Noosa Yoghurt: Koel Thomae

28:06And then Snickety, I think that it was founded by the wife of Brett Shulman, who would go on to help create and scale Kava, which we've done on the show. Because Snickety never really took off. It didn't work out. But this was a kid snack company that you were. Yeah, it essentially sustained my family while I was getting noosa off the ground. And we were in sort of this little co-working office with a few other consultants. So they sort of became my in-house advisory board. All right. So it's going to be you, Rob, and the Mathewson's. And that company was called like Queensland Yogurt Company, but that was not what you were going to call it in the U.S.

28:49No, I really felt like that had no connection to Colorado, to the U.S. No one would have any understanding of what Queensland is. But I wanted it to have a link back to its Aussie heritage. And, you know, the family, the recipe, it all comes from the Sunshine Coast. And I was like, well, what are some of the beaches on the Sunshine Coast? And Nusa. I was like, okay, it's easy to say. It's not very long. It ties into the storytelling. This is the name. So, you know, it took a little bit of convincing. But finally, everyone agrees. It's Nusa. All right. So you call it Nusa yogurt. Yogurt with an H, too.

29:33Yogurt with an H. Yes. Right, okay, because that H is really important in the word yogurt. Without it, you would not know how to pronounce that word. I mean, part of me would have been like, well, are we going to have to pay the typesetter a little extra money for that H? Like, could we save a few pennies by removing the H? But no, I get it. You wanted the H in there. Okay. Yeah, but just, again, linking it back to its Aussie heritage. When we come back in just a moment, how Coel brings her first tubs of Noosa to a major retailer and how she responds when they say, we hate this packaging. Stay with us.

30:13I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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33:33Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2009, and to launch her new yogurt brand, Coel has built a partnership that's 8 ,000 miles long. In Australia, the Mathewson family is handling the recipe. And in Colorado, Rob Graves, the dairy farmer, he's getting ready to make it. So Rob's building his new bottling plant. And as things go with construction, it's delayed. Yeah, so we initially thought we were going to launch in 2009. The building's taking longer to get finished. I'm with the direction of the Australian family trying to find equipment at auctions. And ultimately, you know, it really is we're going to push to a 2010 launch.

34:22Things are just too delayed. I think the other thing to note too is just people thought we were crazy because this is coming off the heels of the global financial crisis. So I think there was sort of like, what? You're going to invest all this money? You're going to start a new business when the world is sort of imploding? And I didn't even really consider that. I just was like, I still think even in hard times, people are going to invest in delicious food. Yeah. All right. I want to just go back to the process for a moment, right? Because you had the Matthewsons come and show you guys how to make this yogurt, right?

35:00And I'm assuming there's probably, I know we'll get to this because you're not with the company anymore. So there's probably some proprietary things that maybe can't be discussed. But can you sort of generally describe what made it so complex? Because, again, what did it require? What was required to make this yogurt into this creamy yogurt that you loved so much? You know, I don't know that it ultimately was that complex. But I think part of what made it unique initially was that it was being made in 10-gallon buckets, which is crazy. I mean, I remember doing runs to the Home Depot because we were running out of buckets.

35:43So you essentially are cooling the yogurt faster because it's in a smaller volume vessel. So that changes sort of the way the cultures are interacting with the product. I think the fact that we were infusing it with honey, I mean, there was certainly sugar added as well, but infusing it with honey gave it a different flavor profile. and what made that unique made it harder to scale as we grew. And also were you like, was it fermenting the right term? I don't know. Was it culturing for how long? Eight hours, 12 hours, 15 hours. Was that an issue too? Certainly, right? I mean, again, taking it from this small vessel to a larger vessel to a larger vessel and trying to have consistency in the flavor profile was really unique.

36:34And it's sort of a testament to Rob because it was sort of his engineering brain that really figured out how to develop that. I mean, we were making it in 10-gallon buckets for over a year, which gave the state health inspector a lot of heartache. You know, he gave us a pretty long runway, but out of the gates, he said, you can't do this long term. You couldn't do it long term because there was a risk of contamination? Yeah. I mean, there was too many touch points was his opinion. Yeah. You wanted to do it in like a few 100-gallon buckets. Yeah, sealed. OK, so once you guys get manufacturing going, you obviously have to start getting the yogurt into stores.

