Live From The HIBT Summit: Jeni Britton Bauer of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams

So before we start the show, I wanna tell you about two live episodes I'll be recording in just a few weeks and how you can come see them in person. If you are a fan of 90s alternative music, you will not want to miss my live conversation with the founders of Sub Pop, the legendary recording label behind bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, The Shins, and many, many others. That show is happening on March twenty sixth in where else? Seattle? at Benaroya Hall, and then the very next night, March twenty seventh, I'll be in San Francisco interviewing Ken Grossman, founder of one of the biggest craft beer makers in America, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. That's happening at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco. Now, if you haven't been to a live recording of the show, they are super fun.

Come on down, meet your fellow listeners, be a part of the show, laugh, cry, grab some how I built this swag, and come say hi to me and the team. So I really hope to see you in either or maybe both San Francisco and Seattle on March twenty sixth and twenty seventh for tickets. Visit NPR Presents. dot org Hey everyone, so today we've got another one of my conversations from the How I Built This Summit that happened last October in San Francisco. Jenny Britten Bauer has spent the past eight years perfecting her signature line of ice cream flavors, which include fluffernutter pie, goat cheese, and cherries, and my personal favorite. Brambleberry crisp and biscuits and peaches.

And these are just a few of the unusual flavors you'll find at Jenny's splendid ice creams, which all began at a Columbus, Ohio farmers market back in 2002. Today, Jenny's is a staple at Whole Foods and there are nearly 40 scoop shops across the United States. In my live conversation on stage, I asked Jenny about staying true to herself and how her ice cream can be that amazingly good without any egg yolks. I want to talk to you about a word that comes up a lot and I I have really mixed feelings about this word.

And I and I hope some of you do too, which is authenticity. We hear this word a lot. Be authentic, be your authentic self, your true self. And One of the really cool things about your story that I remember is that in the early days when you had your first version of what would become Jenny Splendid later on. You, you know, you used to wear like torn jeans and you had

green and purple hair and At a certain point you realize that that actually wasn't working, that something about your look and the the aesthetic of what you were selling wasn't right and you decided to change. You you took the dye out of your hair, you started wearing all white, you sort of looked like um Like a pharmacist.

Or an ice cream maker. it it became it kinda reflected that Clean. aesthetic. And and I'm wondering, I mean

You know, you could say, Well, Jenny, you know, you weren't being your authentic self. Uh at that time. But of course. I absolutely was. It absolutely was.

I realized that I was communicating. Through what I was wearing. And it was you know, it was it was you know, goofy thrift store outfits. I mean they were really cute and I had pink hair for a long time and But I wasn't conveying that sort of a who I think I felt like on the inside, honestly, and uh and what I thought that I wanted from my ice cream maker, you know. The other thing was that at Scream, my first ice cream shop, I thought that I could be this ice cream artiste, and like everybody would be so excited about whatever I was doing today that they would just, you know.

Come down and figure and and stand in line and you know, what's the great Jenny have today? And you know I was really thinking more like an artist, or I would you know, a wannabe artist. I was I quit art school to make ice cream then. And w when I got to Jenny's in two thousand and two when I opened Jenny's, I um I took all emphasis off of me on purpose. I had learned the lesson that. No one comes to a business for whatever I'm making today. I don't go to businesses for that. I go to a business for what I had the last time I was there, not for some new thing. I might change my mind when I get there.

And so once I learned that, I knew that I had to create this like signature line that everybody knew about and that it was like cravable in the middle of the night and you just had to have it the next day. And then I could play around with other stuff and then those could move on to the signature list. If they were good enough and if people loved them enough. And so that was part of like that take the emphasis off me, put it on customers, still add, you know, my passion to this. Um but not make it about me anymore, make it about other people. And I knew what people love because they I knew what they loved at Scream when I when I had my first shop.

But I didn't always have that. So that constant disappointment is not a very good way to run a business. I mean do you do you sort of agree with me this idea of authenticity as being complicated? Because you know the message we get is be your true self, be your authentic self. And um and not all of us know w how to do that or what that actually means. Yeah, it is. It's a complex thing right now.

Especially when you talk about companies in brands building authenticity and starting with authenticity. Because what does that actually mean? That's something that you can't Make? You have to do, and it takes a long time.

