part and it's like, it seems really boring, so we don't eat it. But it's very good for you if you're eating watermelon. Keep eating. In fact, my business partner Mark had lived in, was living in la, and his son had just gone to school. And so he was able to like, literally pack up and move within a couple of several weeks to New Jersey and start this little lab that we started inside the produce processing company. And we just started asking questions. We wild ferment the watermelon rind.
- [14:31]
Diana Ransom
Oh, neat.
- [14:31]
Jenny Britton
Learned how to do that, and then dehydrate it, mill it into like a flour we can then use to make anything.
- [14:37]
Diana Ransom
Oh, neat.
- [14:38]
Jenny Britton
So that's where it all started is this watermelon.
- [14:40]
Diana Ransom
And that's like a base for the new bar product.
- [14:43]
Jenny Britton
It's one of the several ingredients that we use. We also now are using the apple cores to make apple paste, which is actually the base of the bar. So the apple cores also are high in pectin, which is another prebiotic fiber. Really, really, really good for you. The seed chambers, we take the seeds out, but those are really filled with really great fiber for you. So we make that into an apple paste, like a really thin applesauce, and then thicken that and then that's the actual base for the bar. And then we add our other prebiotic fibers from watermelon rind, but also cantaloupe, honeydew, pineapple, which has this other enzymes and other cool stuff in it. All these micronutrients in these ingredients and mango skins.
- [15:21]
Diana Ransom
Oh, neat, Neat. Okay, so at what point does this experimentation and this working inside the lab and all this scientific research that you've been doing, at what point does it start to become a company in your mind?
- [15:34]
Jenny Britton
We're thinking in this sort of web way. You know, it's sort of like, okay, what are our resources here? What do we have here? What's going on here? And how do we, how do we keep everything connected? How do we connect all the dots for people? So we know that we've got watermelon rind. We know we've got all these incredible prebiotic fibers in a lot of different ingredients. We know we have an incredible partner in the produce company with extraordinary reach. It's 600,000 square feet. It's a family owned company with incredible values, which is something I noticed right off the bat first. So we have share values. They're making all the cut produce for some of the best grocery stores, like Whole Foods and the salads of Trader Joe's and all these, you know, these really incredible grocery stores across the country. They've got reach and distribution. So we've got all of this, like, stuff that's kind of brewing. Like, well, if we can do this inside of here, we can get this out and we can actually expand pretty, pretty quickly. So it becomes a business idea pretty quickly. But we weren't sure what we were going to make, so we had to figure that out.
- [16:32]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it seemed like a viable business before it even had a product.
- [16:37]
Jenny Britton
Yeah. Well, we had to decide, are we going to be a fiber company that sells ingredients or are we going to be a fiber company that makes a product that sells it? We could do both, but we can only do one at a time.
- [16:47]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [16:48]
Jenny Britton
And so we started with a pancake mix, which was fantastic. It's, like, become kind of a cult favorite already in our small community that we built. The chocolate cake mix is extraordinary. It could be at the best restaurant in the world, and you would love it. It's incredible. But we realized, like, people aren't eating pancakes and chocolate cake every day. We need something that people can eat every day. What? I would say that the company wants you to eat. Us as a brand, as a company of human beings, we want you to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and 30 plants a week when you can't, which I think is really hard even for me and for people who are very conscious about that. Flora is making our products for you to eat and fill that fiber gap. And so we wanted to make something that people could reach for easily to get their plant diversity. Each bar has 12 plants out of the 30 that you need every week and then also bridge the fiber gap. So it's 50% of the fiber you need every day.
- [17:37]
Diana Ransom
Wow.
- [17:37]
Jenny Britton
And 97% of men, 95% of women are deficient in fiber by at least 50%. It's a really huge, huge gap.
- [17:45]
Diana Ransom
Sure, sure. And it's a shelf stable bar.
- [17:47]
Jenny Britton
Yeah.
- [17:48]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, it is. So you start thinking, okay, bar, and then your mind also. I assume this came from you, because I've read the list of new flavors that you're creating with this bar, and they seem to have the same kind of interesting mixes and, like, kind of, like wholesome zing that Jenny's. Many Jenny's flavors have that almost make me think of the ice cream. Tell me about the flavor designs and profiles you're working with.
