Bonus Episode: Seth Goldman Brews Another Ice Tea

Introduction:

This week, in a special bonus episode recorded right before Labor Day, Seth Goldman talks about getting the disappointing news that Honest Tea, the brand he built and sold to Coca Cola, was being discontinued—and how it took him about two weeks to decide to create another tea business to fill the shelf space that Coke was vacating. Along the way, Goldman talks about why it made sense to sell a mission-driven business to a soda company, what he wishes he had done differently in the sale, what it was like being a Coke employee, what he’s been doing since leaving, how the beverage industry has evolved, and whether he’ll end up selling this business to Coke, too.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

Seth Goldman is co-founder of Eat the Change, parent company of Just Ice Tea.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word Productions.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome, Seth Goldman. Thanks so much for doing this. It’s great to talk to you.

Seth Goldman:
Thank you, Loren. Great to be with you.

Loren Feldman:
I think we first spoke maybe 20 years ago, when you were fairly early in the Honest Tea journey. It’s so unusual for someone to have the opportunity to kind of get a second chance. I imagine this one is getting started a little bit differently, just because you’re smarter and more experienced. Can you tell us a little about that?

Seth Goldman:
Sure, so just to update you on the timing, we found out May 23rd that Coca Cola was going to be discontinuing Honest Tea. And the first two weeks were kind of just shock, disbelief, and a little bit of mourning. But by June 6th, we said, “Well, we’re gonna go launch our own ice tea brand.” We were getting enough interest and support from not just consumers but even suppliers and fans and retailers. So June 6th, we announced—

Loren Feldman:
So that took about two weeks, is that right?

Seth Goldman:
Two weeks to get over the initial shock. We couldn’t do anything. And we’re confident by September 6th, we’ll have sold our first bottle out in retail, so three months from decision point to commercialization. I’ve never heard of anyone moving that quickly. But this is not a rush job.

This is actually, instead of calling it a startup, this is a jumpstart, meaning, we have the whole supply chain in place. We have a team in place. And frankly, I think the product—we just did a tasting yesterday against the Honest Tea varieties—and I actually think on every item, our taste is cleaner and better. So this was not rushed just getting to market. It was done with building on two decades of experience. And I just did a little calculation, because we have a team of 12 people, but within that, more than half of those 12 people are Honest Tea veterans. And so we have over 100 years of collective experience, among our team of people building an ice tea brand. So we are ready to go!

Loren Feldman:
When you say you had the supply chain in place, do you mean that you were actually buying tea?

Seth Goldman:
No, it was just the relationships. The folks who manage the tea gardens and our supply chain there, even if I weren’t going back into the tea business, they’re now close personal friends. My family has been to these tea gardens, and so they literally reached out to me when they heard the news, because, by the way, they didn’t hear the news from Coca Cola. They learned about this news from my LinkedIn posts that showed the announcement. So they were very concerned for their economic livelihood, and also for the decisions they’ve made. Their decision to commit to organic and to commit to Fair Trade certifications, there’s a price to that.

And they were worried, they didn’t want to come to regret those decisions. So they were super eager to work with me again, and the bottling plant and the bottle suppliers and, in many cases, I’m now dealing with the second generation. At the bottle supplier, I dealt with the father, and now the son has taken over the business, and he said, “It’s such an honor for me to continue to work my father started on this.” So it’s just been a very gratifying experience, a little bit like being able to be at your own funeral without having to die, just sort of hearing appreciation. And that’s just a very real gratifying experience.

Loren Feldman:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that when Coke made the announcement, they referred to supply chain issues. It would be kind of interesting if you were able to walk right in. What do you make of that?

Seth Goldman:
I think they did have supply chain challenges. During the pandemic, I would go to stores, and I would see shelf points where there should be 10 varieties of Honest Tea. And I’d see either none or maybe one or two bottles. So there were challenges. I think some of it was around the glass packaging. Some of it may have been sourcing, but that’s also the difference between a large corporation and an entrepreneur. You know, a large corporation says, “Oh, there’s no inventory that’s available.” Okay, we’ll just go make something else.