37:16And you said earlier that Rob like was already selling milk to a few Whole Foods in Colorado. So at least he had an in, right, with Colorado Whole Foods, which is not the entire country, but still it's still something. And I guess you guys were able to get a meeting with a buyer to see if they would be willing to sell your yogurt. Yeah. So by this point, we've invested in the equipment. We've invested in the packaging. And with the packaging, we really wanted it to be reflective of that first experience I had in Australia, which was transparency. letting the product sort of speak for itself. And, you know, in that initial sort of startup capital, we didn't really factor in a custom mold.

38:06We just sort of assumed that we'd be able to find a traditional dairy cup that was transparent. Off the shelf. Off the shelf. Just a clear, like a clear container off the shelf. Okay. And it actually didn't exist. So, you know, at that point, most yogurt was sort of between 5.3 to 6 ounces. and there was nothing. There was nothing available in stock packaging in those sizes. I was pretty adamant that we needed to be in transparent packaging. And so that ultimately led us into this 8-ounce container. It looked more like a hummus tub. But, you know, with some refinement, I felt like it could stand out.

38:49It could be unique. but it was a little nerve-wracking because we knew that just by volume it would drive us to a higher price point on shelf. And so this is what we've got as we go to our first meeting with Whole Foods. With Whole Foods. You show them this packaging, okay. Yeah, they just see the packaging and are like, we hate your packaging. And I'm like, okay, I understand. I was like, but let's taste the food, like let's taste the yogurt. So we do a taste testing. They're raving about the product, but then they immediately go back and they're like, but we hate your packaging. We hate the packaging.

39:29Yeah. It's eight ounces. It's going to take up all this space on the shelf. They're thinking all of these unit metrics. And I'm like, look, all I could do is be honest. I said, we have already invested all of our startup capital in this equipment, in this packaging. we can't pivot at this point. Like we've just got to go. So I just wore them down. I'm like, let's ignore the packaging. Let's think about the food. If you give us this opportunity, I will be in every one of your Colorado stores demoing the hell out of it and we're going to make it successful. All right, which is great that you did that because Whole Foods, they know what they're doing and here you are a new entrepreneur.

40:10And so the fact that you stuck to it, I guess you didn't really have a choice. You kind of had to. But I wonder, I mean, even before they agreed and you went into Whole Foods, right, how were you going to differentiate it just in that millisecond or one second that somebody would just pass by this brand in the refrigerated yogurt aisle? The only thing that we had on the packaging, besides the name, Noosa, we had a little tagline that said Aussie culture, which obviously has a double meaning, Colorado fresh. That was the only thing that implied that there was sort of a link to Australia. Again, I think because it was in transparent packaging, you could see the freshness of the product.

40:58The fruit puree with the white yogurt really popped. And nobody on the shelf at that point in time was doing transparent packaging. So I just had this strong belief that if I had discovered it purely because I could see the product when I first tasted it in Australia, somebody else was going to take that leap of faith. All right. So finally, finally, you get this first run into Whole Foods, I think, in January of 2010. And it's just in... Colorado. Just all over Colorado? Yeah, only the Colorado stores. Because the Rocky Mountain region at that point umbrellaed, I think, Idaho, Utah. But the bulk of the stores were in Colorado.

41:40And how much yogurt at this point... I read that at this point, you could only make about 200 gallons of yogurt a week, which was probably plenty at that point. Yeah. Yeah. So we, I mean, we were making one, maybe two batches of yogurt a week to start. And what were your first flavors that you were going to put on the shelves at Whole Foods? So we had four flavors. We had honey, we had raspberry, blueberry, and mango. So you did not do the passion fruit. We did not do the passion fruit. It's tricky in Colorado to get, I mean, probably expensive to get all the passion fruit. Yeah. At that point, like just even trying to figure out how to source that puree was more than we wanted to address.

42:19And I think knowing that yogurt consumers are still pretty traditional, we wanted to sort of stay in that bandwidth of having flavors that we knew would sell. And mango was sort of maybe the most exotic in that lineup. All right. So you get into the Whole Foods and then you spend every opportunity you have to go to each of these Whole Foods in Colorado and how many roughly how many were there in Colorado in 2010 it couldn't have been more than seven or eight yeah it was I think max maybe 10 10 stores so I would just sort of you know we hired a few other demo people but just sort of rotating through those stores really sort of connecting with the store managers because I really I think from my time as being a server right like really understanding relationships and how they can serve you when you're getting out of the gates I really wanted to build those relationships with not just the store manager, but the people stocking the yogurt.