- [18:17]
Jenny Britton
We're definitely thinking differently about our company, but that's inherent in just who I am and who we are. We're creating a bar company where we can actually make some fun flavors, some really beautiful flavors and flavors that actually taste like real food. So all of our flavors are whole foods. I mean, we have a bramble berry lavender, which, of course, is inspired by our ice cream. It's a. We have, like, our most popular flavor. One of them is the. The bramble berry crisp, which is a vanilla ice cream with a bramble berry sauce in it. So we're working with the fruits that my grandmother always called brambleberries, which are just the fruits, the little, like, berries that grow on brambles or a thorny.
- [18:48]
Diana Ransom
Bush, like little black raspberries or, like.
- [18:50]
Jenny Britton
Black raspberries, red raspberries, black currants, and then lavender for that one. So it's almost like combining two different ice creams. And then we Have a raspberry rose, which Jenny's does. A raspberry rose jelly donut, or. We've done. But, you know, here we're just kind of doing this raspberry rose. We have mango cardamom, which Jenny's has done many, many times as a yogurt. Vanilla rooibos, which is actually my favorite tea that I drink every day. I have for years and years. I love it. And then blueberry matcha, which is another sweet, beautiful flavor. All of these could be ice cream.
- [19:18]
Diana Ransom
They could be.
- [19:19]
Jenny Britton
And many of them have been interesting. And we have, even though we're a bar company, because we are making everything ourselves, and we can make small runs, we can do new fun flavors. So we'll be doing this sort of like Jenny's does, in that we. If we want you to be eating these regularly, we want to keep you interested. So we'll have new flavors coming out, and limited editions, of course. Just like Jenny's.
- [19:42]
Diana Ransom
Yeah. When I think of bars in the grocery store, I think of, like, a utilitarian kind of thing. Like a. Sure. Like a kind bar with chocolate on it is delicious. But when I'm buying that, I'm just kind of feeding, like, I'm just hungry. And it should be trying to be something good, relatively healthy. It should be good. You're entering a really interesting market and have a kind of different vision for it. The bar market, though, is complicated. What kind of thinking are you approaching the market with in terms of where you fit in and the kind of, you know, perhaps the kind of education you may have to do in terms of appealing to customers?
- [20:18]
Jenny Britton
I mean, it's a lot. It's a very big market. It's a very crowded market, but so is ice cream. And ice cream is just so incredibly complicated. And I think that when you speak directly to people and you build a community of. I mean, a lot of people talk about this, but we were. This is what we did from the farmer's market days. One person at a time. I think building a business is one person at a time. It's a street game when you do it that way and you know your customers and you build alongside them. You know, you just carve out your space. You carve your own space out, and that's what we're doing. We already look very different from every other bar out there. We'll be behaving differently because that's how we do it. And I think we'll bring people along with us and grow our people, and I think that'll be Important. And of course, flavor is going to be a differentiator. And then, you know, I just think that people are turning to these kinds of snack foods more and more now. And there's research that shows, there's data that shows that with the rise of the GLP1s, of course we have this need for nutrition, dense foods, and that's exactly what Flora is. But also, you know, we're not eating at home anymore. I mean, it's like, you know, 60% or something of our meals are eaten outside of the home. They're eaten kind of in transit and, you know, we're eating one meal at home now. It's just a very different era and it's moving very quickly. And so we don't think that you're going to go back to this, you know, three meal a day kind of at home thing. I think we need to be thinking about nutrient dense whole foods. Really good stuff. And I do think that we're in a time where the conversation of the industrial food system has real potential to make real change and we need that.
- [21:48]
Diana Ransom
Absolutely. I mean, every day there's new headlines on ultra processed food and which ones are, which ones aren't, how to avoid them with the actual.
- [21:57]
Jenny Britton
It's so difficult to be a consumer. And I would say that one of the questions I asked early on in my health journey is why is it so hard to be healthy in America? It is hard for even somebody who knows and has resources how to do it. And it's hard for every person in this country to know what the right answer is. Even for people who are health gurus, they've all got a different way of doing it.
- [22:19]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [22:19]
Jenny Britton
You know, and so it's very difficult for regular people to just be like, well, what is healthy? It turns out it's not.
