Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome back to Hitting the Mark, Jeni,

Jeni Britton:
Thank you. It’s so good to be here.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, it’s really, really fantastic to have you here again. Again. Yeah, I know this is actually part two of a little mini-series of guests that I have back. So you’re the second guest back on the last episode. We checked in with Till Janczukowicz who founded IDAGIO, and then very recently he launched Hello Genius. This episode also features a brand new brand, which sounds overly branded, but yes, a brand new brand. I believe Floura officially launched in 2025, and it’s only February, so it’s crazy. For new listeners though, Jeni has been on episode 28 where we did a deep dive into Jeni’s Ice Creams, which she started at age 22 and now sells in 80 scoop shops and 12,500 something retailers and an annual annual revenue north of 125 million. At least that’s what Fast Company says, and I believe Fast Company. If you missed it, stop right here.

Do your homework, listen to that wonderful episode, and then come right back. As today we are diving into a new chapter of Chinese entrepreneurial journey with Floura. So Floura is a next generation fiber company that currently has fiber bars, which you call Fruit Crush bars in multiple flavors. On the Floura side, it says ice cream legend, chenny bread, and a few foodie friends saw potential where others saw waste. Tell us how did this new venture come about? Where did this journey begin? Because I know it didn’t begin this year. I know there was a lot prior to the official launch, but how did it come about?

Jeni Britton:
Yes, it did. It came about, well, it has been a long journey. It’s been about two and a half years that we’ve been working on Floura behind the scenes. We actually didn’t know what it was going to become when we started working on it. We were actually working on a different project. My business partner, my co-founder is my, well, he was my business advisor actually at Jeni’s. That’s a strange kind of title, but he was kind an outside almost business coach for me. When I was able to make the move to step away daily from the company or step away from the company, my daily routine and work at the company, he helped me do that. He helped me in the last couple of years there with our board and just ended up being such a great sort of right hand but outside of the company.

And I learned so much from him that when I stepped away from the company, we worked really well together that we just decided we were going to keep working together. So we were working with other founders, which was kind of just almost as a mentor to help them avoid some of the mistakes that I had made so many founders make in the beginning of growth era. And we were looking for a produce company because found that we were working with needed one sort of bigger than the farmer’s market, but ultimately smaller than what we ended up finding. And in this process we toured this massive produce company. I mean, it is 600,000 square feet. It’s absolutely enormous. It’s so cool. It’s like a planet almost. I mean processing. They’re feeding a hundred million people a year through this one produce company, and they just do cut produce and salads and things like that.

We saw the waste coming off of that. And the thing that Mark and I also like to do together, this sort of a side thing is just as I was coming out of Jeni’s, I was also kind of getting my help really for the first time in my entire life, really feeling what it felt like to be sort of balanced on all realms of health all at once. I had never done that. I mean, think entrepreneurs, we often kind of use our bodies like a box of tissues. Somebody else can fix it. We just want to keep going. It’s such a cool adventure. You forget about the pain, you can just keep going and it’s fun. But also, once I learned what it started to feel like, what actual health feels like, I didn’t want to ever let that go again. It felt so good, and I realized I’d really never had that before.

So Mark was kind of almost becoming my health coach in a way. I mean, he’d been on this journey for a while. He sent me all these books on the microbiome and fiber and all that. So we were already embarking on these things, and I think this is actually how the best idea has come about. It’s like you are pursuing all the things that matter to you at that moment in your life. And Jeni’s came about the same way I was pursuing art and French pastry and scent and in that little sort of sea that all of my curiosities, Jeni’s was born, and this is exactly what happened with Floura. All of these things kind came together when we saw the waste coming off of this factory or this produce processing company, because I had already read that watermelon rind is full of prebiotic fiber. We should be eating it or more of it than we do. And I remembered that article because my grandmother always pickled watermelon rined, so many grandmothers pickled watermelon,
And now we don’t so much. So it was like all these things came together. We were like, wow, all of this amazing, these amazing products that are full of fiber, full of micronutrients that we probably need. And then that kicked off more research. And then within weeks, mark had moved from LA to New Jersey where this facility is, and we had started a little shop, a little sort of, they gave us a room to experiment in. And from there we start just playing and learning to ferment and learning how to dehydrate and mill into these ingredients that we could then use to make products.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How amazing. Not what I expected to hear.

Jeni Britton:
Yeah, it’s like all stories are sort of almost like this sort of web that begins to be spun based on your curiosities and how you open up and find the sort of pattern I think, which ultimately then becomes the brand or the company that you’re building.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. I mean, I can just see the two of you in this plant I once visited or a couple of times visited an orange choose plant, and it was just amazing the amount of oranges that were going through this facility

Jeni Britton:
Oh I bet it smells sounds so good in there.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, so good. And you’ve got your sexy hairnet on and you’re like, but it was so cool. I mean, I just shot so many pictures there and I just felt like it was such an amazing place to be. I could just imagine the two of you in this tiny little room somewhere with neon light, most probably like some floor rest and light flickering, and you’re working on things that you don’t quite even know where they’re going to end up. But it’s interesting. I mean, what a really weird and also super cool opportunity. And then how did it get you to where you are now? I mean, obviously a lot happened, but when did you realize that want to make bars with it or the consistency and the texture? I mean, a lot goes into this entire RD process.

