How I Built This with Guy Raz - Advice Line with Ben Goodwin of Olipop

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Today’s callers: Darin from North Carolina seeks guidance on consumer education as his ghee-based snack brand grows into major retailers. Then Sarah from Massachusetts explores scaling pathways for her ‘never-frozen’ gluten-free baked goods. And John from Ohio considers whether online sales can turn around his local food co-op. Plus, Ben comments on the drivers of Olipop’s nearly $2 billion valuation, and critiques a common piece of business advice that often holds founders back. Thank you to the founders of Gheelish, Sarah’s Gluten Free Goods, and Bexley’s Natural Foods for being a part of our show.If you’d like to be featured on a future Advice Line episode—where Guy and former show guests take questions from early-stage founders—leave us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and a specific question you’d like answered. Send a voice memo to [e-mail] or call 1-800-433-1298.And be sure to listen to Olipop’s founding story as told by Ben in 2024.This episode was produced by Kerry Thompson with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineers were Cena Loffredo and Robert Rodriguez. You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram and sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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All right, let's get to it. Joining me this week is Ben Goodwin, co-founder of the prebiotic soda brand, Oli Pop Ben. It's great to have you back on the show. Guy, absolutely a thrill to be back with you again. So Ben, you were first on the show not that long ago, 2024, when you told the story of OliPop, of course, and you spent years developing a completely different sort of brand that you then had to walk away from with very little in return. But you eventually, after much struggle, rebounded from that experience and created OliPop, a brand that is, it's so hard. It's amazing. It's now valued it at over $2 billion, maybe more. That was the last I saw, which was last year.

It is such a great story. And as always, for those of you who have not heard that episode, we will put a link to it in the show notes. So please do listen to Ben's episode if you haven't heard it, the story of Oli Pop. It is so good. Ben, before we get to today's callers, just a couple questions for you. You guys just launched a kind of a rebrand, right? Like a refreshed packaging and an national ad campaign. Tell me about the thinking behind that.

Yeah. No. Thanks for noticing, Guy. Look, I think that, you know, if I reflect on where OliPops been stronger and weaker since its inception, I think we've always been a really great pole brand. And a lot of that is, you know, the kind of original packaging and brand ethos. And then there's a great tasting product that once you tried it, it kind of was a delight how good it actually tasted. And that kept people coming back and that made people want to give it to their kids. And so that's been amazing for us because it's created a really, really strong. foundation. That being said, it's always been a really significant goal of mine to take the layers of our brand mission and to kind of competently translate them to the consumer, which I had never really felt satisfied with the level at which we'd done that prior. And so we have a new refresh to the visual identity, which speaks to all the layers of benefits you get out of Olipop, a new sonic

identity, which I'm really, really proud of, and a new fiber education campaign. And I, you know, I'm really happy with how the early traction is going. We're reaching men in a higher rate. We're reaching older demos at a higher rate. It's the most effective advertising put out today. And correct if I'm wrong, I think you guys are an entirely remote distributed organization, right? Yep. That's right. You don't even have a central office. No, we don't. I mean, you know, David and I, when we first started the company kind of were a little loathe to commute or to force you to commute. And then, you know, you get this logical push from your investors. Hey, you could really use an office. And then COVID hit. And, you know, we spent about a

year and a half or two years or whatever was learning how to create a remote culture that could really thrive. And then once we had that rolling, there never really seemed to be a good reason to revert. It's really remarkable. I mean, given your, your sort of the valuation of the company and, you know, your sales figures. And I suspect that. I think you run a pretty lean team, right? I mean, how many overall employees do you have? So, yeah, we're sitting in about 280 right now. And, you know, we might have closer to 300 end of this year, Q1 of next year.

So, Ben, as you know, of course, last year, PepsiCo acquired one of your biggest competitors, Poppy. We also told that story on the show. And I suspect that was a very good day in many ways for OliPop. Because, I mean, when all of a sudden done with tax credit. And so on. It was almost $2 billion acquisition. Yeah. And again, I suspect that there were a lot of smiles around Ollipop because of what it could mean for you in the future.

I mean, tell me about the vision for the future of the company. I mean, you know, I think most minds are like, oh, well, then Coca-Cola may or another, you know, Currig or some other big brand is going to want to acquire you for even more down the road. Yeah, look, let's find out. I, my, and, you know, look, I say this and it's not coming from a place of coyness. Look, I think one of the things that's made Oli Pop have the level of success it has is the way that we really hold the impact of the mission is the North Star of the business. And so no matter what checks or opportunities show up, I don't want to live in a world where five's, ten years from now, I'm staring at a product that's being delisted or it's been cratered out to the point where it's no longer providing value. For me, it's like dead serious that we're providing real value to all those people who need the health benefit. I mean, we just published our first piece of human research on blood sugar stability.

