How I Built This with Guy Raz - Honest Tea: Seth Goldman

Episode Date: January 16, 2017

In 1997, after going for a long run, Seth Goldman was frustrated with the sugar-filled drinks at the corner market. So he brewed up a beverage in his kitchen, and turned it into Honest Tea. 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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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. So in 2003, we had a delivery of glass that was faulty. And so we ended up with some product in the marketplace that had broken glass inside the bottle. In fact, two different Whole Foods stores. And Whole Foods has a rule, three strikes in your out. We knew we couldn't afford it as a business to lose our largest customer. So we voluntarily withdrew all product from the market. Every store. Everywhere, not just whole food, everywhere. Wow, how much did that cost you?

It totally stopped our sales. It was just painful. Brom NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, the story of how Seth Goldman and Barry Nailbub took honest tea from a kitchen sink in suburban Maryland

to the shelves of virtually every grocery and convenience store in America. So the year is 1997. Seth Goldman is living in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife and three young kids. He's 32. He just graduated from the Yale School of Management. He's got this great job at an investment firm. But Seth, he's got an itch. He feels like he wants to start something.

And it keeps nagging at him day after day after day. So he starts thinking about different ideas, maybe a web-based system that would raise money for public schools by tapping into alumni networks. He came up with an idea to simplify diagnostics for urinary tract infections. There were a bunch of other ideas that would pop into his head, but nothing really got him excited until one afternoon when he finished a long run and walked into a convenience store, hot and sweaty. And I went to a beverage cooler and I said there's nothing here. and nothing seemed appealing. Yeah. And it was all 100 calories per eight ounces.

And so the difference was fizz or no fizz, color, you know, different names, different bottles. They were almost uniform in their taste profile, their sweetness profile, which was, you know, six or seven teaspoons of sugar per eight ounces. Or none. Why isn't anyone making a drink with one or two teaspoons? Just like a little bit sweet. Yeah, just a tad sweet. So how did you go from that to like thinking about starting a tea company? So when I felt that thirst, I reached out to my professor from business school.

And when I had Barry Nelboff, when I had been his student, we had done a case study of the beverage industry and we had agreed there was a gap. There was that space. A sweetness gap. A sweetness gap. Huh. So I reached out to Barry. I said, I think I'm ready to do something about this. But you were not a tea expert.

No, not a tea expert. And more importantly, not a beverage industry expert at all. No knowledge of that. And that was where having zero knowledge of the beverage industry in the beginning was actually a kind of. competitive advantage because we went in without any of the assumptions. One of the things that happened literally the same month that I went for that run in New York City was that an investment my dad had made in 1977, so it was more than 18 years ago at the time, came to fruition.

And I was presented with a check for $50,000. And that was kind of the risk capital. And it was enough for me to say, okay, well, look, I'm going to put this, this is, if we lose this, we lose it, but this is what I'll bet. But at the beginning, I mean, you were thinking, I'm going into this with two feet. I'm going to quit my job. But, I mean, you were still young enough where you could always go back into finance. Yeah, that's right.

So you have a $50,000 check from your dad. And was Barry able to put in a little bit of seed money? Oh, yeah. Barry had been on the board of a company that had gone public. Because he kept his day job. As a professor at Yale. He's still a professor at Yale. What was funny was that before I went to submit my resignation at Calvert, I kind of called Barry

for one last boost of confidence. I said, I'm going to go in there. You know, we just had our third son, but I'm going to step down. And there's this long pause. He says, well, I bet if you went to Calvert and asked to go on a sabbatical, I bet you let you do that. And I said, well, that's not. I was hoping for the boost of confidence.

You know, I knew I had to take the plunge. You couldn't get investors to invest or employees or buyers to commit without, you know, me being committed. Can I just do a quick check, Seth? Sure. You are a father of three kids with a good job. at Calvert Investments, and you tell your wife you're going to quit to start a tea company, which is an industry you know nothing about and nothing about that terrified you?