Jeni Britton:
Absolutely. So we got about a year in, we had gotten good at making turning watermelon rind and mango skins, honeydew, cantaloupe, rinds, pineapple rinds, and apple cores into ingredients. So we were able then to turn those into either a powder or in the case of the apple cores, we could turn them into a paste that we could use. So we had that process down. We had made a pancake mix and actually a whole bunch of things. We’ve made a pizza crust and a beautiful chocolate cake. But what we realized is that we needed something if we were going to bridge the fiber gap, which is what we exist to do, the fiber gap, it’s like 95% of Americans are deficient in fiber by 50%. And that leads to a lot of chronic illness. It’s actually one of the major, I mean, it’s one of the main reasons for many chronic illnesses, including things like neurodegenerative disorders and cancer and all sorts of things. Even just glowing skin, I mean simple things all the way through the very complex, very urgent,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And even dementia, I heard you say

Jeni Britton:
Dementia. I mean all of these autism, a lot of these things can be traced right back to in certain instances, directly back to the lack of fiber in our diets. The industrial food system removes fiber for a few reasons. I mean, one, we just tend to it better in focus groups because it’s almost more addictive, and they know that what they can do with our food in that way and it processes better and flows through their machines better. I mean, there’s just a bunch of reasons why it’s better for them, the system to remove fiber, but it’s also very bad for us. So we had made all these things and they were all very tasty, but we realized that what we really needed to do is make something that people could consume daily, they could reach for daily. And we decided that we were going to be a company that promotes fiber first.
So getting fiber, however you get it through your diet, and if you can’t process your 30 fruits vegetables plants a week, get all of that fiber, we’re going to make something that you can reach for to bridge that gap for you. And so that’s where we decided we were going to do a bar. Bar is interesting because of course it’s a crowded market, extremely crowded. It’s a lot like ice cream, but even worse, maybe even a lot worse. But the thing is, it’s also a language that we all speak. We know that a bar is somewhere between food and supplement, that it’s a concentrated nutrient food, and that’s the point of a bar. Now, not all bars have good ingredients, even though most of ’em are marketed as a healthy alternative to a snack or a meal. But we decided for that reason that we should do a bar because we don’t then have to spend the time explaining to people how to use it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah

Jeni Britton:
Will automatically understand this is a snack, this is for the midday, this is to take over breakfast. And then we can focus all of our time focusing on flavor, which the bar market really needs. And then also of course, fiber and how we make our fiber and why it’s different. And then that went about a year into testing. We launched, we started making bars in January. So in November, December, 2023, in March, we launched a Kickstarter kind of under the radar a little bit just to build a little community to use for testing and learning. And in that community, we learned a lot about flavor, about what people want to eat and also about what people know or what they don’t know. So for instance, we learned that most people don’t differentiate prebiotics, fiber, prebiotics, or fiber, but most people don’t see it as fiber. They sort of associate prebiotics with postbiotics or probiotics. I mean, it’s all very confusing. Probiotics are the actual microbes. Postbiotics are sort of the DNA, the microbes leave behind when they die, and then prebiotics are the fiber that the probiotics eat. I mean, it’s all sort of swims in this kind of confusing little pond.

So we decided to take prebiotic off and just focus on fiber. We’re doing all kinds of fiber. It also has all the prebiotic fiber you need in a day to feed your microbiome. And then we launched with our new formula and new brand then, yes, about four weeks ago. Amazing. We’ve been working on this a long time, but it’s literally we’re just beginning.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, that’s how it always works, right? It’s like, oh, I just launched. Congratulations. How was the last half year? It’s like half year.

Yes, exactly.

Tell me a little bit more about the Kickstarter campaign, because it’s interesting how much information you got out of it was basically one ginormous loving focus group. How did you gain that knowledge from Kickstarters? Because a lot of us consumers, I mean, I did a Kickstarter campaign with my product. It was done in a very different way than you seem to have done yours. A lot of consumers just see a Kickstarter campaign is something where they hit buy once and then that’s it, and then they get updates. And that’s, but yours seem to have been developed in a way where it was much more interactive.

Jeni Britton:
Yeah. Well, we did a kind of normal Kickstarter. I had never done a Kickstarter before. I just know the CEO, and I was like, sure, let’s do that. Maybe that’s a good idea. But one of the other things that I was curious about in the Kickstarter beyond the product itself was whether people would follow me into health and wellbeing. That’s an odd sort of zag for an ice cream maker. And I’ve been doing ice cream for so long that I, I was really afraid of that. I was really thinking, this is going to be something people will just either ignore or just think is ridiculous, or maybe they’ll come along. I mean, we’ll see, because on my Instagram that I do focus on that I have for about five years on my Instagram on wellbeing, what I would think of as wellbeing, my version of that. And so the part of the Kickstarter was also just to see would people follow me over to this world? And so we launched this Kickstarter, the best we could do. It was, I mean, kind of silly in some ways, but also charming as they all are. And we got about a thousand people to buy a whole bunch of bars, like 60,000 bars. It was kind of crazy. Which we then had to make of course, which was great.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s the problem.