And we found that, you know, in that research, Oli Pop, didn't spike people's blood sugar, kept their blood sugar stable. We were studying the vintage colon in that one. Yeah. You're using stevia and like small amounts of real fruit juice. So it's less than, it's five grams or less sugar for cancer. Anyway, those things are always going to be really, really important to me. Now, I mean, my target right now in my head is, okay, I need to go to a billion dollars gross revenue. We're well over a half billion and we're chugging towards that line.

And as long as we perform well and run a great business, we'll have, there's the public path, there's the acquisition path. And then there's all sorts of weird paths in between. Sometimes you get a distribution deal and you still go public anyway and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Ben, I'm curious. And you may not have an answer for this right away. what's like a widely accepted piece of business advice that you that you've gotten over the years that actually is completely wrong or maybe in your case is wrong?

You know, I think that oftentimes, and this is, look, I think that people who are hardwired to be entrepreneurs will buck this kind of anyway. But I think, you know, anytime I hear the quote, something's market, you know, it's like a, and everyone kind of goes, oh, this is kind of what you need to learn how to accept. And I'm kind of like that the second you tell me that something is market is the second I know that we have to do better than that. So whether it's like terms that you're looking at or, you know, either with investors or with, I don't know, some distribution partners or just anything where you're you're compromising your standards, you compromise your integrity or you're compromising quality. and somehow that's considered a part of the Faustian bargain that you just need to wrap your head around.

You know, I always thoroughly reject that. Fair enough. Fair enough. All right, Ben, ready to take our first call? I'm stoked. All right, let's bring in our first caller. Welcome to the advice line. Your Honor, Ben Goodwin, co-founder of Oli Pop.

Please tell us your name where you're calling from. Just a brief line about your business. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ben and Guy. Great to meet you both. I'm Darren Alpert. I'm based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I'm the founder and CEO of Gie Lish. We're a snack brand that's made with Orrub,

organic ghee and got into about 4,000 stores in two years. Wow. So welcome to the show, Darren. So geelish snack brands made from ghee, the clarified butter, of course, right? So what kind of snack foods are you making? Yeah, so we started with three skews of organic popcorn. And then we launched our version of a pop chip slash popcorner. And then we've got a sweet snack that's going to come out in the fall. Amazing. So tell me a little bit about the business. Where did you start it? Yeah, so I had the concept about three years ago. My wife and I made samples in our kitchen.

I cold emailed sprouts. I got a meeting with their innovation team, brought them samples that my wife and I made, and then six months later, we got on shelves. So we went straight from my kitchen to sprouts nationwide. Wow. And so good, so ghee, I can understand because it's delicious and buttery. I mean, tell me why you wanted to build a brand around ghee. Yeah, yeah, great question.

First of all, no one else had. Right, there's avocado oils and things like that, but yes. Lesser evil, I think, has one geesekew, but nobody who's ground up geek. Right. So that logic is exactly why I did what I did. I thought that was a platform that we could make similar to like collie power or Bonza or hippies or truff. Take an ingredient and make a platform out of it. And how did you raise money to launch the brand?

Initially, no. I mean, I literally launched the whole thing with $250,000 credit card points. $50 in ingredients from the store. It's kind of like Ben's Sotomaylorpe, and it's a classic. Yeah, got the green light from sprouts, and then I went out and raised money. So I cold emailed Gary Vaynerchuk.

He's one of our lead investors. Wow. Yeah, it was incredible. And then I went out and raised money from friends and family as well, too. And tell us briefly, how is the business doing? Where do you expect to net out this year in terms of growth sales?

Yeah. So last year was our first full year, which is 2025. We did about $1.8 million last year. Wow. All wholesale, no D to C, no Amazon. We still don't do those. This year we'll finish about three and a half million. Incredible.

Okay, before we dive in further, what is your question for me and Ben? Yeah, so just like you let off, Guy, you had to clarify, no joke, no pun intended, what clarified butter is. Ben, I've got so much respect for what you've built. You have talked about the Trojan horse strategy with soda to bypass kind of the education hurdle of prebiotics. We're doing the same thing with chips. popcorn as a form factor, but people aren't that familiar with ghee slash clarified butter. I would love to hear any tactical advice to help us educate people on ghee, since they've typically only seen it in a jar and it looks kind of weird in the jar.

Yeah. All right, Ben Goodwin, before you can answer the question or you can ask more questions for Darren, either way, but take it away. Yeah. No, awesome. Well, first of all, Darren, congrats on the growth, right? The hardcore bootstrapping, getting sprouts locked and then raising capital after you had that you had your kind of product together i'm sure did at least minor wonders for your valuation

going in so um that's that's a really good the really intelligent strategy and uh yeah i mean i also for what it's worth i mean 90% of my cooking at home i use gey i'm a huge a huge fan of gey and yeah it's kind of i don't look this isn't necessarily the track you want to go down but i you know i am really fascinated by kind of its i herbetic history not you know for for balancing but also uh its utilization as like a high absorption carrier. It almost acts as like a liposomal agent for nutrients. My brother in nerd of ingredients. I love it, man.