And we saw this, because we have to move so quickly. When it comes time to do our first production run and an ingredient’s not there, we’re going to find a way—literally if it means driving the ingredient to the bottling plant, which has happened more than once, or we’re making a personal call to the owner and explaining that this is critical for our success—and the entrepreneur is not going to be denied. A large corporation has got so many different things, they’re just going to move to whatever else is occupying their mind. So we haven’t had supply chain challenges getting this line launched. And we have locked in and made our suppliers aware of our bold ambitions for this product line. So I don’t anticipate any challenges in that dimension.

Loren Feldman:
I think you bought quite a bit of tea from China the first time around. Is that going to be possible this time?

Seth Goldman:
Sure, yeah, we buy tea from China, India, and Africa. And we have already purchased a great deal and expect to continue to buy more. It’s all certified organic and all certified Fairtrade as well.

Loren Feldman:
And there aren’t the supply chain issues associated with China that were so prominent?

Seth Goldman:
Not with respect to tea. We have good suppliers, who can handle the brokerage. We want to make sure everything is landed in the United States, so there’s a long lead time on those purchases.

Loren Feldman:
Technology has changed a lot in the last 20 years. Is there anything that has an impact on your business doing it this time, as opposed to last time, because technology has evolved?

Seth Goldman:
Yeah, it’s so funny that the bottling plants are very much the same bottling plants. They’ve gotten a little more mechanized. They may use a robot palletizer. But the bottling technology is pretty basic. And so where technology has an impact on us is around social media and how we communicate with people. But the basic science of taking tea leaves, growing them, bottling it, putting it in a truck, and getting it to a store, all of those things, really those haven’t changed since 1998. It’s just the way we market and create awareness that will have to be a little more innovative. Back in 1998, the marketing was giving out samples, and we’ll still do a lot of that. But we have to find additional ways to get people to be aware of what we’re doing.

Loren Feldman:
Is that marketing plan in place, and something you’re ready to talk about?

Seth Goldman:
In broad strokes. I mean, it’s going to be very much based around the ingredients we have, the ethos around the sourcing, and certainly working with retailers who are very excited to have this line. I mean, the loss of Honest Tea wasn’t just something consumers will miss, but retailers will miss having this kind of offering on their shelves, both for the dollars but also for the values that it epitomized. And so we’ve gotten great support from retailers, and several national retailers who have committed to launching with the brand and already have plans to give us high visibility in their end caps and in their coolers and other places in the store.

Loren Feldman:
What’s different this time because you have more money to spend from the beginning?

Seth Goldman:
Well, it’s not about the money. What’s different this time for me personally is the level of sheer—I had a lot of worry. I was not just launching an ice tea company for the first time. I was launching a company for the first time. And I had no experience in the beverage industry, no experience in the food industry. And so it was all very intimidating and worrisome. My whole livelihood, everything was on the line. And the other thing that was so hard back in 1998 was trying to convince distributors to carry our product, because the dominant brand at the time was Snapple. And so anyone who was carrying Snapple just wasn’t to be bothered with Honest Tea, because that wasn’t the mainstream taste.

What’s so exciting now is that the marketplace has been built. And frankly, you know, the team and I spent 20 years building it. I have no doubt that there’s a place for this on the shelves of grocery stores. And just because Coca Cola is pulling out doesn’t mean the category is over. So I have a lot more confidence and a lot more willing partners—both within our company, who know the opportunities there because they built it, but also our distributors and our retailers. I used to have to spend, well, back in the day it was weeks and months just trying to call somebody to get them to answer the phone. Now, it’s emails, and in many cases, the retailers are reaching out to us. But when I do reach out to a retailer, the calls or the emails are getting returned. And that’s really gratifying.