43:18So in a sense, I would not only sample consumers, but I would go and sample all the store employees as well. So you would make sure that the employees at the store tried it too? Yeah, absolutely. And did that work? I mean, in-store sampling? It did. It absolutely did. And obviously, as we grew, I couldn't be in all of these places. But when you actually meet the founder of a business, there is sort of a more openness and emotional connection to trying something and believing in it. So I actually had a lot of friends and family do sampling events for me as well. I tried to think of as many avenues where I could get people to taste this product.

44:02And also doing farmer's markets. Yeah. So that started spring of 2010. And that was sort of actually a harder sell than Whole Foods was getting into the Boulder Farmer's Market. It's considered one of the top 10 farmer's markets in the country. So essentially, if you come to Colorado in the summer, you'll probably end up at the Boulder Farmer's Market. And when you were doing this at the farmer's market, again, probably weren't that many people selling yogurt at the farmer's market. We were the only yogurt vendor. So I still have to laugh thinking about how crazy it got. And that just sort of built a groundswell.

44:42And people obviously were then like, well, where can I get it, you know, if I can't make it to the farmer's market on the weekend? And at that point, we still were really only available at Whole Foods and a few independent markets. Did that have, I mean, did that get you? I mean, were there people coming up and saying, hey, who are you guys? Like, can we talk? I mean, did you start to hear any of that? Yeah. So we actually had a lot of inbound emails from out of state. And one of those inbound emails was actually from a retailer called Hy-Vee, which is in the Midwest in Iowa. And essentially, I don't know if I sampled him or somebody else did, but the president of Hy-Vee had been at the farmer's market and tried Noosa and loved it.

45:28and basically told his dairy buyer to contact us that they wanted to carry it. So we said yes. And I think the learning from that was that yeses with the right partners were good opportunities. But we learned that not every opportunity was the right one. And you did not presumably have the logistical capacity to really go that far beyond Colorado, maybe into the Midwest. Yeah, I mean, at that point, we were producing the product with about 28 days of shelf life, which is short. I know there's other products out there with even shorter shelf lives. But, you know, you add in shipping and like logistics of getting it onto the shelf.

46:14And you got like 15 days. Yeah. And how did they do at Whole Foods in Colorado? Like it was hard to keep up with the growth in Whole Foods. Wow. And they quickly expanded us into their Rocky Mountain stores. Yeah. I think – and in your first full year of business, so you really launched in January of 2010, were you profitable? I mean, getting there. Getting there. So pretty great first year. Yeah. I mean, not accounting for the fact that we weren't paying ourselves. Yeah. Right. I guess you got an opportunity to work with a pretty big retailer in New York in 2011. First of all, who was the retailer?

46:57The retailer was ShopRite. Oh, that's a big one. That's a big one. And they wanted to carry your products. Now, that's New York. That's not Iowa. That's far. That's far. That's not Colorado. But it was a big opportunity to go in there. And how many stores were you, they want you in? They were, I think, about 250 stores. Wow. Yeah. And you guys said yes. We said yes. So in 2011, we brought on a business development manager. He was an outside contractor and a very good salesperson, let's just say. And at this point, we still have not ever sat down and created any type of strategy for the business.

47:38We're just pinch hitting. Like if an opportunity comes up, we're going to say yes. and so we get this meeting with shop right we know that we have to invest with these retailers as far as you know potentially slotting fees and all of their in-store marketing programs but we started asking and tried to get creative where we would say look we're willing to invest whatever that slotting fee is to get on the shelf but but can we put it in to demos can we put it into your retail marketing programs where we have a real opportunity to get off the shelf because we're proving out in Colorado that if we can get people to taste this product, it's going to sell.

48:21And interestingly, ShopRite said, okay, well, we're willing to defer your slotting fees. We're going to give you a 12-month time horizon. So you would have to pay them the fee to... Pay it up front, yeah. Because again, and we've said this in the show before, grocery store, if it works, is an amazing business because they get the markup and they make money from that. And then they make money because the brands have to pay them to put, you're essentially renting space on their shelf. So they have all of these multiple revenue streams. Yeah. So it was really learning on the job for me. But yeah, so ShopRite says, we're going to, instead of charging you$100 ,000 out of the gates, we'll bill it quarterly.