Jeni Britton:
Yeah, exactly. So that was wonderful. So then we just started asking those people questions and we watched when they reordered. So we launched our website, but we just really soft launched it. We almost had to work to not get press because we weren’t ready with our packaging. We weren’t ready with the message, and we didn’t want it to go mainstream. We didn’t want it to be anybody to write about it. We didn’t want any influencers. We just wanted to be under the radar in a soft, I wouldn’t even call it soft launch. I would just call it literally just under radar testing phase, testing phase. And then we just started asking people. And honestly, you don’t even have to ask people because most people in this early stage, they’re bought in, they want to help. They want to tell you. They know you’re in the early phase. You just did a Kickstarter and they’ll start emailing you and then you express your gratitude at that, and then they continue. That’s

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing.

Jeni Britton:
So it was great.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And it’s not necessarily built into Kickstarter, that’s why I was interested in this. But you then opened up the website and Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Jeni Britton:
We transfer them all to the website, all the emails, and just started emailing questions when we had them or when people would write to us about how they experienced the bars, we would then start asking them questions. We knew they were kind of bought in.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Right. Super. I love that phase of a company when it’s actually super personal and you love getting these emails and you reply yourself and you gain so much information and then the person on the other hand feels all excited that it, it’s a real human being getting back to them in an empathetic way. Exactly.

Jeni Britton:
And I’ll say too, that, and at Jeni’s, it’s this way as well. We don’t do focus groups for a bunch of reasons, but one reason we don’t do a focus group is because people, when we all get into critic brain, we behave differently. We behave because we know we’re being watched. We’re trying to be something, we’re trying to be helpful, we’re trying to solve a problem, we’re trying to be the hero, whatever it is. And that is very different from how you just eat ice cream. And so at Jeni’s always, I would just go to the stores and watch people and listen. And that’s the same, we were trying to do the same thing with Flores. Just get people in their normal environments when they email us or when just trying to ask the right questions or have a little gathering of people and watch them eat it. Don’t ask questions.

Of course, sometimes you want to ask questions too, but the best thing you can do, I think, is just to observe people because people act differently when they kind of don’t realize they’re being observed. And that’s also really important. So just getting in the most natural setting possible. I remember we took these bars in January actually right before launch, the week of launch to Food and Wine Magazine. And it was so cool because I sort of just want to see how people are eating. These are people who obviously eat the best food in New York City, their foodies, they brought their sommelier in the, so I’m sweating bullets thinking, this is a fiber bar. This isn’t ice cream. We can’t hold it to that same standard. But they were running down the hall and giving it to their colleagues, and I felt like really, I could trust that feedback in a really big way because they got very animated about it. And that was really a cool moment before we launched the brand, the actual brand this last month.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, that’s so important. And what you said about focus groups is something that I keep stressing to everyone too. It’s like this whole idea of, well, if we asked people, they would’ve wanted faster horses instead of cars. But it is so applicable on a day-to-day thing because you’re constantly, everyone wants to be a critic. Everyone wants to when they’re on the spot. And that’s kind of like what’s happening on social media too, right? It’s like it’s going to be

Jeni Britton:
Exactly what’s happening on social media, what’s happening all over our culture. What happens then is that it’s vanilla. So when you think about vanilla and ice cream, when you go to some of the big brands, you get a vanilla, it’s a very top note, very single note vanilla. It’s like the biggest vanilla. It’s exactly what you think about when you think about vanilla. You think about vanilla perfume, you think about, but actual vanilla, once you learn even just the minimum about what vanilla is, you have a whole different standard. So what you really need to enjoy something to find pleasure is story. You have to have story in order to connect in that deeper sort of pleasure way. And so if you’re not giving people story, but you think that you’re going to create the best vanilla or the best coffee or the best red wine or the best chocolate, you’re just watching listening to people and their feedback, you’re going to get the most of the sort of obvious reflection into your product instead of being something that’s really beautiful.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I saw a piece of designer furniture in a Facebook group that was all about, the Facebook group was all about storage. Where do we put stuff? And then there’s this piece of design of furniture, and everyone was just slamming it like, oh my God, the price is insane. What is the price? It wasn’t my piece, but it was some of that. What is the price? And then if you would take that piece of furniture into any other group that is educated about design and that appreciates design and form and functionality, they would never even once talk about price. And so it’s so interesting that vanilla comment, it’s like different things for different people, but it all needs to be in the right perspective. It needs to be the story that needs to be told around it. Otherwise it suddenly becomes a totally different type of product that serves a different need or it doesn’t serve a different need. Talking about snarky social media comments, I saw, well, I guess it would be a lovingly snarky comment that I saw on social. It said, love your ice cream. Let’s see how you do fruit. Oh,

Jeni Britton:
Okay. And that was, it’s also like dehydrated, wild fermented. Just the watermelon wine is fermented, so it’s fermented, dehydrated, milled fruit. So yeah, I mean, this is a big challenge. It’s actually relatively easy. I mean, let’s face it, it’s pretty easy to make ice cream taste good. The texture is the very complicated part, but almost anything can taste good in ice cream. So this was a pretty fun challenge for me.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
No, that’s exactly it, right? It’s like how different is the process of creating ice cream flavors versus developing flavors for fiber parts? I mean, it’s a complete, you basically have to start over, right?