Yes, right. Yeah, so I mean, I guess I'm just curious. Obviously, you've got some of the great traction. It sounds like it's mostly in the natural channel, yeah? Yes and no. So we've got pretty close to a green light with one of the big club stores as a regional test. But yeah, you're right, though. The majority of it is all through natural for the most part.

Current sales. Currently, yeah. Yeah. Are you getting any other feedback other than we just don't have enough awareness of the value of this particular ingredient? Well, it's kind of just in my own head. It's like you look at Skinny Pop and you look at Smart Food and obviously Lesser Evil, but like Skinny Pop and Smart Food do about a billion dollars combined just in those brands. And we're 30% less calorie, 60% less fat than Skinny Pop and we're organic. So like there's a lot of reasons to switch. Is that front and center on not versus Skinny Pop, but is, yeah, yeah. The reason why I ask is because you have to think about the order of operations of consumer motivation. So you'll typically get kind of price at the topish, but that's always like a value to dollar ratio. And so that kind of goes to the side.

You know, it's about the argument that says underneath price. So then, you know, number one's always taste. Yep. Right. So if you quote blind taste test against all your major competition, especially in your price point, are you coming out on top? If you basically aren't getting a yes, then the structural argument behind the product is going to be borderline irrelevant. Then, you know, especially at the mainstream level, specific ingredient nuances can be a little challenging to communicate because the tension spans are so short. So the structure of less fat, less calories, but taste better than.

And then, you know, simple like broad strokes, like all real ingredients and yadda, yada, that would in my, I would say, like, it's a little generic, but if your packaging looks good enough, but that would be my starting place, especially when you're looking to go outside of natural. Yeah, Ben, I have a question for it. I mean, I think that there are plenty of people who will buy olipop because they like the prebiotic. side of it, but I think, and I think you're implying this, most people buy it just because it's a good tasting soda, but it doesn't have, you know, 35 grams of sugar like a can of Coke, right? And so the ghee side is great. Yeah. But I wonder whether it even matters that you emphasize that.

In other words, if it tastes great and it has, you know, far fewer calories and far, far lower fat content than the leading brands, like, that's really interesting. I don't see that on your packaging. I see fiber, which is great. Yeah. But if it, if it just tastes great and it's a great alternatives. You're not thinking, oh, man, I wish I had Skinny Pop. You're thinking, this is amazing. And that to me is where you have the opportunity and not necessarily in educating people about Guy. Right. Does that, Ben, would you agree with that? I mean, so I think at a broad strokes level, that's right. I still would ensure that you find a great avenue to tell the deeper, richer story. So it's that's the, you know, people do like a good bootstrap entrepreneur story.

I do think there's interesting dynamics in terms of Ghee's historical relevance to, you know, a culture and a medical discipline. And I also think that, look, fat is a major transporter of flavor, right? I mean, you've also got the culinary arguments. I think for your broad, for your broad consumer base, I think it's really, it's, I think what guy just articulated is bang on. It's, you know, does this taste really fantastic, especially at a premium price point, then it's bullet points right on the front of the pack around comparative nutrient compositions and how your product is superior. And then figure out the other avenues for the stories that are, that's deeper. But that's for your evangelist consumer, who they're an important part of your community.

But it can go a little deeper in so that it's, it's, um, it's less front and center and you get faster absorption rate from your emergent consumers. And maybe it's something you put on the back of the bag, right, for people who, or you've got QR codes, or you use social media to create videos. What is ghee? Why do people who use ghee? What are the benefits of ghee? You know, why does popcorn taste or snacks taste better made with ghee? You know, that's really where you can start to tell the story.

But I mean, you've got a great product. You're doing, I mean, your velocity is terrific. Yeah, you're up to an amazing start. Yeah. So appreciate it. Thank you. And it's a tough, tough space, snack foods. It's a really tough space. So that's, that's exciting. Darren, thank you so much for calling in. The brand is called G-H-E-E-L-I-S-H. Good luck. Best of luck, man. Thank you both. Yeah, of course. Thank you. It's a tough category. And we know that because we've, you know, we've done a lot of

snack brands on the show. Yeah. Switching behavior in snacks is tough. But if you can get it right, And if you can get the product, you know, make a delicious product that is, you know, I hesitate to use a term better for you because everyone uses it. But if it is or can be perceived it to be better for you, that's, you know, that's gold. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, another caller, another question, and another round of advice. I'm Guy Raz. Stick around. You're listening to the device line on how I built this lab. Starting a small business is the fun part. Running one, that's where it gets complicated. Because all of a sudden you're hiring people, and you've got to pay them on time and figure out benefits.