49:06I'm like, okay, well, this sounds like, you know, something that we can cash flow. So we launch. So we're already$100 ,000 in the hole out of the gates. And you got to ship it, truck it out there. We're trucking it out LTL, which, you know, doesn't move as fast as a full truck, is more expensive than a full truck. These are refrigerated trucks, obviously. Yeah. Come to learn that ShopRite is probably one of the hardest operationally retailers to work with. Like if you miss their delivery window by like five minutes, they'll refuse you and then you have to reschedule. Wow. Getting it. I mean, you're making this in Colorado.

49:50It's got a 28 day shelf life, the product. Yes. And to your point. Yeah. So we've got 28 days of shelf life. We just get rejected at the dock. Takes another two days to get rescheduled. I mean, it was a nightmare. There was sort of a disconnect between what was coming from corporate down to the individual stores. So we were seeing not all the stores were getting set. So everything that could go wrong was going wrong. And I mean, we were literally hemorrhaging cash for this customer from spoils to the slotting fees to not getting much velocity because it wasn't getting set in all of the stores.

50:34And finally, I was like, this is not working. Like, this retailer could sink the entire operation. So what did you do? We pulled out. You pulled out. We pulled out. And you just ate it. You just knew you were going to. How long before you made that decision? A year? Six months? It was probably about six months that we realized that we couldn't continue to do it. And you basically lost at least$100 ,000 off that deal. And some. And some. It was such a hard – even though I knew we were losing so much cash, it was a really hard decision to make because I knew that if we pulled out, that might be the last opportunity to ever sell at that retailer.

51:18Right. And we've had these examples on the show where, you know, it's a struggle, it's a struggle, it's a struggle. And then eventually, you know, after just bleeding for years, like it works out. And that could have happened here. But what you're saying is you didn't do all of the kind of planning and projections in maybe in the way you should have done because you because that would have you would have realized this was not going to be sustainable. Absolutely. I mean, we didn't do any of that. We just were kind of operating in the Wild West. Yeah. You know, it's interesting. We did an episode on this brand called Zoomies, which sells skatewear and snowboard gear.

51:59And Tom Campion, who was on the show, and I remember him saying something, which was, what makes a retail brand successful is basically relentless focus on inventory control. And the point of that was like, it's this little boring things because I think accounting is so boring. It's so boring. It's just the most boring part of a business. But it's so critical. Like it's sometimes that is not sometimes, often it's that which can make or break a business. Absolutely. I 100 % agree. And we weren't focused on that in the first, I'd say, two years until we had that big misstep. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess you you're on the East Coast in New York.

52:44It's an influential area. Like it must have also shattered the idea that that, oh, the American palate. It's just like that. Like it must have part of you, I would assume, must have thought maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is just working going to work in some parts of America. Yeah. I still had this strong belief that New York could be a great market for us. And it's, you know, ShopRite is an amazing retailer. Like they do a ton of velocity and a ton of volume. But for where we were at the time, it was too much. And I mean, they pretty much said, you'll never sell at our store again. And I was like, OK, but I'm not going to be a business if I don't do this.

53:30When we come back in just a moment, the delicate partnership between Coel, Rob, the dairyman, and the Mathewson's starts. to break down. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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56:00Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and after an abrupt exodus from ShopRite in New York, Coel has managed to steady the business and is even thinking about expanding again. So she takes Noosa to Expo West, the big natural food show in California. All right. So you guys have a booth there. Got a lot of buyers and, you know, vendors, all kinds of people are walking around and trying different things. And one of the, I guess, a group of people who came by were from Target. Yes. Did you know they were from Target or like they hiding their badges or? I didn't know they were from Target.

56:42No. Right. Yeah. No, they were hiding their vouchers. A lot of those buyers are pretty good at being stealth. Yeah, it wasn't until post-expo that we actually got an email from Target. I think Target maybe had been a little bit behind the curve with Greek and wanted to be ahead of what they saw as sort of the next evolution in yogurt. And they thought Noosa could be that. so they essentially offered us a test in I think it was about 250 of their super target formats wow and did you have the capacity to fulfill that I mean at this point how much yogurt were you making a week we're now probably operating at least four to five batches a week so we're starting to butt up against what I would consider some capacity constraints right because you're now having to bring on probably two shifts of people to work a seven-day schedule.