- [22:23]
Diana Ransom
There's so much misinformation out there, so.
- [22:25]
Jenny Britton
Much money to be made. I mean, you know, on that misinformation, you know, I was, wait, can we.
- [22:30]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Stop here for a minute?
- [22:31]
Jenny Britton
Kind of interesting at Flora.
- [22:32]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
It feels like you're obviously speaking with Jenny about her experience and I just want to dig into something for a minute. So the idea is that even if she was super successful as an ice cream entrepreneur, it didn't really help her when she was entering into. I mean, I'm sure it helped her to some degree, but like it didn't really in the end end up helping her when she's starting this brand new business, right?
- [22:53]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah. I mean, she is just starting out right now. She had just in January had the first bars go into, you know, one grocery store shop, and then she's going from there. So she told me that, you know, she knows this is gonna be hard work building this new brand, finding customers, finding locations, getting sales at a velocity that stores are comfortable keeping this new product in it is carving out a new space in health food bars.
- [23:20]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Right. I mean, I guess if I were. If you were to sort of step back for a second. The thing that she does carry with her, from Jenny's ice cream to Flora, is this idea of fearlessness. Like, you've been there, you've done it, you can, you know, scale the mountain, look out, and you can overcome major odds.
- [23:36]
Diana Ransom
Right, Right. I mean, I'm sure she knows a thing or two about grocery distribution.
- [23:39]
Jenny Britton
Right?
- [23:39]
Diana Ransom
Totally. And she did, you know, meet folks in this. The plant in New Jersey that were using all that were cutting up fruit and where she found the fruit processor and, you know, experimented with uses of some of the otherwise discarded parts of fruit. So she had connections, she has knowledge, and she also knows how hard it's gonna be, which I think might be. You know, that last part might be the most crucial.
- [24:04]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Absolutely. So what do you all talk about next?
- [24:06]
Diana Ransom
We continued our conversation about taking risks and the trials and tribulations that would come. Great.
- [24:12]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Can't wait to hear it.
- [24:24]
Diana Ransom
So that said, did anything daunt you about starting over and starting over in a new portion of the food industry?
- [24:34]
Jenny Britton
You know, I will say, and I think other entrepreneurs will, who are listening might. This would resonate. I think it took me a while to really click with the business idea. I was interested in it. I was curious about this idea of fiber, what we could do, what my input could be. But once it clicks, and for me, that was like. It was like all of the elements of the puzzle kind of clicked together with the produce company, with their reach, with the capabilities inside, with the flavors, with the research that we were having kind of white papers written for us. All of it kind of click together and fit, and then also my role within that. And when it clicks, you don't ask that question anymore.
- [25:13]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [25:13]
Jenny Britton
You know, it's not whether I want to do this or not. It's just you're on the train and you're going. It's a funny thing. You click and you just go. You're going, how do you know?
- [25:21]
Diana Ransom
I mean, like, is there a click? Like, there's not a real click. Is it that? It's just you're thinking about it every day. What's the change?
- [25:29]
Jenny Britton
I Think. A lot of entrepreneurs think like this, too. For me, sometimes when I click into a vision, it's actually very much in my body. It almost appears to me or feels to me like it's already happened, like it's in the past. Once I can click into a vision to the point where I can see it and I almost feel it, like it's already happened, then I have to pursue it. And it's almost like you go into autopilot, like you're no longer in control. You're just. You're going to make it work, and it's with you.
- [25:55]
Diana Ransom
It's already part of you.
- [25:56]
Jenny Britton
It's part of you. You believe in it, and no matter what happens, you will survive and you'll make it work. So we have such few resources at Flora in any, you know, startup, any small company. And whatever happens, we're gonna figure it out.
- [26:10]
Diana Ransom
Yeah. So what's been easier the second time around? Like, what did you come armed with in creating this new company that you were just like, here's how we do this, here's how we do that.