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because you don't have to worry when it just works. Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz, and my guest today is Ben Goodwin, co-founder of Oli Pop, and Ben, are you ready for our next call? I very much am. All right, let's bring in our next caller. Welcome to the advice line. Please tell us your name where you're calling from and just a little bit about your business. Hi, Guy, I'm Ben.

Thank you so much for having me on today. My name is Sarah Godfrey, and I'm the owner of Sarah's gluten-free goods. I specialize in gluten-free desserts that actually taste good and also cater to other food allergies, such as dairy, nut, corn, and oat allergies. Awesome. And where are you located? I'm right in Westfield, Massachusetts, close to Springfield. Got, okay, got it.

Welcome to show, thanks for calling in. Okay, so you're making a line of gluten-free baked goods. Do you have a bakery? Is that where you're selling them? So I actually have a cottage food permit, so I'm allowed to cook out of my home, which is a really unique opportunity because I don't have to have all that money up front to have a commercial kitchen and all that kind of stuff. So where are you selling your baked goods?

So right now I do three local farmers markets, and I also have my stuff in two or three local small grocery stores as well. Got it. Okay. And so gluten-free, a lot of gluten-free products out there. But what is, tell me about why you went into this, why yours are different. I'm assuming you are yourself gluten-free. I am indeed, which is funny to me when I'm at farmers markets and people are like, you're gluten-free too. And I'm like, yes, I am. There are many of us. I know that somebody the other day said that there's a minuscule amount of people that have gluten and dairy allergies in the world. And I was like, well, nothing has made me more angry and want to do more good with my company than somebody saying there's a minuscule amount of people out there. Oh, my God. By the way, I could talk.

We won't do it. I promise. But I could talk about why the rate of gluten and general food allergies have gone up precipitously since the 70s. Spoiler. It has a lot to do with the. microbiome. Of course. Yeah, yeah. That's for another day. So I think the difference for my company is that it's not frozen, first of all. Everything is fresh. So when I go to a farmer's market, people ask me, did you bake all of this yourself? I say absolutely, I baked it all yesterday.

In a local facility that is completely safe for multiple allergies, such as nut, dairy, and gluten. Got it. Okay. Before we dive in further into, oh, yes, briefly, tell me how, you know, roughly, what do you do in sales a year? I mean, or, you know, what do you expect to do? So I've only been open for about a year. Last year, my net profit was negative $2,000. And this year I, the fact that you know net versus gross, you're actually up the great start. I learned it from this show. So thank you so much. I know so much. Good. Oh, wow. Look at you. Good. So this year, I'm expecting to do about $20,000 in net profit. Oh, fantastic. Okay. That's great. All right. Before we done,

Evan further, what's your question of us? So my question is that I'm really sort of harping on the fact that I want my goods to be fresh, never frozen, and available for people in my local area, if not more. And I find that as a consumer of gluten-free goods, everything I buy is mostly in the freezer section. And if I want something fresh in the grocery store, it's made by the grocery store bakers. And there's a caveat on the label that says, make and tain wheat, nuts, stuff like that. So I personally could never eat that because it's not safe for me. So I'm wondering how can I provide that for my community when there is that issue of perishability and how long it'll last on the shelf? All right.

So how do you start to sell fresh stuff that's not shelf stable and not necessarily frozen? Okay, Ben, good one of want to bring you in. You've already said hello to Sarah, but say hello again. Hey, Sarah. Hello again. Yeah, hi. How many, is this a one woman show? It sure is.

My wonderful husband is doing a farmer's market for me right now, though. So he is amazing. Okay. So what the one, the 1.5, got it. Yeah. I guess the main question I kind of have is every pathway from here, unless you get really lucky with, you know, a network that you're connected into is probably going to require some additional money.

Yes. So have you thought about that? And then do you have a sense of your kind of. risk tolerance for raising either raising capital and, you know, the challenge obviously would take you money is you need to then show some sort of scale and you show the ability to return. Right. The alternative to raising equity is to raise debt, but then the debt's going to be secured against your assets, which might not be super exciting.

So have you thought about if you need a capital scale, how you'd approach it? So I definitely have thought about it. And I would say that just in a personal, I am debt-averse because I have been debt-free. I did a personal debt-free program. So my brain is already a little bit ofverse to it. And just hearing me. Me too. I hate, yeah, I'm debt-free and I like refuse.