57:42And at this point, I'm happy to say we're out of the 10-gallon buckets. And so it was just, it was sort of this constant leapfrog. We've got, at this point, we have a line of credit from a traditional bank who's allowing us to buy more expensive equipment. And we're just constantly investing in the manufacturing process. By the way, out of curiosity, what is the maximum shelf life you can get for cold pasteurized yogurt? You know, I'm not sure about some of the competitors, but we were at 45 days. Okay. So huge improvement over 28. Yes. But still, it just shows you like the minute that leaves the warehouse, the clock is ticking.

58:24Otherwise, you have to throw it away. Absolutely. I mean, it's just an argument for going into dried beans. Oh, 100%, Guy. I will never start a perishable food company again. Yeah. All right. So you guys have some automation and you finance this mainly through loans. So once you're going into a Target, you're also going to go from like, you could go from like 2 million in sales to like 10 million in sales, 15 million in sales within months, a year. Yeah. I mean, just because of the scale of a Target. Well, I mean, so we launched, that was probably like mid-year that we launched in SuperTarget.

59:01they came back four months later and expanded us into a thousand stores, a thousand more stores. A thousand stores. And were you at breaking point, like at that point as a business? Yes, we were at breaking point. And basically I had to stop selling at that point. You had to stop signing contracts with retailers. Yeah. Which is, I mean, a good problem to have, but like hard once you're sort of in the groove of selling. Because again, in the back of my head, I have sort of like, okay, well, if I say no now, will that opportunity exist in 12 months? Yeah. And are you putting all your eggs in the target basket, which could or could not work?

59:41Yes. Thankfully, it worked. Tell me a little bit about the business by this point, end of 2012. You're in a thousand targets. But from what I've read, you guys are really running lean. I mean, we were profitable at the end of 2012. We were close to a$20 million business. So we were able to pay people reasonable market, like competitive salaries, but it was still such a small team. Right. To attract a good COO, you would have had to have paid at least$150 ,000. 150 grand. And then we were able to offer some options. They ended up being the only person that we offered options to, which actually became a bit of a point of contention between the partners as we started growing even further.

1:00:29Yeah, I imagine. And we never had a board of directors. We never had an internal advisory board. So it just became sort of butting heads as far as how do we continue to grow this business and put appropriate team members around it. Yeah, I mean, who was in charge? It was you. There was Rob at the dairy. And then the brothers, the Mathewson family in Australia. Who actually was the decision maker? Was that ever kind of discussed? Who would ultimately make the decisions? No. No. So everybody had a veto in a sense. Exactly. Which is not great. It's definitely a recipe for not great, especially when you're on a rocket ship of growth.

1:01:13Why didn't you guys have that discussion? I'm not browbeating you because I've made the same mistakes. I'm just curious why you didn't. Was it just an oversight? Was it like you never thought that this would be required? Yeah. For me personally, you know, it was my first time ever being in business. I could see that other companies were doing it, but I had a naive sense and trust in my business partners that we could just all get along and be aligned because things were pretty rosy in the beginning. But with growth and harder decision making, it just became readily apparent that we were all not super aligned in how we wanted to go forward.

1:01:56What were the disputes over? Oh my gosh. I mean, ranging from should we pay ourselves? You know, I was sort of the poor business partner where I had to have that second job where the other two partners had businesses that they could rely on to pay themselves to, yeah, how to grow the business. You know, even with that mistake at ShopRite, there was still sort of this pressure to say yes to every opportunity where I was sort of pushing back and saying we actually have to have more strategy if we want to keep cash flowing this rather than taking outside investment. And then sort of coming into 2013, 2014, and I could just sort of see that we were going to hit this wall.

1:02:42Around, around. If we couldn't agree how to hire a real team of people to help us run the business, because when things start to really take off, sometimes founders need to get out of their own way. Yeah. Just reading between the lines here. And again, they're not here to kind of refute this. So I'll do my best to, you know, we always try to be very fair to everybody because it's a great product that you're selling. But it sounds like the clashes really were with you and the Australian partners. And Rob, I mean, and Rob, we all just had very different viewpoints on how to go forward with growth.