More importantly, nothing about that terrified her. Yeah, I think it was, I believe in myself, probably a little bit of hubris, right? Like, I think I can do this even though I don't know anything about it, right? But I'm ready to try. So you quit and then basically you embarrass me. What did you start to do? Like, how did you start to get, did you start to raise money? Was that your first thing?

So it was a little bit of the chicken and eggs. So the first thing we did was I did write a business plan. These days, people really put together PowerPoints. They don't write business plans. I wrote about a 20-page business plan that mostly showed the thinking behind the business. I think every potential investor wants to understand. There's actually some thought here about where this goes and how it becomes something. I managed to secure an appointment with Whole Foods.

That early? Even before you had a product. So that was lucky because the marketing director at Whole Foods, or at that time it was called Fresh Fields, Whole Foods, it was a mid-Atlantic. He was a graduate of the Yale School of Management as well. So he helped me get an appointment with the buyer. Wow. Seth, I just want to pause here for a sec because from what I have read about you, I understand that like in the midst of all this happening with Whole Foods and all that excitementment, your son, Ellie, got pretty sick. Well, it was the ultimate test in compartmentalizing because literally the day before.

the Whole Foods, our first presentation when we're going to present the, so it's probably the most important day in the company's history where we're going to go present the tea. And Barry and I are in the kitchen, and we've got mugs and bowls that we were brewing the tea, and it was not an official-looking lab. So the kitchen's full of all these things. My wife walks in with our middle son, and she's got this ashton look on her face. And I thought, oh, oh, no, she's so upset. We've made the kitchen such a mess.

And I said, we'll clean this up. And she says, that's not what I'm worried about. We just came back from the doctor, and Ellie, our middle son, had a co-arctation of his aorta. He was going to need major surgery within the month. And so, you know, that's a pretty heavy news to get. How old was he at the time? He had just turned four. Man.

So it's intense. And probably if that had happened a few weeks earlier, I probably wouldn't have left my job at Calvert. Because, you know, whether it's the health insurance benefits or just the risk level, you know, I couldn't do that. But I had already taken the plunge. I knew you can. can bet that when I was at the Whole Foods meeting, I was selling with great intensity. I needed to succeed. And then while Ellie was in the hospital and I stayed with him that whole week, but I would go down at sort of after midnight, we had someone working on formulas, blends,

and he would come in and meet me in the lobby of Children's Hospital and we'd taste tea together and go back up and sleep by Ellie's bed. And I think, you know, life happens. It's part of the experience. It's part of the journey. And I'm so thankful and to have Ellie still with us and such a delight and such a wonderful presence, you know, and for me and for, you know, all the people he touches. Wow. You know, I'm thinking about you like pitching this product, you know, at Whole Foods in the midst of all this. And what did you do? Did you like, did you bring them samples that, like the samples that you made in your kitchen, just put them in like some random bottles or something?

We got an empty snapple bottle. You used empty snapple bottles? Yes, we have to take snap. But what's really funny is that Barry had sent over some thermuses one day in the mail. And when I met with the buyer and we poured out samples from the thermos, showed him my empty snapple bottle. With the honesty label on? Of course.

And he had said, well, look, this sounds interesting. We'll give it a try. We'll take 15,000 bottles, which of course was both terrifying and thrilling. How did you make that much tea? That was the other scary part. So we got this commitment from the buyer, and the next thing we did is we basically went up and down the East Coast looking at bottling plants. And we went to beer plants and soda plants, apple juice plants. So we ended up at a plant in Buffalo, New York, that was making apple juice.

Maybe it was a little down on its luck. Had some line time available, and they said, how are you going to brew the tea leaves? And so we brought in these mesh bags, these large mesh bags. these large mesh bags that are actually can be used to clean a pool like a... Oh, yeah, yeah. And so that was what we used. You just filled them with trees.