Loren Feldman:
I guess when I was asking about the money, I was thinking about the difference between a scrappy, bootstrap kind of startup—which I believe you started in your kitchen—to a more professional operation right from the get-go. How does that feel different to you?

Seth Goldman:
Not too different. We always want to have that challenger mindset. And that’s a phrase we use all the time inside Eat the Change. That challenger mindset is just a key way to do business. Because a challenger mindset knows things aren’t given. You’ve got to go out and earn them. Even the day of our first production run, we went to our bottling plant in Pennsylvania, and my co-founder Mike and I shared the hotel room in the Hampton Inn. Just because we’ve raised money doesn’t mean we’re gonna go spend it on ourselves. We’ve still got to be lean and entrepreneurial and have a guerilla marketing mindset.

We’re not going to go advertise our way to growth. If we can spend money on an ad, so can a big company. And a big company has got a lot more money to spend. So that’s not going to be the way for us to compete. We’ve got to be resourceful and creative and lean and scrappy. And so, that challenger mindset, frankly, I hope we never lose it. I’ve been around companies that don’t have it, and I can tell you that’s not a path to growth. And it’s also not a path to disruption. It’s not where change happens. It’s where the status quo is maintained.

Loren Feldman:
You mentioned that Snapple was the dominant brand back then and that nobody was looking for anybody in your lane. Are there other big differences in the beverage industry today?

Seth Goldman:
Well, yes. Certainly the big one is the sweetness level. When we started back in 1998, we were the only people trying to sell a less sweet tea. And it was a little bit like crickets, right? Nobody even understood why we would try to do that. Because the Snapples of that time, or AriZona Iced Tea, were much closer to soda from a calorie and even from an ingredients perspective. But now that’s all shifted. Somebody said to me today, “You guys were ahead of your time 20 years ago. Now it is your time.”

And so we can avoid the pretty grueling learning curve that we had to go through as a company, but also that we had to take consumers through. So that’s a big change. The other one, of course, is organic. So when we started in 1998, we had some organic ingredients. But there wasn’t a national system for administering an organic seal, and now there is a USDA-certified seal, and Fairtrade as well. There was not a chance to use Fairtrade ingredients in a national brand, both for scale and then for marketing reasons. And now there is as well. So it’s wonderful that all of those have advanced and can be relevant for us.

Loren Feldman:
You said you can avoid the learning curve that you went through as a company, not just in terms of teaching consumers. What were you referring to, in terms of the internal learning curve?

Seth Goldman:
How do we work with distributors? How do we make the product? I mean, you may remember, because when we met back in the early 2000s, Honest Tea still had like an inch of sediment on the bottom, because we were using real tea leaves but we didn’t know how to filter it. But our first production run we’ve already done here, and we’ve got this beautiful clean tea. It’s still very much got all the right tea notes, it just is much cleaner filtration. So some of this stuff we just had to learn, and it was painful. We’ve already been able to leapfrog all that.

Loren Feldman:
When you raise money—and I think you’ve raised more than $14 million, if the reporting I saw was correct—that’s a responsibility. When companies go into public markets, they disclose risk factors. They talk about what could go wrong. Did you warn your investors of anything that could go wrong here?

Seth Goldman:
Oh, always. Any accredited investor should be familiar with the risks, but most companies don’t make it. And it’s easy for someone to look at my track record and say, “Oh, there’s not a risk.” But of course, there’s risk here.

Loren Feldman:
Were any risks that you highlighted might be worth talking about?

Seth Goldman:
I mean, I always make a point of sharing the risks. Even with all our advantages and the funding and our team, it’s still an uphill battle. We’re challenging established interests. And it’s certainly worth noting that Coca Cola exited the space, because they didn’t think it was worth going into. So that should raise some questions. We’ll certainly assess those risks, but obviously, we decided it’s a risk worth taking.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have a national retail deal in place?

