Jordan Buckner (00:00)
Today I'm very excited to be joined by Jeni Britton who is one of the most influential entrepreneurs in modern food. Most people know Jeni is the founder of Jeni Splendid Ice Creams, where she helped rethink what premium ice cream could look and taste like. She built a brand that grew from a singles scoop shop in Columbus, Ohio, into a nationally recognized company. But today we're gonna be talking about something new that she's up to.

Jeni is back in Starlet Mode with Floura, a new company built around fiber and plant diversity. Jeni, welcome to the show today.

Jeni Britton (00:32)
It's so great to be with you. Thanks for the invite. Of course.

Jordan Buckner (00:35)
Of course. I'm excited to chat. You know, I have been a big fan for over a decade now and literally have consumed over a hundred pints of your ice cream. Brambleberry crisp is my favorite. And have even, you know, walked through Chicago winters with my wife to your scoop shop on Milwaukee Avenue, which is absolutely our favorite.

Jeni Britton (00:53)
Gosh, well, that is really a testament. Those Chicago winters are brutal. I actually grew up in Peoria. So I know a little something about that. And it's funny because even with the cold winters that we have in the in the north and in the in the Midwest, we still eat more ice cream than anybody else. So I love the

Jordan Buckner (01:11)
I

know it's so true. So I'm excited. First off, tell me about Floura, the new company, the product and the brand.

Jeni Britton (01:18)
Well, Floura started because I, well, I started eating fiber and I realized that fiber is the missing nutrient in our diet. It's 95% of us are deficient in fiber. But when you start eating fiber, you actually feel it pretty like right away. When you get fiber and not just like the old sort of school fiber, but diverse plant fibers in your diet, it can change how you feel on like every

realm of your being. And so it's like right in front of you, it's very clear from the moment you start eating diverse plants and and diverse fibers. So, you know, for me, it was like I was eating so much fiber, but I couldn't always get it. And so we started Floura as a way to make it more convenient for people, just diverse plant fibers. And how we do it is really interesting too, which I can't wait to see.

Jordan Buckner (02:05)
Yeah, tell me a little bit about the the how because I know you talk about different diverse plant sources within there, which are crucial to the fiber. So tell me about that.

Jeni Britton (02:12)
Well, it's funny because I actually would say that I wasn't that interested. I was really more of in like sort of input mode and curiosity mode in those early days, figuring out like, okay, it's about fiber. Fiber is so good for you. Like, why aren't people eating fiber? Why are why isn't everybody shouting from the mountaintops this message? And but it really wasn't until I was touring a ginormous produce processing company. And I mean it's 600,000 square feet of produce processing power.

just people cutting rinds off of watermelons, apples going to these beautiful rivers getting chopped or sliced into apples that are served in the in restaurants and in markets out in the in the country. And these are apples from upstate New York. And I was touring this incredible place, and I saw these ingredients just apple cores, watermelon rinds, mango skins, and other ingredients being kind of tossed away as the not main ingredient.

And I had already read, because I had been so curious about it, that actually the apple core contains even more pectin, more pro prebiotic fiber than the rest of the apples. Watermelon rinds contain more prebiotic fiber than the rest of the watermelon. And so we're actually throwing away these ingredients that are really beneficial to our bodies. And probably in past generations, in fact, not so far long ago, you know, your grandmother, your grandfather would have.

Pickled the watermelon rinds, would have eaten the entire apple, including the core, except for the seeds. And so I then had this like really this light bulb moment of like, my gosh, this business now feels almost inevitable. It has this, I have this vision now to not just get fiber to people, but in this very specific way from these ingredients. And it started to feel this is what happens with founders, and I'm sure many of your listeners will know that feeling it just like you can't not do it.

So from that place, my partner, Mark, and I started, it's just like that curiosity burst open and we just started playing with these ingredients. And that was about four years ago.

Jordan Buckner (04:09)
That's really exciting because I love as an entrepreneur finding new opportunities, but there's always that balance of, yeah, when do I actually take this on as a new business? And so I'm curious, right? Like certainly you didn't need to start a new company. And so what was it about seeing that at the factory that made you think not that this is a problem, but actually need to build a new business around this on top or kind of next to your existing ice cream business?