Put TVs in it and dunked it in boiling water. And every once in a while, the bag would break and then the pipes would, you know, clog. It was not pretty. How did you know the tea was, I mean, that, like, the tea was going to be good? Well, that was what was so funny. You know, when I talked to Barry, he just,

he's very good at making things sound simple. And sometimes they are. Sometimes it's a little more complicated. Like, well, look, you take a tea bag, you dunk that in water. If you multiply times 15,000. No problem. So theoretically that works. What we found is that when you, you know, especially in the beginning, too many tea leaves,

you don't get the full infusion. Yeah. No, the bag breaks, then you really got a problem. So we just had to keep iterating. It was a very makeshift operation. So once you had all the bottles, I mean, how did it sell? Like, did it do well right away? So what happened was, you know, obviously we went to the shelf.

Nobody knew what it was. And so all that first summer, this was 1998 now, all we did was give out. Like our marketing effort was me and two interns giving out samples in Whole Food Stores. And we gave out more samples than we sold. But by the end of that summer, we were the best-selling tea in the 17 Freshfields Whole Food Stores in the Mid-Atlantic. Wow. And so what was then happening was that the consumers were starting to ask for the tea, which was really neat. And it was so different.

And so what was nice is we have. Low switching. You know, some brands, maybe in the serial category, if one, you know, if raisin brands on sale, someone will go buy post or whatever, you know, they switch back and forth. But with Honest Tea, if it's not there, you don't go back and buy Snappler, Arizona because the taste is so different. Yeah. And so when we got somebody, and we were clearly not for everybody, they were very loyal.

What was like, what was the thing that made honesty different from like everything else that was in the market at the time? So two things. first of all, just much less sweet than everything else. But the other thing, and the reason the name on is tea made sense is because what we learned is most of the bottle tea in the U.S. at the time, and still today, is not brewed with, you know, it's not brewed tea. It's a powder or a concentrate.

It bears a relationship to the tea leaf, like the fish filet bears a relationship to the fish. You know, somewhere along the way there was a fish. But our tea, we bring in the tea leaves to the plant and we brew them there. I mean, so once you were in Whole Foods, pretty quickly after you launched, I mean, it seems like you were sad. I guess the impression of the average person would be, wow, you're set. You're in Whole Foods.

Keep in mind, it's only 17 stores. So it was just a start. But we had, I guess, prove the concept. Yeah. And so then we were able to go back out to investors and say, we proved the concept. Now it's time to expand. So we got more investment money raised.

And then we went to the other buyers and the buyers for the West Coast. And we went to buyers from other stores. You know, moms, my organic market here in the Mid-Atlantic was one of our earliest accounts. And they, it was working there. and they started to bring it to their other stores. So you're, I mean, you know, you're making lots of tea. You're growing. What were the challenges at that point?

Oh, there were so many because it was still, well, first of all, cash is always a challenge. We were growing quickly, but we were spending money to do it. We had salespeople. We were doing marketing. And then just probably getting the tea to stores, right? Getting to stores. And we were still getting rejected by all these distributors. And distributors.

are, they're the gatekeepers, they decide where your drinks go? Because this is unlike a, you know, a tech company. Yeah. No matter how good our product is, we can't ship it through the mail. Beverages are a high turnover product. And so as soon as a shelf empties of beverages, something takes its place. And so you need a distributor to be there to build, keep the shelf space protected. And so what happened was we were going to all the distributors of Snapple in Arizona.

And they were saying... When they returned our calls. They were just say it's not sweet enough. It's too expensive. Wow. It tastes like grass. It's not what we're used to, which of course it wasn't. And where they were not effective was they were tasting it for their own palettes.

They weren't thinking that there's a whole population out there that has a different appetite. Did you, I mean, when you pitch it to investors who invested in like these kinds of things, did, I mean, were they saying, oh, this is awesome. I can't wait to jump in. Or were they just saying? We're just saying, did you get a lot of nose? We got a ton of nose. The main reason we got so many nos is this was, now it was sort of 1999, 2000. This was during the whole dot-com boom.