Jeni Britton:
Yeah. Well, the same sort of foundational aspect, the foundation is the same. We still always want something that’s a little bit new and exciting on top of something that feels familiar, and that is a formula that works at Jeni’s and in most places. And so we can kind of run with that still, and then you just have to balance the sort of sweet, sour, bitter salty elements. But also we’re working with, because it’s the fermentation, because we are working with the rinds that aren’t really sweet, we work with apple paste, which is sweet, and it’s kind of sweet tart, actually. Beautiful. So most bars, as you probably can imagine and know, they start with date paste and date paste has a very strong flavor and it’s very, very sweet. It’s very sugary.

So you either have to mask that or go with that. So that’s why you get a lot of heavy, bold desserts in bar. In the bar market. You’re getting triple Oreo, cheesecake, whatever bars, chocolate. And so these are more ethereal. They’re lighter. And that’s I think something that we can run with and play with here that’s a little bit less done in the bar world. Although that said, one thing we definitely learned is that we need a chocolate flavor, and that came from my daughter, and she’s right. So we started working on one of those, and it’s actually really good. I actually am very curious is when we put out the chocolate, is it going to just tsunami over all of the other flavors? Because I was pretty adamant in the beginning of this company that we want to make these bars taste like food. Food that you would eat at breakfast or the food that you would eat at lunch, not necessarily a dessert, because we don’t want to be deserting all day long. We can’t be eating dessert, breakfast, lunch, and dinner or dessert flavors, but we’ll see. We’re going to let our consumers decide.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, that’s when peanut butter comes in. Yeah, exactly. Somewhere between dessert and food. Exactly. Well, I mean, will there be a time, will there be a time or will there be a reason for a Floura bar to hang at the Jeni’s checkout line, or is that something that you got to separate church and state?

Jeni Britton:
We have to separate Jeni’s from Floura, and a couple of reasons people have asked, are we going to find the Floura bars in the Jeni stores? It’s on the notes. I’ll tell you something, it’s funny because people in ice cream, they don’t want to be sold anything that remotely looks like health, unless it’s like, of course, if you’re going to that brand or brands that exist to be the low calorie ice cream or whatever of that’s your thing, that’s

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Fine. You’re so right. Yeah.

Jeni Britton:
But at Jeni’s, they don’t want to be sold. In fact, it’s interesting to me, our best flavors I think, and I think a lot of chefs agree with me, a lot of people agree with me are the ones that we actually make with buttermilk and yogurt, and that yogurt and the buttermilk is made for us by a fifth generation dairy. It’s incredible. But if we call it sherbet, if we call it chiffon, if we call it parfait, we can call it anything but yogurt because if we call it yogurt, nobody buys it, even though it’s, it’s the best thing we make. If we call it orange blossom chiffon, it’s one of the top flavors that we make. So it’s interesting how naming and perception changes things, but yeah, we know that people just aren’t at Jeni’s for that moment.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It makes so much, I mean, it’s literally the foundation of branding is what this is all about. How do you position it, what do people feel when they enter the brand? And the last thing they feel is they don’t want the healthy bar. They come to Chinese for a reason, and the minute that you even name an ice cream flavor, something that could somewhat sound healthy, they might even turn around. They might feel like, you know what? I was in the mood for this, but maybe I should do something more healthy. Maybe I shouldn’t even have ice cream. Right? It’s like you want to indulge. That’s exactly right. Super interesting. Super

Jeni Britton:
Interesting. Yeah. It’s funny because a brand is, we always talk about a community. I mean, I came from the farmer’s market, so community, it is like growing a company is not that complicated. It’s like growing a community. What is a community? And the thing that’s hard for somebody like me in the Midwest, also from the farmer’s market, wants to embrace and love everybody. Of course, the thing that’s really hard about a community is that it has to have borders. You have to define it. It has to be gated in some way. And so you have to say, yes, there are laws, standards, norms, cultures here in this world that we created, and it may not be for everybody. And that’s actually, that’s what makes it so exciting for the people who are here. And you have to be okay with it. You have to define that.