Jeni Britton (04:33)
Well, I was it was the right moment for me to be sort of slowly stepping away from Jenny's because the company was just so the team was so amazing. And I knew that actually I had done my job, you know? So I was living inside of this deep curiosity. And I think that's where opportunity comes from. Actually, you know, you could you could say that opportunity comes from two places. I it's always from curiosity, but there's the kind of curiosity that's looking at the markets and finding the gaps, and that's kind of business school mentality.

And then there's the other kind of like personal curiosity, which is where Jenny's and Floura came from, which is like living inside of what moves and motivates me, what's exciting me. And when you keep asking questions and peeling back the onion, eventually what you come to, if you have this kind of brain like me, is this place where your what you're passionate about kind of overlays, overlaps with this opportunity and what other people might value.

And that is exactly what happened there. It was like all of a sudden, a lot of pieces of the puzzle, the pattern was just very clear to me. The path was very clear to me. Obviously, it's a bowl of spaghetti. You know, A to B is not one one path. It's a bowl of spaghetti. You have to get across this big chasm. You have to figure a lot of things out. But it was very clear to me that the food system wasn't serving people, that we we are we are lacking the essentials, and that we, my my my partner Mark and I can live.

inside the food system and help create change for people that really will make a difference in people's lives, which is to say, let's reintroduce fiber back into the diet. Let's recenter our American diet around plants and plant fiber. And then and then go from there. So that's literally what we're doing. It's big vision, but it's small steps.

Jordan Buckner (06:11)
Yeah, I think that's really exciting. And you know, one thing I'm always curious about, so Floura starts with this consumer problem that might not be as obvious to some people. I think fiber is one of those words and terms that floats out there in a similar way of like protein, but kind of fiber diversity requires a bit more education. And so how are you thinking about kind of building demand for something that found or consumers are are aware of, but they're not quite sure like the

all the benefits, how it affects their bodies and what they can have from that experience of eating a barley Floura.

Jeni Britton (06:43)
Yeah, you know, we have to reverse decades of sort of a specific way of thinking about fiber, which was about gut motility to say it politely. And that's like one source of fiber can do that. And that's actually really good for you too. You know, psyllium husk is well studied. It's very good for you. But it's not the whole story. And that's what's new about fiber. That's the new conversation in fiber, is that we when you eat diverse fibers from diverse sources.

Then you nurture a diverse microbiome because each of your microbes wants to eat something different. And so you're really tending a garden. You are literally a garden of microbes, and you want to nurture them even before you feed yourself. So the way that I've heard it said, I don't remember which book I was reading, but Americans are overfed and undernourished. Nourishment's coming from your microbiome and nourishing those literal beings who are inside of you who are going to help you.

In every way possible with so many things in your in your body, which is so to me very interesting. So we have this big communication issue that we need to like help people understand. And we are very early in this market, one of the very first, in fact, the very first diverse high fiber bar and company that's really devoted to that, to the microbiome, to the gut biome. And and so one thing that's that's kind of interesting about that to me is that.

The idea came from inside the research, inside my body, inside living, inside the books, and understanding that wow, nobody's talking about this. Other business ideas come from, wow, everybody's talking about this. And if I can just take a sliver of the market that already exists, I'll be successful. And that's most of protein at this point. and in fact, protein came from a from an excess in the market and marketers backing into it. Whereas fiber is coming from chronic illness. We are not well.

And we need to solve that issue. And the food system is one of the reasons. And we can do it, we can actually solve it through the food system. So we have a long way to go in communicating this. But what's really interesting for Floura is that we started this four years ago. We launched two years ago officially. And right at that moment, the fiber conversation begins to pick up. And I think we're having, we have something to do with that. But I think also it was the right moment where influencers are starting to talk about fiber. So we were kind of like at this exact moment when people start to think.

the way that we're thinking. And so we've been sort of helping to create the tsunami, but also a little bit riding that as well. And it's been really amazing. So more to come, more education needs to happen. And it's not just gonna come from Floura. Floura's not here to educate people. It's gonna come from the research and from the influencers that are out there and the articles that are already being written. And Floura will just be there to to for people when they're ready.

Jordan Buckner (09:20)
You definitely are. And I think that you did have great timing because one of my key tenets in terms of what makes a successful business is being able to ride an existing consumer wave where consumers, customers, people are already asking for the product for fiber in this case. And they're just waiting for the right delivery experience to include that within their diet. And I love that you talked through nutrition and really having that helping everyone's bodies in ways that we don't always know.