1:03:23They were more, you felt like they were more conservative? More conservative, really didn't want to give up equity. And I understand that too. Like I understand that perspective, but I think I knew that that's what it would take to really recruit. To skyrocket. Yeah, to recruit the right people. And we essentially hired a salesperson without sort of that equity ask and literally had to fire them two months later, right? Like we just couldn't get the right people. When they have no skin in the game, they're just, you know, I mean, you're just, it's a crapshoot. They could be great. Yeah. But if they have skin in the game, they're incentivized to really do well.

1:04:01Yeah. And then I had had my daughter in 2013. So I was starting to like max out on just my capacity. Wow. That's a lot. That's a lot. And then interestingly, we had sort of created or revolutionized whole milk yogurt. And we started getting big players coming in and directly competing with us. So within, I would say, sort of that 2012 to 2014 timeframe, there was probably six knockoffs that came into the market from Dannon, from Hain Celestial to even Kroger doing a private label version of Noosa. All right. So I imagine you're starting to think, we got to do something about this or this might all go down the tubes.

1:04:50Yeah. So it was beginning of 2014, the Australians were starting to talk about wanting to take some chips off the table. And Rob probably could have just gone in perpetuity because he's a fourth generation dairy farmer, right? Like, I feel like dairy farmers, people of that world just work hard and just keep going no matter what. And so it just became this sort of dialogue of like, how do we solve all of these problems? So I think by 2014, you guys are doing like 40,$45 million in revenue and growing. You were feeling like the four of you guys were not necessarily the right team to turn this into a$100 million business.

1:05:36Maybe not the right team is not the right way to sort of view it. But it really was a bigger team, somebody that was positioned to take it into that hundred plus million realm because it does become a very different business, right? Like you are an important brand to retailers. There's just different expectations from your business partners. I mean, I feel bad for a lot of our employees that were with us from the early days in the sense that they never really got, you know, a lot of oversight. You know, we weren't building like actual career paths for these people. So even though we were a cultured product, I didn't feel like we had a great internal culture in the sense of, you know, creating real business opportunities or, you know, growth opportunities for our employees.

1:06:28And then we finally sort of got alignment around, okay, we don't think we want to sell to a strategic at this point. You don't want to be acquired. We don't want to be acquired because, you know, Rob still really wants to be part of the business. I'm sort of on the fence. I could have probably gone either way. And then, you know, the Australian family just really wanted to sort of realize their investment. So we ended up hiring an investment banker and sort of running a process to find more of that private equity type investment that would support the growth and help us build out that team. All right, so 2014, you do get a strategic investment from a group called Advent.

1:07:09Yes. Right? But until they actually acquired or put in the investment, you guys were trying, they were probably in your data room looking at your business. Meantime, you're running out of product. Like there's a lot, and that deal could fall through. Absolutely. Which was nerve wracking, right? I knew this was sort of like, if we lose this deal, we're pretty screwed. Like it was probably the most stress I've ever endured in my life. But thankfully that somewhat ended when they made the investment. Yes. And they buy a majority stake in Noosa. I think they're based in Boston. They're Boston based, yeah.

1:07:53Private equity firm. They buy a majority position in Noosa. But you guys stay on. I mean, at least you and Rob stay on as employees. We do. And actually, you know, we rolled over a pretty significant minority ownership in the business. That, you know, that was sort of how the deal was structured. You were incentivized to make it work. Incentivized. That's the right word. Yeah. But, you know, it makes a lot of sense, right? Like, we're in the middle of this growth curve. And to your point, we do bring a lot of value to the business at that point. even if we feel like we need to sort of start to hand over the reins.

1:08:28And was it fairly quickly after they, because I think November 2014, they made that investment. Was it like by early 2015, the whole new executive team was brought in? Yes. And these are people with deep experience in food? Yes. And it was a game changer. It really was a game changer. You actually liked it. I loved it. God, these people know nothing about this business. I hate working with them. They don't believe in the quality or the spirit. No, you didn't feel that way. No. So I sort of see these two very distinct chapters that I was involved with at Noosa. It was sort of like the Wild West chapter and then our professional chapter, which I think we created an amazing internal culture.