If you don’t, then you’re not creating a community. You’re not creating a brand that people can be excited about. And that’s where you get to that point of when people hear, it’s like poetry or it’s like the more you learn, the better it tastes, the more you learn, the cooler that company becomes, whatever it is that they’re making, whether it’s furniture or ice cream or whatever, fashion, it’s almost like this inner circle kind of club that we get this over here because we understand that this watermelon line is fermented and it’s really good for you because it does all these things or whatever. We get this because whatever we’re connected with our, it connects me to all my people in the sort of skincare world or whatever it is that you are making. It’s almost like it becomes a little bit of a secret language and you’re supposed to, not everybody is supposed to speak that language.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. It’s about including and excluding, but not excluding in a forceful manner, but in a very strategic manner.

Jeni Britton:
We always say it’s for anybody, not everybody. I’m sure I said that in the last episode.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. No, I don’t think you have. Maybe you have, but I love that. I mean, there’s so many similarities between the two brands, Chinese and Floura. So both are direct to consumer, both are based on great flavor, both are CPG, et cetera, et cetera. What surprised you the most as you stepped into this new business or as you started building this brand from scratch because you were 22, it kind of almost built itself in the beginning from the farmer’s market to right from the stand to it, kind of like you had demand and then suddenly you build a brand. This was very different where you set out to, okay, well this will become a brand. We have to build it from ground up. It’s a very different way of building it, I’m sure than you did last time. What surprised you along the way?

Jeni Britton:
Oh gosh, I don’t even mean a lot of things. The first thing that surprised me was simply that we started, I started another company that wasn’t the intention. It’s actually, I think the best way to do it is just when you’re just following your own curiosity and then suddenly it sort of clicks into a vision.

There’s a lot of ideas that happen every single day, but when it’s a certain idea, it sort of locks into eventually a vision. And then once it does that and you see this clear path of who are the people that are, what’s the world going to look like when it’s realized, who are the people we’re going to affect? How is it going to live in the world? Once you lock into that, it’s like almost, you have no choice but to step into it. And then from there, it’s like it pulls you along. But that was the most surprising to me was just like, here we are. We have a company. I’m a founder again, and yes, everything about Flores different at Jeni’s. Yeah, I started in the farmer’s market. I thought I knew a lot more than I did. I thought it was a lot easier than it would be. I thought it was a lot cheaper. I thought it was going to take fewer people. I mean, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And that was interesting. And actually I think really a strength of the company, but over many years, learned all the things that I need to learn here now at Flore. It’s really cool because well, all of those lessons we learned in gym, we’re going to continue to make new mistakes because we’re expanding into new territory that we’ve never been before.
But we can take all of those learnings. For instance, something that’s kind of interesting to me is at Jeni’s, we launched into grocery with flavors that were our best sellers in stores, which was a mistake. And I kind of thought it might be at the time, how do you know the bestsellers at stores were bestsellers for a really specific reason and they didn’t work in grocery. So the best I would say that the reason that people visit Jeni’s is you get what we call this, I always call it like the tour guide. You get this sort of

Quirky, quirky young person who comes in and they come in for whatever the newest flavor is, whatever the coolest new flavor they see on Instagram or whatever is, but they’d bring their parents and their little sister or whatever, and all of those people, those three people get milk, chocolate, vanilla and salty caramel, an older flavor or something. And so this has been going on forever and ever. So the reason we made all of those sales is because we made the sweet potato with blowtorch marshmallows, but we sold more milk chocolate in that sale. Do you launch in grocery with sweet potato, with blowtorch marshmallows, or do you launch with milk chocolate? We ended up launching with milk chocolate, not realizing that milk chocolate, vanilla, there are these flavors that other companies have on lockdown. Haagen-Dazs owns vanilla in a way that nobody else will ever impact.

And so we needed to actually have brand flavors that spoke to people through the freezer in a grocery store, and we didn’t do that. So we can do this now at Floura in a way that we couldn’t or didn’t realize it at Jeni’s. We can have flavors that we are kind of tried and true at a price point people can afford, and we definitely did not do that work. It took us about a decade to dig out of that once we got started in grocery at Jeni’s, and I think we can go much faster now with Floura with those learnings.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Fascinating, super fascinating. And how do you go, this is something that I was wondering ever since I saw you starting with Floura, what’s the brand personality of Floura going to be? It is this, and now it already is shaping obviously, and a lot of it, I mean, you’re actively shaping it, but it’s really difficult because now you’re in the health space of sorts. And so how far do you go down that route? I mean, looking at some of the brand personality that comes through your brand that’s like you call your testimonials, gut reactions from our customers, which really makes me smile. But then it also, it reminds me that this is good for my gut. So it’s kind of like this nice balance, but how do you think about the brand personality of Floura?

Jeni Britton:
I think that it is ultimately, it’s going to be sort of sexy and optimistic, and these are things that we don’t see in the fiber world, pre Floura, you just don’t. I think there’s going to be talking a lot about connection, your nature inside and out. And I think that’s how I felt when I got my health. It was like it wasn’t just that I felt healthy, and when you start to think about what does it feel like to feel healthy, it’s that I felt like myself. I actually felt very purely like me. And that is something I think we want to try to play up at Floura, this sort of almost sensuality of living through this sort of inside inner world. So there will be that sort of almost like spirit of Floura as we go forward. And by the way too, we’ve done our visual design for our packaging, but our brand is very much in development still.