Yeah. And we were a very old economy. And so, you know, people would much rather throw millions of dollars at, you know, something.com than put a few maybe $10 or $20,000 into a beverage company. Like you had investors come in and say, you know, you should follow our advice and do this. What were some of the things that told you to do? Oh, everything. thing. So we, yeah, we had these fancy investors from Boston. They said, you know, well, you know, you should be an energy drink because that's really growing or you should be a dot com.

You know, if you made the product a cheaper, you could make better margins on it. I said, it sounds like you're interested in the opportunity, except everything that we do. But we also knew to really succeed in the long term, we had to be different than all the other big companies out there. And if we, you know, to create a sweet tea, there were tons of companies already doing that. you were in those early days when people are saying, this doesn't taste great or they're probably saying like add more sugar. Did you ever think maybe they're right? Well, there's no question that would have led to faster growth, but it would have diluted what we

were building. This was about building something that we could always believe in, that we would be meaningfully different. And to take people in a different direction, you have to disrupt where they're going. Seth Coleman, in a moment when we come back, Seth explains how honesty became an actual political issue in the 2008 presidential campaign. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So by the early 2000s, Honest Tea had become one of the highest selling beverages at Whole Food Stores,

and things were going pretty well. But then, there was a hitch. At the time, the company had its own bottling plant here Pittsburgh, and something happened there that could have completely, destroyed the company. So in 2003, we had a delivery of glass that was faulty. And there were a lot of blisters in the glass. Literally, you could look at it and see little bubbles. And so we ran it on the production line. And the way the line works is that if it ever sees a defect in the bottle, it's supposed to kick it out and reject the bottle. But the line didn't do that. And so we ended up

with some product in the marketplace that had broken glass inside the bottle. In fact, two different Whole Foods stores. And Whole Foods has a rule. Three Strikes in a round. Fortunately, no one got hurt or injured, but we did have bottles with pieces of broken glass of them. And we knew we couldn't afford as a business to lose our largest customer. So we voluntarily withdrew all product from the market. Every store. Yes, everywhere, not just whole food, everywhere.

How much of that cost you? Oh, it was, well, we were doing about $3 million, $4 million in sales, and it totally stopped our sales. So we lost several months of sales. So several hundred thousand dollars. I don't know that it cost a million, but a huge, you know, just momentum stopper. Here you are trying to build. You got your salespeople out trying to sell product instead. Now they're trying to take product.

You recall it all and you destroy it. We destroyed it all. And it was just painful. We weren't profitable until the eighth year or so. I mean, it took a lot of time. Now, we kept things really lean. So it wasn't like we went on the spending sprees. We were sharing hotel rooms and cutting corners everywhere we could, not on the ingredients,

but just trying to keep the lights on. So what were you like, what were you paying? as CEO. My first year salary was that $50,000. Literally, I took that $50,000 check and it was even, it was tax inefficient because I invested in the company and then I paid myself. I don't think I got over

$100,000 and probably not for the first five years. And then it, you know, it grew. But the stock obviously really grew. So during this time, were there lots of other companies that were offering to buy you guys out? Yeah, we were approached by lots of companies along the way. I mean, it was very

partially because we were growing quickly. And partially because we were doing something others weren't doing. So really, from the first year, every year or so, we'd be approached by a major food or beverage company that wanted to buy us. And I read like one of those companies was Tetley tea. Tetley, yeah. And they kind of threatened you, right? If you don't sell to us, we're going to crush you. We're going to go right. We're going to do exactly what you're doing and just do it bigger. And we were always, that was another thing I could lose sleep about, which was there was always competition. And you and Barry owned like what, like 90% of your company.