So, and one of the amazing opportunities I had, which is sort of like stuck in my head, is I had the opportunity to do a local grant program for small businesses in my town. and I ended up getting a $3,500 stipend for my business. And that allowed me to have somebody help me with my website. So I'm wondering, a lot of people have talked to me about the ability to maybe get grants to start my own allergen commercial kitchen. And I'm wondering if there's a way for me to go that path instead of having investors and debt.

I want to jump in for sake. And I'm going to take a counter argument here, which is I think you're really far away from raising money. You're too small. You've got to show traction and velocity. And it's not to criticize you at all. Of course. It's actually to sort of put a reality check on this and say you have a lot of work and opportunities before you even go down that path. Now, it's not to say you don't have to. But I'm thinking of like we did Bobos, the Bobos opars in the show several months ago. And, you know, she started by making opars and selling them to a coffee shop in Boulder and then two and then. And then two. And then. five. And I wonder, even before you move into a commercial kitchen, can you start to kind of become the bakery behind other businesses like Bobos did? Like, could you go to coffee shops that you like or small co-op stores, you know, independent cafes and say, hey, can I drop off, you know,

gluten-free blondies or cinnamon bread or, you know, not 20 different things, like chocolate muffins, Like your best sellers, can I drop these off, you know, and maybe we can start a relationship that way? Yeah. So what I have right now is I have three local shops where I drop off a small batch of things every Tuesday. And they take a 10% commission. But I get to decide what I bring. So there's not a lot of leftover product. And I can sort of figure that out. I have tried a couple of coffee shops. And what I'm finding, there's friction in that, because, they don't want the liability that if somebody has a nut allergy that they might go after their business versus my business. And I'm not really sure how to get over that hurdle because I know it's okay, but it seems like the business owners don't want to take that risk of somebody

saying it did have gluten in it or something like that. Sarah, how, what does your kind of excess capacity look like? You know, how much available additional time or energy do you have with your current? Because I think Guy's point is super correct in the event that you can continue to generate more output with existing human and, you know, time resources. Yeah. So something, that's definitely something I've been thinking about because this year has, it's been incredible the growth that I've had this year. And the people, because I've been on local TV, local radio, in the newspaper, in a gluten-free magazine. Amazing. And people are like coming and coming and coming. And I'm like, yes, I can do that. Yes, I can do this. And I'm,

you know, up in bed late at night. Like, oh my gosh, I'm one person. Like, how can I do this? And so I'm wondering when I take that next step to be able to have help to be able to get it in more places. And I'm not sure if my role is in the kitchen as the baker or if it's as the marketing person, because right now I'm all of it. Yeah, but you have, I assume you've got standardized recipes at this point for a base selection of products. Yes, absolutely, yep. Okay. So you might be the one on the lead of creating any new products, but you can in theory hand your existing formulas off to staff. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, so, okay, so sounds like you've picked a bunch of work, but it's already the place where at least it's causing you emotional stress.

It sure is. Okay, so yeah, you're, look, obviously you know this. The next logical step is what is something that was also part of guys' feedback, which is the commercial kitchen, right? And we did that at Raleap. I mean, I was formulating in my kitchen. Yep. And we had a local commercial kitchen, and we just grew more and more and more space. I have some very fond memories of that. But, you know, in this case, that cross-contamination issue would be a challenge.

You know, so. Well, and I've reached out to a couple places, and nobody is willing. And not. Maybe I just haven't found the right person, but nobody wants to take that risk or have a specific space. So maybe about five people have said, why don't you be the one to start the commercial kitchen for people with allergies? That's totally, yeah. Which would have been my. I love world domination, but like how the heck do I start my own commercial kitchen?

Money. Yeah. But I think Sarah right now, and you're selling at farmers markets, it mainly is you, right? You are, the story is we can trust this to be totally allergen-free because she is totally allergen-free. I mean, she has to eat that way. And so it's the trust factor that you bring into. One other thing I want to bring up, which is you are, you said you're reluctant to freeze products. And I wonder whether, and again, you'll, you know, you'll need to figure out how to do this with a small amount of money, ideally a little bit more money. Right.

Can I mean, surely you can freeze things like muffins or, you know, or, or, or, you know, things that could actually defrost pretty well, right? I mean, isn't that possible? Yes. So I find that the blondies and the muffins do well. The breads, not so much because of the moisture content in them. And I find that myself and the people I sell to, their eyes kind of light up a little bit when they realize that they can have something for breakfast that they don't have to get out of the freezer section. Like I've heard feedback from people that they like that idea. So I'm so stuck on it. And I wish I wasn't so stuck on it. But, It's just, it's something that nags me all the time that like, I want to be different. I want to be different. But I wonder if that will be my downfall of I want to be different sort of thing. Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, if I think about your story, I would, for if I would really, because I've been at this inflection point a handful of times with things that have started from zero, right?