- [26:18]
Jenny Britton
Many things are easier. One thing is, I think, just this idea that I had of Jenny at Jenny's, which is this idea of fellowship and just making sure that the right people are around me and we're all together, and that together we make something greater than some of our parts. And so that is something that we were really focused on at Flora from the beginning, that there's just the right people. And it's kind of interesting at Flora. It feels like the right people keep just kind of floating into our world, and then we latch onto them, grab onto them, and we don't let them go, and they just come in and we do the work. I would say from a sort tactical point of view, one thing that we weren't able to do at Jenny's was kind of engineer our ice creams, which we easily could have done for grocery and for that sort of distribution chain, which we didn't get to do because we just didn't. Well, frankly, didn't know that we should do that. And so we were taking basically Farmer's Market bespoke ice creams and selling them through distribution into the grocery stores. And so some of those were coming out at like, $15 a pint, and it really wasn't a sustainable business. So it took us a long time to learn how to adapt this. This grocery or this sort of farmer's market style with grocery store distribution. And if we had done that from the beginning, there are ways we can do it in this really beautiful way. Different kinds of flavors. Like. Sure. You know, maybe we're not making the most bespoke hand done one for the grocery store. For the grocery store. But we're still using the same quality of ingredients in the same recipes. It's just the ones that we choose at Flora, just being really conscious of what do we want this to cost so that we can make sure that the most people can afford it. That can. And that has been something we did from the very beginning is to think about like, we gotta make sure that we can be in distribution for this price so that we can be on shelf at this price and that most people can afford it and then go down from there if we can.
- [28:00]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Yeah.
- [28:01]
Diana Ransom
So it'd be savvy about the market and the price point from the beginning. Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of money, you know, you're coming from a place where I would, I would guess having 80 plus ice cream shops around the country, you probably didn't need to do a Kickstarter. You probably could get seed funding from elsewhere or yourself, but you did a Kickstarter. What was the drive there?
- [28:23]
Jenny Britton
I was curious about a lot of things. First of all, it's really hard to know what prebiotic fiber is or that fiber is really good for you. And we're talking about this was a year ago. And so years are going quickly when it comes to like information, you know, as we know, but a year ago. People know more now than they did a year ago. But even now people don't know what prebiotic fiber is and the benefits of that. So I was curious like what people knew what that, you know, I needed to learn that before I could go out and try to raise money. And then I was also really, really interested in whether people would follow me. I had been in this ice cream world for 26 years. People knew me as the ice cream person. And was I gonna be able to change people to get people to follow me into like fiber, the world of fiber? Like what's that? What I found was, yes, no problem. They are and they do. And in fact, my Instagram for the last several years has all been about my version of what health and wellbeing looks like, which is very, just very much centered around pleasure and sensuality and like being in the forest and nature inside and, and it's different kind of well being. And so that was pretty easy getting people come on board. And then what happened through that Kickstarter is that we built this community of about a thousand people that we could then ask questions. And so they became our test market, which was incredible. We learned everything from them. So over the last last year, we learned what people know about prebiotics. We learned what people want from the nutrition panel, what flavors work and what don't. It was actually a really important part of our journey. Yeah.
- [29:50]
Diana Ransom
What was. What was one specific thing you learned from that early customer that people don't.
- [29:55]
Jenny Britton
Want to be sold? Health. We see all the time on Instagram these super health gurus who have all of. They go to the, you know, the sort of GNCs of the world, and that's all great and we follow them and we go there sometimes or whatever when we're really in the mood. But for the most part, most people just want something that tastes good that they believe is good for you. So on the front of the package, we were our sort of sample packaging was like too much about prebiotic fiber and that just kind of fell flat a little bit for a lot of people. Not everybody, but, like, I think we really want to hit, like, mainstream. Yeah, that was interesting. So it really was going to be about more like, fun flavor and yes, it's going to tick all the boxes for health.
- [30:33]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, that's so interesting because, like, if you think about purchasing habits, like, there's buying something for yourself and then there's buying something for your family too. Like, if I'm at a store, I might just buy a health product for myself, but I've got three kids also who need a snack after school. And then you're going to get four times the purchase from me if it looks fun. And like, I think what we want.
- [30:51]
Jenny Britton
Is to believe that it's good for us, but we want to be sold on flavor and brand and fun and community and these other things. And so you don't want to be like, sort of preached to is really the way that I would put it. We don't want to be out doing that. So we'll have all of the education, our nutrifacts and our ingredient list lives up to the highest levels of nutrition and the highest standards of functional medicine and functional foods. But you can find that information on our website. You can find it anywhere. But our packaging is just gonna be beautiful. And this is a lot like Jenny's, actually. We do so many things behind the scenes, whether it's how we are working with our farms or, you know, direct trade. And just there are some. We're a B corp, so, like, you can go really deep on this. Behind the scenes at Jenny's but we almost never talk about it out front because we know you're here to get to know somebody else better, to enjoy the ice creams, to have a moment. And we're not trying to like, preach to you.