And I think that so many tim for me anyway, I think authenticity For yourself, and it's not trusting that you'll never make mistakes, it's trusting that you will, but you'll get yourself out of trouble. And I think that authenticity almost comes from that place of trust for yourself. Mm. You know? Because the people in the companies that we find the most authentic are the ones that are making mistakes.

sometimes or that are trying things, that are pushing themselves. So I wanna I wanna sort of um shift gears a little bit and ask you about Perfectionism. Because For those who know about your company and about you

You're you're a bit of a perfectionist. I mm you obsess over Ice cream in a way that few people obsess over. Any products, right? I mean we you know start with what the cows eat. Um

And the Every year our ice cream recipes change. I mean right now we're talking about extended hold times for pasteurization and how that will impact stability. Um we don't use stabilizers, emulsifiers, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, and a whole bunch of other things. um ingredients that are sort of very typical in ice cream, or even egg yolks. Um but we've figured out that um that that there's various ways to make milk proteins act that way and it's really fun and it's extremely delicious. But it's all still an experiment and it's a big challenge. I think it's one of the reasons that twenty four years in, I'm still extremely excited about what we can do this year and What we're gonna try this year is gonna impact what we're gonna do next year. Sorry, I can get like really excited about this. Yeah, I know. No, me too. I like I can feel my cheeks. Yeah, I mean because I was I've noticed that there are no egg yolks, so it's the sort of I guess you call it. Unless you want it to be unless you want there to be egg yolks. Like in an eggnog or something like that. But I mean even like the peaches you buy for the peach um cobbler or the cherries you use for the goat cheese, I mean you

source it in an obsessive way. The cows are grazed on the other. For me it always starts with people. And so it starts with building a relationship with a with a grower. or producer, and then we s we we can work out quality together, because we know that that's the way that I mean that's how you get the best stuff. So sometimes it can take years to figure out how you know which While strawberries grow in Ohio?

And how can we extend that season by a few weeks so we have time to process them all as they come in? There's all sorts of cool stuff that you can do, but you really have to have a good relationship with your farmers and your growers and your producers, or like whiskey, you know, there's too much alcohol in the in the whiskey, we couldn't add enough to ice cream, you know, and still abide by the law. So we work with our whiskey distiller to create a a lower w um alcohol whiskey so we can add a lot of whiskey to it. But those kinds of things all are based on relationships. I mean but with that level of obsessiveness, right? you're paying a premium for really high quality products it also means that your ice cream is more expensive.

expensive compared to a pint of, you know, another brand, right? You it's very dense, there's a lot of ice cream that's packed in there. There's really high quality stuff. I mean Presumably you your company could make a lot more money if the pints were Two dollars cheaper. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but I think that um For us.

That passion is in growing the commute in that s as a community. You know, it's that sort of community spirited um business and making something truly beautiful that we're all really proud of. I mean w in our stores, we have thirty-nine stores and we have well at the peak this summer we had 1800 team members in the stores. And I I think it's because mostly because those people who work in our stores are so proud of what we do. that over the counter it's sort of a natural they're naturally good at service because they're just proud of all of these back end details that we will never probably be able to convey all of them over the counter, but they know that. Like it's that detail and the That

Everyone feels And it's this crazy magic. Um But you feel it. I mean do you think that there is a an argument to be made that

You should per sue perfection, that you should persue. an uncompromising Just absolutely No cutting corners at all. I mean or or It's like having a garden. I mean sometimes you're gonna have a very lush, beautiful area and something's gonna get a little bit uh withered. Hopefully nothing dies.

You know, but that's what you're doing. You're moving your resources around. I mean, ultimately we only have a limited amount of resources that we get to do this with, and so you're constantly Shifting. Yeah. I mean you are in and entered a crowd space, lot of ice cream makers, a lot of people here working on baby clothes and different products where there's you know, there's a lot of competition.

Um I mean how do you really I mean it's one person at a time. It's all on the street level.

It's time and that starts small and build sort of mentality of business because you get to create Um I didn't know how to make the ice cream I know now. when we were younger. And let's say we would have taken, you know, a whole bunch of money early, and I don't think anybody would have given it to us anyway, but let's just say we could have done that. I wouldn't have had the time to work out these details and the things that I now know about ice cream. I needed all this time. I spent At least eight years boots on the ground just

making ice cream and serving it before I ever started growing. And that Time is everything for me because I learned all of that. I mean I studied art. I didn't study Ice cream chemistry. And honestly.

