Justin Gold: Squeeze Packs and Local Growth - Historical NPR Live Q&A (October 2020)
In this historical NPR Resilience Edition live Q&A from October 2020, Guy Raz talks with Justin's founder Justin Gold about nut butter, squeeze-pack differentiation and growing outward from a home market. Gold also describes narrowing the product range to meet a 2020 demand surge. Notes cover selected business passages from the full public auto-captions, not wellbeing references or the election-week introduction. This is a COVID-era live session, not a standard founder profile episode. Date is the verified YouTube upload date. Manufacturing and retailer claims are Gold's account of the period, not current results or an independent audit.
Executive Summary (TL;DR)
In this historical NPR Resilience Edition live Q&A from October 2020, Guy Raz talks with Justin's founder Justin Gold about nut butter, squeeze-pack differentiation and growing outward from a home market. Gold also describes narrowing the product range to meet a 2020 demand surge. Notes cover selected business passages from the full public auto-captions, not wellbeing references or the election-week introduction. This is a COVID-era live session, not a standard founder profile episode. Date is the verified YouTube upload date. Manufacturing and retailer claims are Gold's account of the period, not current results or an independent audit.
Key Takeaways
From kitchen to jars
About 17 years earlier, he made peanut and almond butter in a food processor because almond butters tasted bad. His roommate ate them, he wrote Justin's on the jars, and someone suggested a business. He used a business school library to write a plan and launched at a farmers market.