- [31:42]
Diana Ransom
Yeah. But then a customer can go as deep as they want in their relationship with the brand.
- [31:46]
Jenny Britton
And what I always say is it's hope confirmin. I hope that Jenny's is a company that does the right thing and then you go look into it. And I hope that we are too. I think, you know, we are. I think that's the same kind of the way that we're thinking about Flora.
- [31:57]
Diana Ransom
That's fantastic. So tell me about your marketing strategy. You just launched.
- [32:02]
Jenny Britton
We just launched. We will be direct consumer through our website. Of course we're gonna be talking on social media and all of that stuff and trying to continue to build our community in that way. And so begins our journey into retail. Yeah, and just like Jenny's, I think it'll go a little faster. Cause we know what we're doing a little bit better now. But you, anybody who's built a company in retail knows and in grocery knows that it's quite an effort. And what's great about Flora is it's really our only effort. I mean, at Jenny's we have our stores. We have, we actually do all of our own graphic design in house. We do so production. We have, of course, our website, we have grocery. You know, there are like multiple companies under one roof. And so here we will really be able to focus on our entire effort on Velocity on shelf.
- [32:46]
Diana Ransom
You're starting in small shop.
- [32:47]
Jenny Britton
Yeah, similar to Jenny's.
- [32:49]
Diana Ransom
True. We, in this last year, we just at Inc. Ran a big feature about how difficult it is for new CPG companies to kind of maintain their shelf space even after they break into a bigger store.
- [33:01]
Jenny Britton
Well, and that's the thing. That's the game. And I think a lot of people don't realize, and it seems to me too, a lot of the venture funds don't also realize that just because you say it doesn't mean it will happen. And even if you do get on shelf, you have to be ready with your team to support that. Because the only thing that matters is Velocity. So you're better off to start with a couple of small accounts and win there. Learn how to do it, and then the world of retail will open up to you. Once you start to do well somewhere that word travels. But if the opposite happens, you know, it's a brutal, brutal industry. If you get placement somewhere and you know, you're not able to support it. You know, you get dropped and then it's very hard to get back in.
- [33:38]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [33:39]
Jenny Britton
So you've gotta be very mindful of it. Luckily, I have a lot of this experience and I've made all the failures at Jenny's. So I know enough about it and enough about like just really wanting to make sure we take care of our customers. I mean, Jenny's is all about our customers. At Floro, we will be this. We are the same exact way. Yeah.
- [33:55]
Diana Ransom
Fantastic. Is it hard for you to grapple with that? Like you reach. Talking to those customers face to face is not going to be quite as easy. They are not walking up to your counter asking for a scoop. Right.
- [34:04]
Jenny Britton
It's so true. I mean, I think of it all the time because I spent 10 years at the counter before we ever started growing at Jenny's. It's my superhero understanding. That's why I know what people want in ice cream, because I listen to that every day, hundreds of times a day from customers. But I find my way to do it at Flora because I really believe in being on the front line where your customers are. And I know that Jenny's is this way, but Flora is too. That we are an act of co creation with our customers. That even our brand, that we've just launched this new brand, visual identity, even that will continue to evolve and brands should evolve with our customers because we are a living, breathing organism of human beings that includes our customers. And as we need to morph and tweak, we will. And also as we get more resources like, you know, for a website and so on.
- [34:51]
Diana Ransom
Oh, absolutely.
- [34:51]
Jenny Britton
We'll continue to build that out. You know, we are really very scrappy.
- [34:55]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Great. And the name, how did you come up with it?
- [35:00]
Jenny Britton
Honestly, the true answer is that I was in Pompeii in 2022 in the summer, and there was this gorgeous fresco of Flora, the goddess. And you can Google it. She's beautiful. You've probably seen it before. It's this beautiful green fresco, Googled immediately. Like Flora. Obviously it means flowers, but like, what is she the goddess of? And she's the goddess of like, blooming. And so I kind of took that a little stretch further to flourishing and this idea of flourishing. And so flora is another word also for the microbes that live inside of you and around us. And then I also added that sort of word, flourishing, that idea that we want to be flourishing and that. So we added the U.