And, and I think you can get a little more squeeze out of the situation by, all right, are there some people at me at the farmer's market or are there some friends that, you know, can be a combination. of product and cash or some way to kind of stay within my means to just eke a bit more out. I would really try to have an honest conversation with yourself between you and your husband around, all right, how much more can I squeeze out of this super, you know, super bootstrapped? Right. And at what point do I need a bit more cash in order to, you know, because, for example,

thinking of my friends of original Sunshine, they did just build their own facility. I got to. And that was allowed them the quality control that kept it free from allergens. They happened to be lucky enough to have connectivity to somebody who had some space. So that was useful. But I think you probably are going to have to cross that hurdle. Grants do a grant all day. But 3,500, you need tens of thousands, right?

No, I know. You need like $100,000. Not like, you know, $3,500. So I agree with Guy that, you know, raising, first of all, raising equities really. complicated and it's easy to get screwed and you have to generate some sort of return. But I would start to go look at small business loans, maybe run by like a low credit union or something. And then just you know, you're going to reach a threshold point where it's like, okay, am I super committed to this? Because you're going to trade the stress of being overworked, which is still

going to be, by the way. You can just trade the stress on the financial side. So you're just going to have to evaluate, all right, what's my real commitment level? What's my real risk tolerance? here, how much do I believe in this and do all the modeling you can? But if you've got a great customer base and you're already experiencing a lot of traction, then you've got a lot of positive signals from the community that there's a demand. Yeah, absolutely. And so I wish you massive amounts of luck. Thank you so much, guys. Appreciate it. Sarah Godfrey, the brand is called Sarah's gluten-free foods. Good luck. Thanks for calling in. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. It's like such a labor of love because baking is a lot it's a lot of work it's like early mornings it's a lot of work

but um there's a i mean this is different there's a mission here it's like making gluten free food's delicious which is slightly harder and and i this is where you know this is why when i'm in a lot of the kind of interviews and stuff that i do i talk a little bit more about the interpersonal side of entrepreneurship because this is this this this is like stress management holding a vision together and, you know, these intangels like courage and stuff like that are going to come into a lot of strain. But look, small businesses to start from nothing are kind of the backbone of this country. So I support them. No question about it. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller and another round of advice. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz,

and you're listening to the advice line right here on how I built this lab. Welcome back to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. And today I'm taking your calls with Ben Goodwin, co-founder of Alley Pop. Ben, ready for next call? Ben, ready for next call? Let's do it. All right. Let's bring in our next caller. Welcome to the device line. You're on with Ben Goodwin of Ollie Pop. Tell us your name where you're calling from, and a little bit about your business, please. John Groner. I'm calling about the Bexley Natural Market, Central Ohio's only cooperative grocery store. It's been around for 50 years. In 2024, it had some financial trouble. I happen to retire as a pediatric trauma surgeon in 2024.

So the Bexley Natural Market seems like it needed some resuscitation. So I joined the board with no food experience. Okay. Thanks so much for calling in, John. So if I got the story right, you are running a food co-op in Ohio. And where in Ohio is it again? It's a suburb of Columbus. Okay. It's called Bexley.

Okay. And tell me about the co-op. I mean, I'm imagining like bulk bins of natural. products and organic foods. I mean, what do you guys sell there? So, well, of course, I have to say first, the olipop is right next to the cash register. Oh, good man. Great. Okay. Good. Natural organic. Yeah.

Well, I mean, farmers bring stuff right to our store. I mean, one time a customer said to me, is the farmer nice to his chickens? I was stocking the eggs. Right. I said, well, you can ask him. He's standing right here. So she had a conversation with the farmer and she brought three dozen eggs, you know, so. We spend hundreds of thousand dollars to local vendors and farmers every year. Yeah. Nice. And John, tell me a little bit about how the business does.

I mean, it's a co-op. And are you profitable? Are you, yeah, I mean, how are you guys doing overall? So if you go back to pre-pandemic, maybe 1.2 to 1.4 million in sales per year. The problem wasn't so much the pandemic, but afterwards, there was definitely some mismanation. management, too much on salaries, some bad choices, and this is before I got involved. So it was really going downhill. And when I joined the, there was a public meeting, should we close the store, should we not close the store? A couple of us said, you know, I just really loved the store.

I mean, my kids sort of grew up there, you know. Yeah. And how's the business doing now compared to the pandemic? We're about halfway back. I mean, we are definitely in the profitability way, but not terrific. So your sales are half of what they were at their page. That's right. So that's significant. Okay. Before we dive in further, what's your question for us? So I visited co-ops in a lot of other cities as research, and they all have websites. So I thought, well, I will develop a website for the co-op, and that will help our sales. So I spent hours and hours and hours, you know, photographing thousands of products, putting on the website, and there's, like, no traction. So how can I get traction on the website? How can I just, we need about 20% more sales?

to kind of push us over the hump to really be not in danger of closing. Okay, a lot to ponder here. Ben Goodwin, I would love to hear your thoughts for John. Bexey natural market, their sales are half of what they were during COVID. And obviously, you know, they're trying to figure out how to turn this thing around. Yeah, 100%. Well, first, it just says the starting place, John, I think it's really admirable of what you're doing. Being a pediatric trauma surgeon is absolutely incredible.