Seth Goldman:
We have several. We haven’t announced them yet. But yes, we have several national retailers who are already ready to go and have given us a commitment to launch this in the coming weeks.

Loren Feldman:
I believe at one point, we spoke about why you decided to sell the business to Coca Cola. I think the main thing you emphasized to me was the need for better distribution, and that you didn’t think you could get there as a small business—I think Honest Tea may have been around $20 million in sales at the time when you first sold to Coke. And that’s what Coke was bringing to the deal.

Seth Goldman:
Yeah, we’ve always had the mission, and it continues through today, to democratize organics, to make healthier foods available—not just to the healthy and wealthy or just the people on the coasts, but to everyone. And so when Coca Cola arose as a potential partner, we thought, “Who better to democratize organics with? And who better to make a change in America’s diet with than the world’s largest beverage company?” And so I still stand by that decision. I think it was the right decision.

What I would have done differently now, in retrospect, is I would have made sure Honest Tea got to be larger before turning over ownership to Coca Cola. It was still too small. The scale wasn’t there. And so it’s easy for them to say, “Okay, well, we’ve got a lot of priorities. This will not be one of those priorities.” But you know, here at Eat the Change, our goal is to make planet-friendly food available and help change people’s diets and the way they think about their diets.

Loren Feldman:
You did get some backlash at the time of the sale from people who thought you were selling out and not remaining true to your principles.

Seth Goldman:
Yeah, I mean, the idea that we didn’t stay true to our principles is just ludicrous. When Coca Cola invested, only 40 percent of our product was Fairtrade-certified. They invested in 2008. By 2011, all of our products were Fairtrade-certified and organic. And by 2015, we even converted all the sweetener, the sugar, over to Fairtrade as well. And the drinks’ net calorie profile went down as well. So they may think that we didn’t stick to principles if we sold to Coca Cola, but one of the things I was proud of—and that I’m still proud of—is that the Honest brand was more quote-unquote honest in 2019 than it was in 1998.

So, if the idea of partnering with a large company means betraying your principles, that I just reject. I think a mission-driven entrepreneur has to have the aspiration to make impact happen at scale. And so I have the greatest respect for the small craft entrepreneur. But that’s not an aspiration that I have. My goal is to make change happen at scale. And in order to do that, you either have to become one of the world’s largest companies, or you have to work with the world’s largest companies. And that’s exactly what we did.

And to talk about the impact we brought Honest—and Honest Kids, by the way, which is not being discontinued, is carried in McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Subway, and Chick fil A, some of the world’s largest restaurant chains. And so that democratization of organic is absolutely happening for millions of people around the world. The Honest brand is their first exposure to organic, and not just to organic. It’s also their first exposure to less sweet taste profiles. And so what we’re doing here at Eat the Change also, we’re excited to bring organic food and present it in new forms and make it available to people in a way that we hope will become part of their daily diets.

Loren Feldman:
Do you have a sense of why Honest Tea wasn’t more profitable for Coke?

Seth Goldman:
I wasn’t on the inside, so I can only speculate. But I do know they did not invest in Honest Tea the way they invested in their other tea brands. So you weren’t going to see the same level of growth. And then, during the pandemic, as you know, they had supply chain challenges. So then, when they get to after the pandemic, and it’s obviously shaken up the whole business, they went through a process called “fewer bigger bets,” meaning fewer brands, betting on bigger ones. And so Honest Tea, as they looked at the numbers, isn’t growing. And they didn’t have an internal advocate like me there explaining or making the case for why it was important for the world’s largest beverage company to be future-forward in its thinking.

So there just weren’t the same internal advocates there, and that made it easier to decide to cut the brand. And when they called me to tell me, I thought at first they were saying they were just going to move it off the bottom of their trucks. But I thought for sure they would keep it in the natural channel where Honest Tea is and has been the top-selling bottled tea brand. And they said, “No, we’re cutting it there too.” And I had just been in a Whole Foods store the week before for a new store opening, and Honest Tea had two full shelves of products. And so as soon as I heard Coke’s news about this, I’m like, “Oh my goodness, that’s some amazing shelf space that’s going to be available pretty soon.”