And I believe that we have to do this with our customers. So you can’t just do this in a room. I think you have to launch the first iteration, which we have, and then continue to evolve with your customers. So I would say that we’re going to continue to evolve forever, but very intensely over the next six months. And that will also include online, on our social media, on our website and all the places that we can impact. So this will be the fun part to I think pay attention to if you’re into this kind of nerdy sort of brand work. I do think that it’s a two-way conversation with customers and we’re just beginning that journey.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Totally. Did you just call us nerdy? Yes. You were the opposite. Nerdy. No, it is. Well, I think you own nerdy when it comes to flavor, so I think we all are very nerdy.

Jeni Britton:
Yes, exactly.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
So what you just said about the brand personality and how you feel like it is about connection. So let’s talk about the name because Chinese was unquote easy, right? We talked about this last time. In hindsight, it was rather easy to go with Chinese. I know it was also tough to actually arrive there, but how difficult was it to drive Floura? Because Floura, I know you have the.com. I myself, looking at Floura, I feel like it’s a mixture of Floura without the U and then to flourish and the two come together. But maybe I’m wrong. Tell me about, did

Jeni Britton:
You read that? Did I tell you that that’s exactly what it is?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
No, but I do it professionally so it makes sense. Yes. So

Jeni Britton:
You’re spot on and it makes me happy that you said that. I was actually in Pompeii in the summer of 2023, and I saw this, the very famous fresco of Floura, the goddess, the Roman goddess, and she’s the goddess of blooming in springtime, and I thought flourishing, she’s the goddess of flourishing, rebirth, all of that. So yes, we wanted, so instead of F-L-O-R-A, we added the U to remind us of flourishing. So exactly, you were spot

Fabian Geyrhalter:
On. Perfect. I love it.

Jeni Britton:
Yeah, I love it. And it’s funny because it was just like, I mean I called my partner Mark, and I was like, we have to call it Floura, and that was that. So we didn’t have a name before that, and then we did, and that was it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And it perfectly works with what your brand is all about, right? I mean, it’s wonderful on many levels. Did you have to buy the.com? I’m pretty sure you did.

Jeni Britton:
We did, but it wasn’t crazy at all.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Ok

Jeni Britton:
Was a couple thousand bucks. I mean, really not crazy.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, wow.

Jeni Britton:
Yeah. I think that ‘u’ really helps us on that front.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, of course, of course, of course. And now that we go into the nerdy brand conversation and we talk about these words that are so important that are shaping the Floura, the Floura brand, like flourishing and community and all of those ideas, what is one word, this is coming because you’ve been here before, but what is one word that can describe your brand? So if you take all things Floura put through a funnel, and out comes this one word, which I like to call your brand, DNA, with Liquid Death, it is mischief with Everlane, it would be radical transparency. Jeni’s is or was at least in episode 28 of Hitting the Mark. It was belonging. I don’t know if you remember that, but that’s what Jeni’s said.

Jeni Britton:
Oh, that’s lovely.
Yeah, that’s a great word for Jeni’s. I would’ve said, if you asked me today, I would’ve said flavor because of the word flavor means character. And I think, but we’re a few years later and I would look at the company and I see a company of character and characters and flavors and all of that, so that’s cute too. But belonging is really, I like that, really the one that I spent a lot of. I mean, that’s what we use for years and always talk about it behind the scenes. So that makes sense. So for Floura, gosh, I think it’s connection. I think it is going to be that. But we’re going to find out. I think this is exactly what we’re going to find out. This isn’t something, I think sometimes you can create that liquid death shore that makes sense for them, but I think even in the beginning you just have to see what people are responding to and how far you can push it, and then you figure that out. So we’re kind of in the moment, I think working with a few different words. I mean, we’re using the word sexy a lot, connection, sensuality,Even the word optimism, which I love very much. It’s not the same as positivism. So optimistic is just about believing and having faith in something and going forward with it, but it’s also about seeing the challenges and seeing a path through. So I think I’m going to have to get back to you in a few months and let you know what we settled on. But I think right now I

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Would say connection and maybe you will never settle on it. And I think that’s really interesting because when I ask these questions, it’s kind of like it’s an answer in the moment and hopefully an answer that for some founders will actually nourish and drive the brand forward. It’s kind of like how it was when you talked about Chinese back then and it was belonging because that was something that you were nourishing and you were pushing for it, and it was something that you felt with the brand. And now looking back it’s flavor for so many reasons because now you nourished it so much that there’s so much of that belonging that you look at it from afar and you’re like, well, everyone has their own flavor and everyone feels like it’s this living, breathing organism. And I think with Laura, the idea of connection, connection first and foremost to your body, you reconnect to your body, but you also want to form connections early on with a community. And you need to build that in order. You build a brand and then maybe in six months is something to a really different, and that is,