And I'm sure you've really helped a lot of people. and it also shows what kind of person you are that you jumped into this, which was struggling. And, you know, cooperatives are really, really important to the community. First of all, actually, for what it's worth, I owned a small co-op out of a house in my mid-20s back in Santa Cruz. And then we had a sister co-op in Berkeley and at Santa Monica. So I actually, you know, but they were small. They weren't actual storefronts. They were inside homes.

So anyway, I'm just like a, again, really important. part of the community. And I think, you know, you deserve a lot of respect for what you're doing because it's not easy work, but it's so crucial. I'm curious, what is the intended goal of the website? So you said other co-ops that set up websites, you know, how are you attempting to use the website as a revenue source? And is there anything falling off? So the way the website is set up, it's a grace cart. I'm not sure familiar with that, but it's so when new products come to the store and their inventory, it automatically shows up on the website. So you can order from the website.

You can pay. We don't have delivery right now. But the idea is to compete with the Kroger truck that's going by the store every day, taking groceries to families. That in my non-scientific survey, people say, well, I'd love the shop of the co-op, but I just don't have time to go around. If there was a way I could just order things and just pick it up, that would be great. So that was the thought behind it.

We need to get Sarah out there. Yeah. Yeah, you said for sure. John, I don't know how much if you should put a whole lot of energy into marketing or promoting e-commerce for now. It's a very, very hard. It's an expensive game, right? And customer acquisition costs are very, very high. And maybe down the road, but I think for now, what you have is what Kroger and the big chain stores don't have, which is, you know, exclusive products, a handpicked curated items in the stores.

Real stories. You mentioned that people come and ask about the eggs and are the chickens treated well. You know, they want to know about the meat and how it's slaughtered. You know, where's the fruit coming from? I mean, all of those are stories that the big grocery stores just don't have and they can't tell. So a couple things come to mind. First of all, could you try things like, you know, like bringing the farmers in, you know, have like a meet the farmer Saturday or something, you know, where you've got somebody there talking about the meat or talking about the peaches you got right now or, you know, there's great milk in Ohio's got to produce a lot of milk. I know this because Jenny's ice cream uses milk from Ohio.

I think there are some creative things you can do to get not just your existing customers, but to build more word of mouth. Like, oh, we're going to Bexley's natural foods to try out like every Sunday. They have samples of new products they're considering stocking and we want to go try them. Yeah, we do have a table at the local farmer's market, which is actually going on right now. Not every week, but some weeks and we do have some products there. I mean, do you think that's a useful way of spreading the word? Got it do it in the store. Got it doing the store.

I got to do in the store. Yeah. You know, I think there's three levers that are kind of a part of the co-op experience. So one, you know, has already been called out, which is unique to the ingredients and quality of ingredients, right? I've got friends who live in a small town in Pennsylvania who go to a co-op just like yours, right? And it's all this dairy from these amazing Amish farmers and really high meat quality. they know that they're going to be able to go get things that are so much healthier, but also just taste so much better. And it's worth the special trip to go stock up.

So amplification around uniqueness of ingredients, but just an unmatched quality. Two, I really think about cooperatives from the standpoint of their anchors and hub for community. You guys have like a parking lot to the co-op that's got some space that you control that's outside? We do. Yeah. So, you know, I would start to really think about how do we really leverage that space? You could almost take guys' suggestion of like meet the farmer and you could think about, okay, how do I, how do I accelerate that? So how do I bring once a month or whatever the right cadence is?

How do I create a special community moment or how do we deploy out into the community in ways that are supportive? because I think not only does it help to get the word of mouth out, but then by people in interacting with the co-op or interacting with your events, they can start to actually feel more integrated into the community. It actually becomes almost like a social conduit for them, which is a big deal, and we need it more than ever. And I think the third thing is kind of like shopping experience.

What are you doing to the inside of the store to make sure that it feels really good when you come in? Are the sense in the right places? Are they greeted by bright colors? or fresh produce right when they walked in. Like how is it arranged so that it's an intrinsically pleasurable experience? And I think unless you are delivering, you have an Instacart model, most people, this, and I could be wrong, but I would think that most people are going to be using the digital opportunity for the convenience.