- [35:35]
Diana Ransom
So it's F L O U R A. Yeah.
- [35:39]
Jenny Britton
And, you know, of course, our goddesses and Mother Earth, you know, these are. I sort of think of fruit as like, the gift of Mother Earth of these goddesses. You know, all fruit comes from flowers. And what a beautiful gift that is that we have and that we at Flora can then, you know, sort of save from being turned into the landfill or whatever.
- [35:58]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. You seem like the type of leader who is just constantly evolving and teaching them themselves and has gotten a lot of coaching and sought expertise over the years. What is something that you have just left behind and left at Jenny's or left with your old style of working or management that you are trying to do differently in Flora? And I mean this, like, in an inside the company kind of way in terms of leadership or managing or building your team.
- [36:30]
Jenny Britton
I think that's a beautiful question. I. I would say that I've been usually, even at Jenny's, especially in the early, earlier days, I was pretty good at, like, not like, micromanaging people and sort of letting people learn their lessons the way that they need to learn them or you. That's how we learn is by making mistakes. And that's all beautiful and that's part of it. And you can't just step in and save everybody. But I would say that at Flora, I've really learned to let go of control in a big way. I've seen it not just at Jenny's, in my own self and in others, but in other places too. And I've been shown over many years that you kind of flow forward. You don't control forward. You know, you sort of flow into it. And that's the best way I can describe it. You sort of do this with vision. You know, it's almost like you're kind of like, sculpting or kind of herding cats or whatever. In a way, you're just kind of, kind of manipulating stuff and, like, everybody's kind of working together. The more you try to control everything, the less control you actually have, I think. And that is something I've learned from my own experience. Every time I try to control what somebody else thinks or what's going on or whatever, too deeply, I lose control of it.
- [37:37]
Diana Ransom
What happens then? If an employee or a group of employees has a different idea than you on how to do or what to.
- [37:43]
Jenny Britton
Do, well, that's fantastic. That's actually what you want. That's the whole reason we're together. I want people bringing in their ideas. We talk about it almost always. I wouldn't say the right answer, but the one we want to try rises up and then we agree and we go and do it. And if there's still a dispute, I think somebody has to do it, you know, And I would make that decision. I'm never afraid, I would say, to be wrong about something. We just keep going. We're all wrong about saying a lot, you know, because we're a startup and we're just trying things and the point is to adapt and to swerve. You know, A to B is not straight and it's not even A. It's like a bowl of spaghetti. So you're just constantly trying to like, just keep going forward, flowing forward together.
- [38:24]
Diana Ransom
Yeah. As a company, do you have any interesting strategies there in terms of brainstorming or finding new ideas or decision making? Is there anything you kind of stick to and use as a group, as a tool or as an idea or guiding philosophy?
- [38:37]
Jenny Britton
We talk a lot and we, you know, I'm lucky because my business partner is also my coach. He's incredible. And then my other. Other business partner, who's not day to day in the business is my other coach and he's also incredible. I would say coach and advisor. And so I learn from them every day. I know Mark would say that. He's also learning from me. And so it's really nice to just be able to have those open conversations. We admire each other, all of us. We respect each other. And that's so important, I feel like. And it's part of the fun. There's just a lot of admiration, I think, on this team.
- [39:10]
Diana Ransom
So respect and admiration. Great.
- [39:13]
Jenny Britton
And we care. I mean, we want everybody to sort of have their best experience, I guess, and do this. I mean, we're all working really hard and we're all kind of going our own way and like coming together and it's a little bit like chaos.
- [39:24]
Diana Ransom
Yeah.
- [39:24]
Jenny Britton
But it's also just so cool and so fun.
- [39:27]
Diana Ransom
So chaos. But how else does it feel starting again? You just launched your second company. How is it right now for you as a secondary? Yeah, it's interesting.
