The Exchanges

Q And at what point did you start to think, you know, Drew's the person that I could, I should maybe talk to about starting a business with?

A He was my best friend. I've known him since kindergarten. He was just such a big part of my childhood and growing up that I had this trust factor, number one, first and foremost, trust in him. And then two, second, he had just started a company. He knew a lot about the branding and marketing side. I knew that he was athletic. I knew that he didn't like to lose. We had a lot of those same character traits that you want. In a partner when you're going to go to war when you're starting a business. And so I called him, and I was, I was like, hey, I know you're doing poolside, but how do you feel about frozen Greek yogurt?

AI assessment note: “he had just started a company... And so I called him”

Q And, and in terms of building your team out, I mean, in those first sort of, you know, Initially, it was just the two of you, but tell me how you started to build out your, your team. I mean, by 2012, 13, I mean, was it five people, six people?

A It was a handful of people. We outsourced some of the functions early on, like finance. We were outsourcing a lot of the transactional pieces of finance, but we eventually started hiring against some of the weaknesses. So we brought in A finance guy to help us day to day run the finance side of the business. We brought in some people on the marketing team to help build out the grassroots marketing campaign. We brought in a salesperson to help on the sales side of the business. And then as we started expanding, obviously like product was huge. So we brought the R and D function in house and hired a food scientist. And so there was a handful of us. We had a little space It started out as a one bedroom apartment in Boston that we all worked out of, and then eventually we got a little bit larger space that housed about 10 of us.

AI assessment note: “It was a handful of people. We outsourced some of the functions early on”

Q And what, what were some of the brands that, that he represented?

A So it's funny, I think, as we talk about Yasso, too, and the shift to kind of this healthier food, um, healthier foods options nowadays, when I was a kid, it was brands like Micromagic, which were like frozen burgers that you'd microwave, and, you know, McCain-Elio's French fries, and he then picked up the Chobani brand when they first started, and that was huge for him. Um, so it definitely evolved over the years, but, um, yeah, I remember he was selling truckloads of frozen orange juice when I was a kid, and I was like, Who drinks this? You know, now you don't even see frozen orange juice. So there was definitely a shift in the food ecosystem over the years.

AI assessment note: “brands like Micromagic, which were like frozen burgers... McCain-Elio's French fries, and he then picked up the Chobani brand”

Q Alright, let's go back to you, Amanda. You're watching Drew's, like, beer pong business, and tell me, like, what was your impression of it? Like, did you think it was silly or fun, or what did you, what did you think about it?

A Oh, super inspiring. So at the time, you know, we were all living together in the city, like a big group of us was living in this one apartment. It was probably like a two bedroom apartment, but like four of us lived in it. And a couple of us would actually sleep on the poolside pongs as air mattresses because, you know, we had no money. We were just, we were, we were freshly out of college and every morning we only had one car. So I would drive everybody to work in the morning. I would drop them all on the way to my end destination of the food brokerage firm. And so, I was really close to those early years of Poolside, and we were all involved from the very beginning seeing how Poolside was growing, and it was just super inspirational.

AI assessment note: “Oh, super inspiring. So at the time, you know, we were all living together”

Q Was there any hardball? I mean, there's limited space in the freezer section to, and, you know, Some of these companies are very powerful. They have a lot of influence. Did any of them kind of try to push you out?

A Oh, yeah. It was, it got, it got extremely crowded, and yeah, like you said, it was all the big guys that have deeper wallets than we do, or bigger pockets, and there were a few instances where we would get, like, strong-armed out by someone else just paying more for our space, but I think at the end of the day, like, we were in their, like, First, we had been listening to consumers. We knew where we had to go in kind of this shift towards indulgence and improving our product, and I think we were always one step ahead of them in terms of our product taste and quality, and we were able to get ourselves back into every single one of those stores that we had gotten strong-armed out of.

AI assessment note: “there were a few instances where we would get, like, strong-armed out”

Q that when you freeze it, you can scoop it later on. But if you just take like milk and sugar and put it in a blender and put in your freezer, it's going to just turn into a milk ice cube. Right. So is that like, how did you, when you started experimenting with Greek yogurt, like what were you doing to, to figure out how to make this work?

A Yeah, so step one, we were like, what happens when we just put Greek yogurt in the freezer? And it's exactly like you mentioned, it just freezes into a solid ice cube. And we were like, okay, that's not going to work. I think one of the key challenges we had up front was what makes ice cream so smooth and have this great mouthfeel when you eat it is fat and sugar. And we wanted to remove or reduce those items and add in And so we were taking out a lot of the key components that does make ice cream so delicious. And then trying to add things in that at the end of the day, tend to make the product more grainy and icy. And so that was a long learning curve.

AI assessment note: “step one, we were like, what happens when we just put Greek yogurt in the freezer?”