So they want to deliver to the house. Shopping, people might tell you, oh, it would be convenient for me to look at your website, but nobody, it's like, I don't know, it's a lot more interesting and you get more exposure to more things when you go in and actually shop the stores. I would look at those three levers. Yeah. Yeah. But how do you balance, I mean, I think there are definitely things that be done to improve the store.

How do you balance the national brands like you met Alipop and you mentioned Bobos? How do you balance the local brands versus the national brands in a cooperative store? I think the key is curation. It's finding products that you guys really like. I mean, this is what makes Trader Joe so successful. You know, they don't have thousands of skews. They have very few products on the shelves, but people know that it's been through, you know, Trader Joe's people have tested it. And if they don't like something after a while, it goes away.

But you know that what you're going to get there is probably good. I think you want to take advantage of the curation of the folks who run the co-op. And that's what people trust. They want to go in and say, oh, I've never seen this beef jerky. It might be a national brand that they still haven't seen. Or it might be a national brand that they have seen like Olipop. You're going to have some of that too. But I think the key is that the products that you've got in the store are practical.

They're things that people want to use and want to cook with and also eat, obviously. But they are also products that they know you guys have tested out that you guys like. And I think that's what's going to make the difference. That's really helpful. John Grunner, the co-op is called the Bexley Natural Market and Bexley, Ohio. Thanks for calling in. Good luck. Thanks, gentlemen. You've been very helpful. Thank you so much.

Good luck, John. Appreciate you. Rooting for you. Yeah, I love going into small grocery stores and co-ops. I mean, I just walk the aisles, you know. Sometimes looking for ideas for the show, but also just to see what's out there what people are making. And there's a lot of really interesting tiny, tiny brands, you know. And a lot of it's delicious.

Totally. I mean, I remember this tiny little co-op I used to go shop in Santa Cruz, and they definitely had, They had these olives that were just ridiculous. I couldn't get anywhere else. They had these macadamia nuts that were like I couldn't get anywhere else. And it was just this, you know, again, it felt like a cool place to go shop. There was just something about it. And I think that they really need to make sure they build up that emotional experience.

Yeah. Ben, thank you so much for coming on the show and helping me out. I have a, before I let you go, I have one question for you, which I'm asking all of a guess, which is if you could go back to when you were, you know, starting out, I mean, we know, When you start Raleap, you already came with quite a bit of experience from the previous situation, right? But if you could go back to your you self then and give you advice about what to do or not to do, knowing what you know now, what would have been helpful? Yeah, I think that, look, I mean, I think that people who are entrepreneurally minded, you know, and actually, not to plug myself here, but I ink gave me a monthly written column. And I just put my first article out on that.

And in it, I was really talking about the kind of psychology of a lot of founders and then, you know, being a craftsman or having a craftsman mentality and how that's a buffering agent and a grounding agent. But, you know, a lot of us have instincts and we have to learn how to listen to them correctly and work with them correctly and calibrate them correctly. And I think it's being aware that for those of us really covered the entrepreneurial cloth, you will always have something a little special that the rest of the world may not be able to recognize clearly. But that's part of what makes you great entrepreneurs. Learning how to have faith in that part of yourself, learn how to work with it, and learn when to really trust your entrepreneur instincts is a really great use of time. That's Ben Goodwin, co-founder of Ollie Pop Ben.

Thank you so much for coming back on the show. Guy, a real pleasure and an honor. Thanks for having me on. And by the way, if you haven't heard Ben's original episode on how I built this, you've got to go back and check it out. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. And here is a clip from that episode, one of my favorite moments from it, in fact.

The first two years, I was focused on cracking the code around the fermentation. So we want to try these three chemicals, and we want to try this food source. and we want to try these microorganisms. So let's put that in a bag. Let's do 10 different versions of it. And let's literally staple them to the wall of the shed. It looked like a scene out of, you know, the hive in aliens.

A little, well, yeah, until you see like 400 bioreactor bags filled with God knows what hanging from the walls. I mean, it was absolute madness. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. And by the way, please make sure to check out my newsletter. You can sign up for free at gairoz.com or on Substack. And of course, if you are working on a business and you'd like to be on this show, send us a one-minute message that tells us a little bit about your business

and the questions or issues that you're currently facing because we would love to try and help you solve them. You can send us a voice memo at hibt at ID.wondery.com or call us at 1-800-433-1298. Leave a message there and make sure to tell us how to reach you and we'll put all of this information in the podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Carrie Thompson with music composed by Ramtina Ablui. It was edited by John Isabella and our audio engineer was Sina LaFredo. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Catherine Seifer, Chris Messini, Alex Chung, Neva Grant, and Elaine Coates.

I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to The Device Line right here on How I Built This Lab. If you're running a small business and payroll benefits and hiring feel like a lot, you're not alone. And Just Works is ready to help because you don't have to worry when it just works.