Insight
Scaling improves food quality by unlocking superior ingredient sourcing
“I think that you can get better as you grow, and that's been my experience. When we were really small, and there's this sort of Glow around the sort of mom and pop sort of thing, I think, especially in ice cream. But when we were small, we were really limited …”
What-if
Jeni's Ice Cream Would Have Failed If Launched In Brooklyn
“It would be impossible to do what we do at Jenny's. All of our money would have been in, you know, rent, and paying people, and all the things that you have to do in Brooklyn that would be different from Columbus. And here we can put it all in the ice cream, a…”
Insight
Grocery Buyers Prioritize Brands That Bring New Consumers To The Category
“Your customer when you're in grocery is not their customer, it's the buyer. And what the buyer wants to see is, yeah, sure, you can split some votes, that's okay. Are you bringing new people to the category?”
Insight
Bringing In Outside Capital Costs Founders Their Autonomy To Explore
“And when you bring in outside capital, you lose all of that. And so, you know, are, who's on your team? Who, how many people do you have? Are you ready to sort of like let go of that kind of control?”
Insight
PR Agencies Fail Startups Unless An Internal Champion Truly Believes
“I find that PR firms can be really awesome, but you have to have somebody, you have to have somebody at that firm who is your champion.
Who adores you, who believes in you, who wants to push it forward.
Otherwise it falls flat and you just, you kind of go nowh…”
Insight
Mid-Sized Cities Provide Better Startup Launchpads Than Large Metros
“When you're in a smaller, small to mid-sized city, the city gets behind it in a different way. You know, you can really try things and also fail a lot, and people still stick with you. And I have noticed that in big cities, everybody's trying new things. Every…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Food Investors Now Seek Companies With Billion-Dollar Potential
“And I think you have to have a massive opportunity where I'm hearing people say that, you know, they're looking for companies who could become a billion dollar company.”
Insight
Founders Need Personal Attorneys Entirely Separate From Company Counsel
“As a founder, you know, you have your company attorney or whatever, but you do need to have Kind of your own really great attorney, just to have somebody to ask questions.”
Insight
Customers return for past favorites, not daily new creations
“I had learned the lesson that no one comes to a business for whatever I'm making today. I don't go to businesses for that. I go to a business for what I had the last time I was there, not for some new thing.”
What-if
Early capital would have prevented Bauer from mastering ice cream craft
“Let's say we would have taken, you know, a whole bunch of money early and I don't think anybody would have given it to us anyway, but let's just say we could have done that. I wouldn't have had the time to work out these details and the things that I now know …”
Opinion
Britton Bauer: Standardized tests like the SAT are an invalid evaluation metric
“I really thought that was horrible. I still think that's horrible. My mom thinks that's horrible. It's horrible. You can't judge people by that kind of stuff. It's just not right.”
Insight
Britton Bauer: Customer return visits depend on consistently offering past favorites
“The thing that draws me back to a business every single time, no matter what the business is, is the thing that I had last time I was there. I might change my mind when I get there, but it's always the thing I had last time that I loved.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Britton Bauer: A critic loved the exact ice cream he previously hated
“The same ice cream he hated before, he loved now.”
Opinion
Britton Bauer: American ice cream can be the best in the world
“We want to set the standard for American ice cream. American ice cream can be so much better, that it's the best ice cream in the world when it's made a certain way”
Assertion Supported
Britton Bauer: Jeni's recalled 265 tons of ice cream during 2015 crisis
“We got approval from the FDA and we did a full recall within hours, which meant that that 265 tons of ice cream that had been out in the world came back to us.”
Disclosure
Britton Bauer prefers making ice cream over selling out to corporate acquirers
“I mean, I like making ice cream, and I want to make ice cream, and that's what I do, and how I, it's actually how I think. You know, I'm 44 years old, I started making ice cream when I was 21, 22, so more than half my entire life, most of what I remember, has …”
Disclosure
Raising Institutional Funding For Britton's New Venture Flora Proves Challenging
“I've been building this company for two years really scrappy, and we've gotten some angel investors for early stage just to get us to kind of figure out what we're doing. And now we're kind of going after the bigger funding, but we are finding, yes, of course,…”
Assertion Supported
Jeni's Recalled 265 Tons Of Ice Cream Following A Listeria Discovery
“So we decided that we were going to recall everything which meant that that 265 tons of ice cream that had been out in the world came back to us, and there we were.”
Assertion Partly supported
Jeni's Ice Creams avoids stabilizers, emulsifiers, corn syrup, and egg yolks
“We don't use stabilizers, emulsifiers, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and a whole bunch of other ingredients that are sort of very typical in ice cream, or even egg yolks.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Jeni's operates 39 scoop shops with 1,800 peak summer employees
“I mean, in our stores, we have 39 stores, and we have, well, at the peak this summer, we had 1800 team members in the stores”
Assertion Supported
Bauer spent eight years making ice cream before scaling Jeni's
“I spent at least eight years boots on the ground just making ice cream and serving it before I ever started growing, and that time is everything for me because I learned all of that.”
Insight
Smaller cities rally around local businesses better than major hubs
“I see it in other cities as well, where the whole city can kind of rally around a few businesses and companies that they love, whereas sometimes you get lost in a bigger city.”
Insight
Britton Bauer: Butterfat's low melting point makes ice cream ideal for scent
“Butterfat melted below body temperature because I was working with other fats that perfumers often use fats that are solid at room temperature but melt immediately on contact with your skin. And so I knew that butterfat was that kind of a fat, and that ice cre…”
Assertion Contradicted
Britton Bauer: 2015 Listeria outbreak traced to hairline crack behind equipment
“In the end, the Listeria was coming out of a hairline crack over by the wall behind a piece of equipment, and it's like, we finally found it, which we celebrated.”
