Noosa Yoghurt

“At that point, we were producing the product with about 28 days of shelf life which is short.”

“So, you know, at that point, most yogurt was sort of between 5.3 to six ounces. And there was nothing. There was nothing available in stock packaging. In those sizes.”

“And nobody on the shelf at that point in time was doing transparent packaging.”

“It was a half, a quarter. It's because the Mathewson family put in a larger share of money.”

“And again, my vision wasn't to create this national brand. I just thought I could have this really cool Colorado-based company, and then I selfishly get to eat it more than once a year.”

“I will never start a perishable food company again.”

“We rolled over a pretty significant minority ownership in the business that, you know, that was sort of how the deal was structured.”

“So ShopRite says we're going to, instead of charging you A 100,000 dollars out of the gates. We'll bill it quarterly.”

“So within, I would say, sort of that, 20 12 to 20 14 time frame, there was probably six knockoffs that came into the market from Dannon, from Hain Celestial to even Kroger doing a private label version of Noosa.”

“Come to learn that ShopRite is probably one of the hardest operationally retailers to work with. Like, if you miss their delivery window by, like, five minutes, they'll refuse you, and then you have to reschedule.”

“I mean, we were profitable at end of 20 12. We were close to a twenty million dollar business.”

“They essentially said, look, yeah, we think there is an opportunity in the U.S., so We'd happily license to you. We'd want to invest in the business, and we'd be happy to bring, like, a yogurt maker over and just help with the initial startup of the business. …”

“By the way, the company did eventually get around to launching a passion fruit yogurt, the flavor that inspired the whole thing. But today, out of the 18 different Noosa flavors, including cinnamon roll and pomegranate and tart cherry, passion fruit has sadly …”

“I mean, we were making it in 10 gallon buckets for over a year, which Gave the state health inspector a lot of heartache.”

“2008 and sort of seeing this emerging trend of Greek yogurt. And in, in some ways I actually think we thought we had missed the boat. Ultimately we timed it just perfectly because it just reinvigorated the category Greek yogurt. And we got to ride that wave wi…”

“Well, I mean, so we launched, there was probably like mid-year that we launched in Supertarget. They came back four months later and expanded us into a thousand stores, a thousand more stores.”

“So I sort of see these two very distinct chapters that I was involved with at Noosa was sort of like the Wild West chapter, and then our professional chapter, which we, I think we created an amazing internal culture, and I had an absolute blast in sort of that…”