Loren Feldman:
Who else do you think is competing for that shelf space?

Seth Goldman:
I’m sure there’s lots of folks who want it. But if you talk about organic, Fairtrade-certified, less-sweet, bottled tea, I don’t know another brand out there. And that’s why Just Ice Tea, which, we’ve already now made and are going to start shipping out is ready to capture that opportunity.

Loren Feldman:
When I was at The New York Times, we did a case study where we talked to you about a decision you made where I believe Coke came to you and said they did not want you to use the language “no high-fructose corn syrup” on any of your products. And you fought them and said, “No, this is part of our brand. We insist on keeping it.” They obviously didn’t want it there because they were selling other products that did use high-fructose corn syrup. I’m curious, I was always amazed that you were willing to talk publicly about this, in The New York Times no less. Did you get any pushback as a result of that?

Seth Goldman:
Sure. Well, from Coca Cola, not from the consumer, but yeah…

Loren Feldman:
That’s what I meant. That’s what I meant.

Seth Goldman:
Yeah, they were not thrilled with that, but it was real, and it was honest. And certainly, that language continued to be on the Honest Kids package even when Coke bought the brand. So even though they had a bit of a hard time understanding it, they eventually recognized that what I was saying was relevant for the consumer.

And I think the other piece is, the meta way to look at this is, brands have to have their own voice. People don’t want just a mush commodity. They want a brand with an edge. They want a brand that stands for something. And so there’s an impulse or an urge, a tendency in large companies to try to make everything harmonize. And that just becomes the least appealing, most vanilla image, and it’s just not something that creates loyalty or passion among consumers.

Loren Feldman:
You stayed on it Coke for a little while, as CEO of Honest Tea, even after Coke owned the whole business.

Seth Goldman:
Not just a little while, by the way.

Loren Feldman:
How long was it?

Seth Goldman:
Yeah, so Coke invested in 2008, and then they bought the brand in 2011. And then I, through 2015, continued to work in a full-time role. Then in 2015, I shifted to halftime with Coke and halftime with Beyond Meat as executive chair of the board. So I was with Coca Cola longer than I was with Honest Tea as an independent brand. And for me, it was always clear what my job was. It wasn’t to go out and sell fizzy brown liquid. It was to go and build Honest Tea. And everyone knew that. I never pretended. I did my best to be diplomatic.

And I was. I was treated very well by everyone inside the company, from the leadership down. I was well-respected, and I appreciate that. And whether it was launching Honest Tea in Europe or in these major chains, they recognized that Honest Tea and Honest Kids offered them something valuable they didn’t have. So those were not painful years.

Now, I also made it clear, I continued to be based up in Bethesda, [Md.]. And I said, “I can come down once a month. And I can spend a day, one day, inside of those conference rooms. But if you ask me to do that too much, you’re going to just take away all the passion and joy I have for this business.” And so they respected that.

Loren Feldman:
Did you feel as though you still had an entrepreneurial side to what you were doing? Or was it that you felt comfortable being more of an employee?

Seth Goldman:
I definitely had the mission element to what I was doing. It clearly became less entrepreneurial, because as we got more integrated into Coca Cola, we had less discretion over where we could go for new opportunities. One example is we had developed a really great organic sports drink, but we could never get the funding for it. And if I had gone out on my own, I’m confident I could have raised millions of dollars from investors to launch this organic sports drink. We were trying to do it under the Honest name, so that meant we needed to do it inside Coca Cola. And within that portfolio, the part of the business we were in—which was the tea business—they didn’t have money to go support a sports drink. So when a company gets into silos, they miss a lot of opportunities.