Even though you had tons of investors, how were you able to do that? Well, this was one of the key strategic elements that Barry brought to the company. And he literally is a professor of game theory. And so he said, you know, the problem with so many startups is the entrepreneurs give themselves all these penny stocks in the beginning. And as a result, they start with just much more stock than everybody else. And then everybody else just kind of just comes along for the ride. He said, but what if instead you started the founders at the same place as the other investors?

And only when the company grows in value do the founders get more equity. And that's, was it was a reverse structure. And what that did was it helped as we grew and we raised more money. We didn't get diluted. And the other thing was we relied on angel investors. So a lot of entrepreneurs in the venture capital mode is basically they're incentivized to own more of the company. They're incentivized to exit quickly. And we didn't take that kind of money.

I'm very glad we didn't. I think that was a key piece that led us keep control. When did you start to realize that, you know, like honesty was becoming part of like the cultural zeities? We had some funny moments. There was a moment in 2008. President Obama had become an honesty drinker, I guess the campaign for 2008. And the McCain campaign had criticized him for being, you know, out of touch with the American people. What was his favorite one?

The Black Forest Barry. Black Forest Barry, right. And McCain's campaign. campaign manager had criticized Obama for drinking organic, you know, but Obama kept like a stock of it in his like with him all the time. I told him he still. In fact, I had an encounter with him a few years ago and he brought over his the body man.

Yeah. Of course, it was, Barb, tell him, tell him, tell him what I drink and what do you always have to have with me. Wow. So at what point were you able to kind of just feel like, okay, this is going to work? Well, I would say, so when Coca-Cola became an investor in 2008, that was a surreal experience because they approached you they approached us well they approached us in 2007 and they had just created this group of venturing and emerging brands and their goal was to invest in and build the

next billion dollar brand for Coca-Cola and so you know going to the headquarters in Atlanta sitting down with the president of Coke North America and then the chairman and and you know sort of party was like looking down like I'm really here we're really having this conversation so that was the first moment like this this is actually going to work this is going to be around coke bought about 30% 40% company. And they bought an option to buy a majority, which eventually they did. They brought the company out fully in 2011. But like this was your company.

I mean, did you feel like you were giving away control? Well, you know the story. So often, when a brand is sold, the entrepreneur gets really frustrated and they butt heads. And the entrepreneur rarely lasts a few months. My friend of mine who was a ran vitamin water said, he said, and he left shortly after Coca-Cola bought it. He said, you know, the first few weeks, they want to know your opinion. And the next few weeks, they want to know your phone number. So after that, they don't want to know you.

You're irrelevant. So why didn't that happen to you? Because, and I give Coca-a-lot of credit, they understood this is a brand that is different than what they sell in market. They couldn't connect with the organic consumer or the natural foods marketplace. And so they gave us this incredible latitude and autonomy. And there were moments where we ran up against them around regulatory language or just, marketing approaches, and they respected what we did. So what's so, continues to surprise me is this brand is still my brand.

And the biggest part was the distribution. We were in 15,000 stores when Coke invested. Now we're in over 100,000 stores. So that's where the difference is. I hope my numbers are right, that early investors, people who put in $50,000 in the company at the beginning, made a return of $1.25 million, 10 years later. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, 26 times there. Their early investment. Do you know how many millionaires were created by Honesty? I don't know. Well, to me, what was so exciting was some of our employees were made millionaires as well. And that, to me, was all sweat equity that they earned. So that was especially meaningful. This is a question I've asked everybody who's been on the show.

How much of what happened with you and Barry in honesty was because you guys are just really good at what you do? And how much if it was just luck? I really don't believe in luck. I believe that the reason we're still here is the perseverance. And to the extent there's luck, you know, that it's the timing, the way the consumer has evolved. But, you know, I've heard someone says, oh, you know, you were in the right place at the right time. I said, well, you know, it took 10 years to get to that right place. So this was not a, this wasn't, you know, something that just happened overnight.