Jeni Britton:
I think sexiness is going to stick in a big way because it’s the opposite of what we think of With fiber. And I think we can do it with this through this kind of lens of connection. So yeah, I’ll ping you in six months and see which one we’re get stuck, but that’s what we talk about behind the scenes a lot.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love it. And I mean the world that you enter, even though it is as crazy populated of a market as it could possibly be with bars, like you said in the beginning, it is also so much of alike, even though they come in all kinds of flavors and designs and the fundamentals are all exactly the same. And I found it so funny when years ago, the perfect bar came out and it called itself the perfect bar. And I just so made fun of it. I eat quite a lot of perfect bars, which you might tell me not to. And I will say,

Jeni Britton:
Well, they’re kind of great. I have to admit, they’re

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Kind of great. I mean, they’re kind of like, but they come with their own problems of having to be refrigerated and this and this. But to me, it is been something that I’ve been doing. And here I am eating the perfect bar, and I think the name is so ridiculous, but yet I eat it because I think it’s pretty good. But yeah, the Perfect Bar kind of sets the idea of how the bar Bar branding is right? It’s not extremely inspired. It’s not like there is room for something to actually, you don’t belong to a bar. You don’t say, this is a brand I love. It’s kind of like a means to the end. It’s like, oh, you skip lunch or you have one for travels, or it’s not something that, there are few brands, if any bar brands that you really feel like, oh, I want to follow them on Instagram. It’s like, why?

Jeni Britton:
It’s true. And it’s funny because I mean, you’re so right. I mean, RX was incredible branding.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s right, RX. Yep.

Jeni Britton:
And that is the one where you can point to and say when they changed their brand, everything changed for the company and it’s brilliant. And it’s exactly what the people needed at the time. It’s still brilliant. Otherwise it’s not great. The whole bar aisle is just pretty awful, actually. And it’s interesting because it actually reminds me of ice cream in 1998, even 2007. And what you see is that it’s like a whole aisle, the entire aisle of kind of dark colors, because people sort of thought that darker colors meant quality. So you get a lot of browns for chocolate, you get a lot of deep reds, dark greens, ivory in the ice cream aisle. Maybe you get some blues with Ben and Jerry’s, but the whole ice cream aisle is Burgundy gold ivory when you there. Well, Ben and Cherries

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Was disruptive. I mean back then they were, when Ben and Cherries came in, it’s like, whoa. Because you’re right, every single private label brand today, like the Vons and the Ralphs and the Krogers, they still look exactly like the ones you’re talking about from the nineties.

Jeni Britton:
It’s a lot like the bar market even. And I would say even Ben and Jerry’s packaging, because it’s also kind of dark. I mean, you get the sort of blue and I can’t remember what they’re doing right now, but even so the other thing about this is that they’re all kind of the same. So the brand talk kind of looks a little bit dark, and even though there’s lights in the freezer, everything kind of feels a little bit dark. So Jeni’s comes along and we’re like, we’re going to make it look like there’s a light shining bright external light shining on our brand here. We’re going to use brighter colors. Each point is going to look very different. I mean, the logo of course is going to be in the same place and then flavor name, but every pint iss going to be different. It’s going to look like a box of donuts.

When you open a box of donuts, there’s something there for you. And they’re all very different colors. And so when you walk down the ice cream aisle now and you see those, or at least up until fairly recently, you see all these dark colors and then all of a sudden you come to Jeni’s and it’s like, it looks like there’s a light shining directly on us, and I think we can do because of these bright colors that we choosed that are very different from the rest of the ice round. And it’s kind of like that now in the bar aisle. They’re all kind of choosing dark colors. And I think there’s still this idea that Burgundy is sort of representative of quality in America, and I don’t feel like it is. It feels old to me, and it has for a long time, maybe 20 years, but still people use it a lot, these darker colors.

And we’re going to come in as we are with this bright sort of what we think of as a muted natural palette that’s going to look like there’s, and what right now we’re seeing when we put it on the shelves with other bars, it looks like there’s a light shining just where ours a little halo just over our brand. And so I do think that we have this ability to draw attention to our company. We’ve heard that from some buyers or one buyer that this idea that photography sells bars. And I really disagree with that. I think photography is just kind of outdated looking on packaging. I think we don’t really buy it. Sometimes it can work, but also photography can also often look very dark again when by the time you get it printed on a bar package and it’s really small. And so we’ve opted to not do that at all and even not even do fruit drawings on our bars.