Loren Feldman:
Oh, that’s interesting. Do you think you might pursue that going forward?

Seth Goldman:
No, no, we’re doing tea right now. Just Ice Tea is the focus, and Coca Cola has scaled their brand Body Armor, and that’s done well. But we’ve got our hands full with Just Ice Tea.

Loren Feldman:
Did you make any attempt to buy the Honest Tea name back from Coke?

Seth Goldman:
They made it clear right away that they were keeping the name, because they still had Honest Kids. And I understood they would not let a brand that they owned also be owned by somebody else. It would have just created too many potential conflicts.

Loren Feldman:
You mentioned Beyond Meat. Could you tell us quickly what your role has been there?

Seth Goldman:
Yeah, so I joined the board in 2013. And I was executive chair from 2015 through 2020, and helped that business grow and scale from really just around a million dollars in sales to going public and going international. And now I’m chair of the board. So as a governance role, I’m very engaged, but I’m not part of the management team.

Loren Feldman:
And tell us about Eat the Change. When did that start?

Seth Goldman:
So that started in 2020, just after I stepped away from my management role at Beyond Meat. I felt there was an opportunity to move people’s diets towards planet-friendly foods, and doing it through snacks. And so I started this company with my cofounder, chef Spike Mendelsohn. And our first product was a line of mushroom jerky. And then we brought out some carrot snacks that are delicious and more nutrient-dense than a lot of the snacks out there, for both adults and children. And that business was growing, and then this ice tea opportunity got presented to us, and so Just Ice Tea will be offered under the Eat the Change umbrella, but it will have its own name: Just Ice Tea.

Loren Feldman:
And will you continue to do other things with Eat the Change, the snacks, and the stuff that you had previously been working on?

Seth Goldman:
Oh, yeah. For sure. What now happens is, we can create a flywheel where the tea gets into the store, and it can bring along the snacks. Or if we’re doing a sales promotion, we get an endcap in the store. And we’ll have the bottled tea as the dominant offering, but we’ll have our snacks alongside it. And that’s wonderful, because I used to see all this tea on the endcap of the store, the endcap of an aisle, and there’ll be some other snack offered alongside it. And now we get to have Eat the Change have the drinks and the snacks.

Loren Feldman:
You’re also cofounder of a vegan fast casual chain?

Seth Goldman:
Yes, well, I guess fast food. It’s called Plant Burger. We have 12 restaurants, all plant-based, featuring burgers, shakes, and fries. And this is a fun one. You know, I would say it’s indulgent plant-based food. It’s healthy in the sense that it’s plant-based, as opposed to animal-based, but it isn’t positioned as a health food store. It’s a delicious burger concept, and Chef Spike is a cofounder on this one as well.

Loren Feldman:
This might sound flip. I don’t mean it to. Why are you doing this? I’m guessing you don’t need the money at this point. But you’re obviously working very hard at a time you don’t have to be working very hard.

Seth Goldman:
Yeah, it’s never been about the money for me. Back in college, I thought I was going to be going into politics. I thought that would be the way to make change happen, and I obviously haven’t gone that route. I don’t have any regrets about that. So for me, it’s: How do I make change happen.

Loren Feldman:
That was a good call.

Seth Goldman:
Right? If we had a healthy population and didn’t have a climate crisis, maybe I’d be enjoying different parts of life. But for me, this is work. This is work with purpose. It’s work I care about, and I really wouldn’t want to be doing anything else.

Loren Feldman:
How many hours a week are you working? It’s easy to imagine a lot.

Seth Goldman:
I don’t keep track of them, Loren, because it doesn’t feel like work. I mean, I was on the phone last night—I don’t know, 9:30 p.m.—with our New York distributor. And of course, this is someone I’ve worked with for decades. And we’re trying to solve some issues, and it’s like, “Oh, this is an important part of the work.” And the wonderful thing is, my wife and my family have been just incredibly supportive. And they believe in it too.