1:09:10And I had an absolute blast in sort of that second chapter because I didn't have the tension with my business partners anymore. and so. So you were committed to staying with them I think for what for about four years? I mean we were committed until you know they decided to sell the business. And they did eventually sell it I think in 2018 right? It was a merger, aqua merger kind of thing with a company called Sovos Brands and they owned or own a bunch of brands like Rouse, I think Pasta Sauce is one of the brands they own. Maybe they still do own it. They did until Campbell's. Oh, Campbell's bought it, right.

1:09:55Campbell's bought them out, yeah. Yeah, beginning of this year. And so you were, your remaining shares were bought out at that point. And I have to imagine you actually may have made more money as a minority owner than when your majority stake was bought out. Yeah, I mean. You had two bites at the apple, as they say. Two bites at the apple, yeah. I mean, this business that was started really in 2010, I mean, it was kind of like an eight and a half year journey, which from one perspective doesn't seem that long, but I'm sure from your perspective, it was a long journey. It was a long journey because there was, you know, those startup years too, right?

1:10:33Yeah. So it was over a decade of my life that I literally, all I thought about was yogurt, which is a really long time to think about one thing. And I feel like I worked a lifetime in that decade. When you were done, which are sort of when you stepped out of the business after the acquisition in 2018, you were well positioned financially, probably easily for the rest of your life. What did you want to do all the things you weren't able to do while you were building the business? Yeah. I didn't eat yogurt for an entire year. Really? No. Nothing? No, I didn't even want to. I didn't want to shop the yogurt aisle.

1:11:13I just didn't want to think about yogurt for a while. I decided I would say yes to any sort of travel opportunity. And I just needed to be like a little chill for a while and hang out with my kid, hang out with my family more. Like probably one of the most important things I'll do in my life is raise a good human. And I finally have a little more time to focus on that. Yeah. And so there was no plan. There is no plan for you to start another business like you've done that and you have no ambition or desire to go through that again. Yeah, it would be hard. I think it would take something incredibly special to want to go back into the trenches again.

1:11:58You can make more yogurt if you want. I could even I could even explore buying Noosa back if I wanted to. Right. I think it's for sale. I think that Campbell's is looking for a buyer. It is. I don't think I'm going back into yoga. Though I am very interested in sort of the dairy-free space. I know that sort of seems counterintuitive, but... No, no, it's interesting. I sort of feel like I'm back at university, that university phase, right? Where I'm like, what the hell do I want to do with my life? And so I'm just exploring a lot of different things. When you think about the journey you took, you know, and I mean, starting this business in Boulder, thinking it was going to be like a local business and getting the family in Australia to work with you and meeting Rob and the dairy and all that that happened.

1:12:44And then making a lot of money off of this thing, which probably I'm sure wasn't in your plan, but of course was a very pleasant ending, I'm sure. How much of what happened do you attribute to luck? And how much do you think had to do with the work you put in? I think there's a huge element of luck, right? I think about 2008 and sort of seeing this emerging trend of Greek yogurt. And in some ways, I actually think we thought we had missed the boat. Ultimately, we timed it just perfectly because it just reinvigorated the category, Greek yogurt. And we got to ride that wave with the big players.

1:13:27but coupled with that is you know as much as I may have disagreed with my business partners over different things the one thing I think we can attest to is that we all worked really bloody hard you know I've mentored some startup companies where they sort of say well we want to be where you are and I'm like okay well I don't know if I can actually help you because you have to be willing to work really hard and your eye cannot be on this big outcome, right? And that was never what it was about. For me in the beginning or for Rob, it was, you know, a passion around this product that kind of took on a life of its own.

1:14:14That's Coel Tomei, co-founder of Noosa Yogurt. By the way, the company did eventually get around to launching a passion fruit yogurt, the flavor that inspired the whole thing. But today, out of the 18 different Nusa flavors, including cinnamon roll and pomegranate and tart cherry, passion fruit has sadly been dropped from the rotation. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyroz.com or on Substack.

1:14:55This episode was produced by Devin Schwartz with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research from Olivia Rockman. Our engineers were Robert Rodriguez and Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, JC Howard, Carla Estevez, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Carrie Thompson, John Isabella, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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