A friend of mine likened it to water. You know, eventually water finds its way to, you know, going downhill and it gets to where it needs to go. And I think we finally got to a place where we could connect with consumers and do it in a way that was still meaningful. So I'm curious, Seth, as you kind of like look back on all this, is there like one trait that, like one really important trait that you either developed or just had or have that you think all entrepreneurs need to have? Well, you have to be resilient. And this is something that's so important. You know, to put this on the bigger picture just for our, for like our economy. people have to be resilient.

So one of the best ways I developed resilience growing up was I wrestled in high school. I was the worst wrestler on the team. My first year, I was one in ten, and that was only because somebody didn't show up, and I got the forfeit. So I had learned how to fight off my back, you know, and I experienced rejection. And it's so important to be able to bounce back from something like, not just, I mean, all the time. But in life, and especially when you believe in it, It makes it that much easier. That's Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea.

By the way, the company has now sold more than a billion bottles of its beverage. It's now completely owned by Coca-Cola with annual sales of more than $170 million. Seth is no longer formally involved, and though it made him a rich man, his life hasn't actually changed all that much. Seth still lives in the same house in suburban Maryland, where he made that first batch of honesty. And please don't turn us off just yet in a moment. We're going to hear from you about the things you guys are building. Hey, thanks for staying till the very end because we are now at the part of the show where we get to hear a great story about something you guys are building.

My name is Glenn Owerbach, and I'm in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I've created Nice Mug. And the idea for Nice Mug came about totally by accident. It was on one of those freezing winter mornings in Minnesota when Glenn went outside to his backyard, and he picked up a jug of water that had frozen overnight. Nature freezes water in a jug from the outside in and from the bottom up. So you get kind of a hockey puck-type freeze at the bottom. But there's this really interesting cavity that freezes last, and that's an iconic shape. And that shape was a glass, like the kind of glass you would put on your dinner table,

perfectly formed, made of clear ice. So being the resourceful people that we are with a beer in our hand, we poured a beer in and an ice mug was born. I mean, can you say USA any more clearly than a cold beer in a glass made of ice? Anyway, the first thing Glenn did, naturally, was to take the ice mug into his backyard sauna. And it held up pretty well until, you know, it melted. So then? I started messing around with different molds and different ways that we could freeze ice. And as he experimented, Glenn came up with a plastic mold that seemed to do the trick.

But it was a massive challenge for me to make clear ice. And without clear ice, you get leaks. And leaks are no fun. The leaks actually come from air bubbles in the ice. And Glenn tinkered for years to come up with a mold that would make a mug without the bubbles. And finally, he nailed it. It never leaks. And I'm really proud of that.

Glenn now sells the molds all over the. country, you fill it with water, freeze it overnight, then pop out your own ice mug. And this past year, some executives at Coca-Cola actually called them up and said, hey, we want to use ice mugs in one of our ads. Yeah, it's quite a rush. You know, the biggest beverage company in the world, making ice mugs, putting Coca-Cola in there. We just had a great time. For the time being, ice mug is still Glenn's side hustle. He's not planning on quitting his day job as a salesman anytime soon. You know, if we could send our kid through college with the proceeds for Nice Mug, well, I couldn't be happier.

And if you're wondering how long the ice mug actually lasts in your hand before it, you know, melts? We can have nice mugs that last, like 30 minutes, 45 minutes. I mean, I suppose the one thing that's cool about Nice Mug is when your ice is melted, you're done drinking. Claire Arnabach, founder of Nice Mug. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Hey, we love hearing your stories about the things you're building. If you want to tell us about them, go to build.npr.org. That's B-U-I-L-D. NPR.org.

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Our show is produced this week by Rumteen Arablewee, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, I'm Guy Raz. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, I just want to tell you about something happening the weekend of January 14th. If you listen to the NPR News Quiz Show, Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and you love and worship Peter Sagle like I do?

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