- [39:38]
Jenny Britton
I still feel like I'm like rubbing my eyes a little bit. Like, am I really here? I mean, we've been working on this for two and a half years. It's not new for us, but we're just kind of stepping out into the sunlight and it is kind of. It's just, it's so cool. It's like, wow. Like I'm not used to it yet, but I'm also like, as I Mentioned just so locked into the vision. I know that there's a lot of opportunity in the food system right now and in how we eat and how we feed people, and, of course, in sustainability. That creates passion.
- [40:06]
Diana Ransom
What advice would you have for other women who are thinking of starting a company out there right now in this year, 2025? So much has been said, but do you have any specific or general advice that does apply to women?
- [40:19]
Jenny Britton
Well, I still think that you don't need very much to start a company. That this is the promise of America, in my opinion, and that is that anybody here can start wherever they're at and build anything they can imagine. That was my experience with Jenny. I didn't know much about anything. I certainly didn't have any resources. I didn't have family to fall back on. I really was on my own early.
- [40:37]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, you were working out of your kitchen, right?
- [40:39]
Jenny Britton
I was working out of my kitchen. I mean, I just had really nothing. I lived that. I believe in it. I believe in this idea of starting small and building, and I believe that it's really important for women and people of color and to start these businesses. And it's something of a passion of mine to help people believe that they can do it, because we need people. Even there's a lot of small businesses. We need more of them. But also, some of these small businesses become big businesses. And those big businesses, the people who start those become the leaders of the future, and they get a lot of say in where this country goes. And I want to see that level of business leaders look like America. And so you can start where you're at and do it. It's not easy, but it is so fun. It really is so fun.
- [41:25]
Diana Ransom
Fantastic.
- [41:25]
Jenny Britton
It's a great life. It is. It's been my entire life, and I just love it so much.
- [41:30]
Diana Ransom
Great. Well, thank you so much, Jenny, for being here today and having this conversation with me.
- [41:34]
Jenny Britton
Thank you so much. It's been so much fun to be here.
- [41:36]
Diana Ransom
So, Diana, do you remember how after our interview, Jenni kind of pulled us aside and told us how much Ink magazine was a resource for her when she was starting her first business?
- [41:46]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Absolutely. It was flattering to hear that.
- [41:48]
Diana Ransom
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it felt like this was like a nice 360 moment for her, coming to our office and being on the podcast. But it kind of dawned on me that her first business went bankrupt. You know, she spent years building. It was called Scream Ice Cream. And then she tried again, and that's when she hit Jenny's Splendid Ice Cream with the magical flavor. She built it out of her house. She was working three other jobs and she did it. Yeah. And so it's so cool to see her starting again now, like, by her own accord. She built this company that is still running, and now she's building another one.
- [42:24]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
From the ground up.
- [42:25]
Diana Ransom
Yes. From the ground up, I guess. Yes. You know, it's so cheesy, but, you know, when life hands you lemons to make lemonade, she's done it.
- [42:32]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
And she seems to be using the lemon peels now as well.
- [42:35]
Diana Ransom
Yes, yes.
- [42:38]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
I mean, truly, all the fruit rhymes. She's pretty inspiring. I definitely enjoyed your interview with her and hearing more about her. It's almost reassuring to hear about the struggles that she still has as an entrepreneur. It's sort of like validating for all the people who are doing it as well who didn't actually have the connections that she has. Good to hear that she's back at it. And, you know, it's actually just that hard. It is, yeah.
- [43:00]
Diana Ransom
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [43:01]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Absolutely. Not to scare anyone away, but it is. Any big ideas for you that came out of it or.
- [43:08]
Diana Ransom
I think that starting over inspiration can come from anywhere. Right. And I loved when she was saying that she knew she kind of couldn't not do it. Like, it was just what she wanted to wake up and do every day. And I think that's even for folks who aren't entrepreneurs. Like, what drives you, what makes you want to want to do it. You just got to kind of follow your passions, that's all. For this episode of from the Ground.
- [43:34]
Christine Ligorio Chavkin
Up, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your podcast platform of choice. Also, if you like this episode or have suggestions of what topics you'd like to hear about, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or reach out to us on Inc. Social Channel.
- [43:48]
Diana Ransom
From the Ground up is produced by Blake Odom and Avery Miles, editing by Matt Toder, mix and sound design by Nicholas Torres. Our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Thank you for listening and we will see you next week.
- [44:05]
Jenny Britton
Panoply.