So we’re going to have to see how that goes. But I think our goal was to make something iconic that you could see from across the room once and you say, that’s a Floura bar. That person’s holding a floor bar. That to us was the important thing because we’re going to load people with all the information they need on the internet. We’re going to give them all the information they need on TikTok and the Instagram and everywhere else they’re going to find it. So when they come across the design, it’s the iconic design that’s going to speak to them, and that’s that. So we don’t really need to sell on the shelf anymore. We just need to be noticed.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. I really love that. And when they notice that the brand personality comes out, which is the sexy part, that’s not the educational part which happens somewhere else. Yeah,

Jeni Britton:
You don’t do that anymore in the sort. I just want to say also just really quick, that I was introduced to a woman named Mary Libro and she has a studio called Studio Libro and she’s in Sydney, Australia. And I struggled to find a designer. You have to have this certain alignment with your designers. And I struggle to find somebody who thinks like I do, which is that it should be constantly evolving that it’s not a grid. We need to break the grid. We need some kind of handwork with so hand painted, there’s this hand painted sort of squiggle here. It has to be sensual. You have to want to touch it, eat it, lick it. You have to really feel sensual about it. And I met, when I met her, we just fell off a cliff in our sort of love for this language. And she’s our designer and she’s great. She’s in Sydney, Australia. So we did this kind of opposite hours

Overnight. And she’s awesome. She’s just a really great, and then Sam, her who works with her too, so I just wanted to give them some props. Usually at Jeni’s, we did everything in house and I really struggled. We struggled with one design firm. We had to let them go because it just wasn’t getting where it was a lot of the same bar aisle stuff and kind almost at the 11th hour, we let them go about probably a month before we launched and we went into this project with Mary. So it’s been a pretty crazy couple months.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. And it shows how important it is, how important branding is to get it right in the beginning, and not right necessarily for your audience, but right for yourself, so that you feel like this is really, I mean, for the lack of big words, it’s the vibe, right? This is the vibe that I want people to feel. And it’s hard to go to 15 different design agencies and say, here’s what I feel. Can you do this? But if you see someone do something and you’re like, she has that kind of sensitivity, a lot of it is about sensitivity when you go that go into that kind of lane of getting it right in the beginning. And it’s going to change all the time. And I think that’s the beautiful thing about branding.

Jeni Britton:
It’s interesting because when you make branding, when you build a brand, which is your whole world, you’re not just defining you, but it starts there because you have to plant the flag. You have to decide, this is our world, this is what we represent, these are our standards, cultures and norms and laws here. But you have to also remember that everybody that comes into it, it’s like a church. You are also representing them. It defines you and it defines them. And so when I put on a shirt like I’m wearing right now, a shirt that I really love from a female designer, I’m wearing this shirt because I love that company. It makes me feel empowered whether or not other people understand what this label means to me. It means something, it defines me. And so I think when we make our brands, we have to understand this as we’ve talked about already, this community that we’ve built, but understand that we’re not just defining what we do.

We’re literally defining the values of our company, but also the people who choose to be in our world. And so when they carry the Floura bar around, what are we saying about them? And that’s true. We think about that a lot with Jeni’s too. When you show up at a party and you’re not bringing a bottle of wine, but you’re bringing a pint of ice cream, what is that saying about you? It says that you’re creative, that you’re interesting, that you’re a person of character and flavor, that you’re a friendly person. I mean, what is it saying about your stylish? And that’s also something that’s really important, I think, because what ties people to brands,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Totally. The church of branding,

Jeni Britton:
It really is.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. I think that is such a good note to end the show with. But first, I mean, everything is happening with Floura now. I usually ask my guests, what are you excited about in the next six months? And it’s like, for you, it must be everything. So you’re just at the pop-up grocer in New York City. Are you already at a space where you’re getting into stores right now, or is everything going to be online for a little while longer?

Jeni Britton:
We are online for a little while longer. We will start in smaller grocers where we can ship direct, but we are already being approached by the bigger groceries. We will take it slow because I know how that is. You have to build velocity on the shelf, not just get on shelf. We could get on any shelf we wanted to. Right now, it’s just a matter of making sure that we can sell through it so that the product is always fresh. So we’ll start in the Northeast and radiate from there. But we’ve already got all of those applications in and we’re already really well on our way. We’ve got all the major distributors coming after us. We just have to make sure that we’re doing this right, because at Jeni’s, I know what it’s like when you don’t get it right and you fall off the shelf or you get removed from the shelf, you can’t get back on. It’s really hard to do that. So at Floura, we’ll just kind of take this, it’s going to go really fast to us, and I think really it’ll go quickly, but it’s at the pace that we need to make it happen. So that’ll start in the northeast and kind of radiate out from there, but look for it on your grocer within the next month to year, over time, year, year

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And a half. Amazing. And so for now, people can go to Floura, that’s with a u .com to get their bars on. And where can they follow Floura online or yourself?

Jeni Britton:
They can follow @LiveFloura on Instagram. And I’m just @Jeni, JENI on Instagram, and I’ll be talking, I think it’s cool. As the founder, I can talk about things that the company’s going to be just sexy and fun and all of that. I can actually go a little deeper with the science, and we’ve got a whole bunch of scientists on our team that can help us do that. So we’ll have a little bit of both content coming from both places.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that. I’ve been geeking out on that the other day, and I went deep into the conversations about gut and everything that goes around with it. Everyone follow Jeni, get yourself Flouras on. I am so excited to taste the bars and to start seeing you take over one grocery chain at a time. It was so good to catch up with you. Thank you so much for taking, again, almost an hour out of your day. We really, really appreciate it.

Jeni Britton:
Well, thank you. It was so much fun. Such a fun conversation.