I failed every math class I ever took, and math ice cream is math. I had to f learn all that stuff. And for for us, that's that's what's worked. And I think in ice cream, when we look at what's happened in American ice cream. Um for the last hundred years. There was like a new sort of great American ice cream concept every like ten years. Uh and then it kind of stopped at Ben and Jerry's. I mean there's been a couple other things that sort of were okay but not great. Um and now we're in another ice cream moment, and I think it's because

We've really devoted this like time. to um to building it into a real f I mean a community That means something, and it doesn't just mean something on paper. It feels a certain way. And I think that Um like Ben and Jerry's, I think that they did that. It was a it was a moment in American history.

Yeah, every industry and every business is so different but I just don't think that you can just create an ice cream shop and just bounce onto the market. It's just too complex of a of an industry and we've seen so many come and go over the years. It's very hard. Dairy is a complex industry. You know, of course we always think everybody else's businesses are so much easier than ours, you know what I mean? I'm like I'm not doing dairy again. But it's been amazing and it's been a joy and I'm an absolute Evangelists for dairy farmers. I'm curious to get your your take on growth, right? Because Um we you know we we sort of were fed this mantra that growth is good and growth is important.

But there are also consequences when it comes to growth and challenges. So for a company like yours, it means you've got to source more stuff. It means you've got to build more shops. It could mean that you lose control of the quality as you have more stores and more shops. And I think most of your sales are still online and and at and at stores, right? Um but I mean how important is Explosive growth. I mean do you want Jenny's to be like Baskin Robbins?

I mean I love growing so much. I like the challenge of of business and I love all the um I don't think that my company would ever grow just because of growth. I don't think anyone in our company is motivated by that. I think it's been really fun to grow where people are buying our ice cream and then be able to offer them service. I mean, I'm very service driven as a person. It's very personal to me. And so being able to open shops is really important to me in places even where we're selling a lot of ice cream and whole foods, for instance, to be able to open a shop in that community where we know people know about us and love us and then we can offer that sort of service and that moment. And you know, I do think that ice cream is a really a lovely moment, a place that you can get to know somebody else better and it's

you know, just a special thing. So I think that you can get better as you grow. And that's been my experience. Um when we were really small, and there's a sort of glow around the sort of mom and pop sort of

thing I think especially in ice cream. But when we were small we were we were really limited by what we could buy. I mean we had to do an ice cream mix. You couldn't get an a company to help us. We couldn't get the dairy that we wanted to. We couldn't get the milk that we uh we wanted and we knew we were surrounded by these farms. We couldn't get them outside of the system co-mingled with the other milk. Um even our strawberry grower who now grows fields for us and he's got his brother involved and the other guy down the street. Um you know, it was like f w flats at a time or whatever, and so we really couldn't do much planning and then sometimes he wouldn't have enough or whatever. So you actually feel like

Up to this point. We've gotten so much better as we've grown in terms of ice cream quality and definitely in terms of service. And we have So much more to do. And it takes resources to do it.

Um as you know, the theme of the summit this year is kindness and collaboration. I love that so much. Um and I know that there there's been many examples of that on your journey. Can you share just just one example of of of somebody who was kind or collaborative or just Enabled you to get here.

Yeah. Um Yeah. I love this I love Columbus very much and uh my whole story is about asking for help.

I always say nobody starts from nothing. We all have our brain brawn and buds, and that's literally like how we started the company. Um But that community came out for me. And I think once I started to prove myself so it wasn't immediate, but once I started to prove that I was in it and that I would cared and that I was gonna do this and it was gonna be here for a long time, the community came out in a big way. And at that point you know, it becomes this love fest. Like now I'm super committed. I want to get back to the community. They're supporting me. And I in a way love these sort of smaller cities see it in other cities as well, where the whole city can kind of rally around a few businesses and companies that they love, whereas sometimes you get lost in a bigger city. There's other advantages of being in a big city with a with a new company. But that would that has been amazing and I just would put that credit back on Columbus and I love it to this day and will never leave for that reason. I mean I travel a lot but I will always go back home because that's

My place on Earth. Yeah. Jenny Burton Bauer, founder of Jenny Splendor. Thank you all. Jenny, thank you. That's Jenny Brittenbauer, founder of Jenny's Splendid Ice Creams. Jenny joined me live on stage at the How I Built This Summit, which happened in October at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We'll have more of my conversations from the summit over the next few weeks, so keep checking for updates. Thanks to Candice Lim, who produced this episode, and Raptine Era Blue, who wrote the music. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening. to how I built this.

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