You know, when we got the news about Coca Cola discontinuing Honest Tea, I would say my three sons took it harder than anybody. So they were really upset and angry about it. And we had to talk to them about why.

Loren Feldman:
What’s the age range?

Seth Goldman:
Oh, my oldest just turned 30. And my youngest is 25. And they’re all in their own groove doing entrepreneurial, mission-based work themselves.

Loren Feldman:
Is it easier this time, because the work-life balance thing with your family is less of an issue with grown kids?

Seth Goldman:
It’s mostly easier because I know more of what I’m doing. So I don’t feel the same level of stress. But I don’t want to suggest it’s easy. It’s still hard work. We’re challenging the predominant diet. We’re challenging what’s out there on the shelf. So this is not a layup.

Loren Feldman:
What’s your biggest near-term concern? What challenge are you facing?

Seth Goldman:
We’ve got to commercialize the tea, and we’ve got to make sure we bring along the snacks with them. And then we’ve got to create awareness. Like I said, we’re not going to do a national ad campaign. We’re not going to be doing huge media buys. And so we’ve got to make sure people know about these products and discover them—and of course, enjoy them—and tell others. But we want this to be a discovery brand. We want people to find it, love it, and share it with others.

Loren Feldman:
When you go into a national retail chain, to what extent do you feel the onus is on you to drive sales through your own marketing versus their being in a position to make sure that the sales happen?

Seth Goldman:
It’s always on us. Everything’s on us. And that’s the challenger mindset. Maybe the non-challenger thinks, “I’ll just put it there and someone else will take responsibility.” It’s always on us. We always have to control our destiny. We have to earn the shelf space, and then we have to earn the consumer’s attention and that moves it off the shelf.

And frankly, look, when we sold Honest Tea to Coca Cola, that was the beginning of an effort, too. And you could say we didn’t succeed. I mean, we certainly got the business scaled, and we kept the mission intact, but the brand didn’t ultimately survive. And that’s a shame. So it is nice to get this next opportunity.

Loren Feldman:
Could you imagine one day selling this one to Coca Cola?

Seth Goldman:
All I can imagine is building something valuable. That’s the goal. And when we started Honest Tea back in 1998, there was never, “Oh, we’re gonna sell this and flip it.” It’s: Build something valuable, and if you do that the right way—one of the best pieces of advice I got from one of my board members was, “Build the company like you are going to own it forever and like you want to own it forever. And if you do that, you build it right, opportunities will emerge.”

Loren Feldman:
Seth, did I miss anything important that you can think of?

Seth Goldman:
Here’s the overriding lesson for me, which is that, whether you call it karma or just doing right, it really pays off. It is a real thing. And what I mean by that is, there’s no way I could have launched a brand from idea to marketplace in three months, if we hadn’t treated the people right all along the way. The employees who came back and joined this effort, the retailers, the suppliers, all of them stepped up—most of them before I had the chance to reach out to them, because they value the way they’d been treated before.

And so there really is no downside to doing right by people and right by your partners. And I think there’s also no downside to acting in a way you believe, because as upsetting as it was to see Honest Tea discontinued, even before we decided to get back into it, I didn’t have any regrets. I mean, I had built a brand with integrity, and those values stayed intact. And so of course, to be able to go back again, and in a sense, double down on those values, is an incredible opportunity. But even if Honest Tea had disappeared, it was just so gratifying to hear how much that brand meant to so many millions of people—emerging entrepreneurs themselves, consumers, retailers, brokers, distributors, all really took pride in that brand. And I hope we’re able to give them that same feeling with Just Ice Tea.

Loren Feldman:
My thanks to Seth Goldman. Seth, I really appreciate you taking the time. Best of luck with this, I hope we can talk again when you’re a little further down the road, and we can hear how it’s going.

Seth Goldman:
Thank you, Loren. It’s great to be with you.