But as you also know, you know, people want flavor and experience from products and fiber products historically haven't been associated with either. And so how are you blending in your deep experience with creating masterful flavors that you've done through ice cream and other areas with Floura to create a bar that is not only nutritious, but also tastes amazing and has a great eating experience?

Jeni Britton (10:14)
So funny you say that because it's so it, of course, like this is where I come from is the world of flavor and richness and vitality and all of that. And and and really part of that sort of matrix of the pattern formation or whatever in those early days was like my literal thought was: okay, fiber tastes like cardboard. Like it's just been like this brown, sort of murky solution or bar or whatever, you know, that you have to drink or like eat or whatever. And it's sort of you know dry and whatever.

And can an ice cream maker bring something to this category? And the answer is, of course, right from the beginning, it's like, maybe this is like Olympics for the ice cream for an ice cream maker, right? So, you know, it's easy relatively. It's a very deep chemistry and that's really fun. Ice cream is, but like, and you know, at Jenny's we took stabilizers out, emulsifiers, corn syrup, you know, all these and even egg yolks. Like we're doing it in this like incredible new way to bring flavor forward. But nevertheless, it's pretty easy to make cream and sugar taste good.

Can we make watermelon? Can we make wild fermented watermelon rinds taste good? And that was really so fun. So the answer was yeah, we we can get that. I mean, it's not ice cream, but it is a good snack and it tastes good. But the other thing is the flavor strategy is really fun because now we launched with fruit flavors because we wanted to bring it back. We wanted every conversation we had to come back to the idea that we're making it with fruit. Fruit, like f apple cores, watermelon rinds, cantaloupe honeydew, pineapple, and mango.

and that's what we call wild fiber. Fiber, that's the our ingredient that's that's the first ingredient in every bar. It's what we make in our facility. but then to do flavors that after we get the fruit flavors that sort of tell that story, then we can start doing like brownie batter. Now we can get a little indulgent. Now we can start serving other people in your life. And so just like ice cream, I'm thinking like every flavor is another person, right? So

In ice cream, you're like, if you only had vanilla, you'd only have one kind of person that comes in. And so then you have fruit flavors and then you have nut flavors and you have, you know, your different kinds of chocolates and you have flavors for very and I think of them as actual literal people, humans that are coming into our shop. And so that's how we're thinking about Floura. So we've got amazing flavors coming out. we just released mint chocolate, which is so good. And our and our chocolate's really good. But then the other thing is that we have these platforms. So the fruit platform has 12 plants, but they're different plants. There's the wild fiber and then

Plus, plus some other fruits and other things. And then we have chocolate, which is the wild fiber plus cocoa, which is really good for your gut biome. And then we'll have another flavor, but actually platform that we'll release that even has another set of of plants so that when you eat one from each of those groups, you're actually getting multiple diverse plants in your weekly diet, which is really fun. So yeah, flavor is a huge part of the strategy and not just flavor, but those ingredients that cause those flavors.

That that then even add more diversity to your diet.

Jordan Buckner (13:06)
You know, one thing that you said that was just really caught my attention is this idea that flavor has a different customer and a different person who's consuming it. Because I think that's one thing that is not really thought about in the CPG kind of package product space. You think about like either you might have savory flavors, sweet flavors, and have a little bit of diversity, but not the sense that some people are coming in, they're only gonna like the fruit flavors. Other people are only gonna like chocolates, other people are only gonna like nuts, and that's just

their behavior. And that's very much the case with ice cream, right? There's certain people that come in, they're getting their exact same ice cream every single time, whether we're coming in once a week or four times a week.

Jeni Britton (13:43)
Most people, by the way.

Jordan Buckner (13:45)
And then there might be people, you know, I'm one that I like to try something different every time. And like that's another group, but like I like having the diversity of different flavors. And so I think it's really fun that you're bringing that mentality into this bar space to be able to appeal to a wide number of people.

Jeni Britton (14:00)
And that's a good takeaway for some for a listener too, is like, I think a lot of us get hung up on brand. And I have never been hung up on brand. I know that I'm known for brands and for you know for creating a beautiful brand of Jennies, of course. you get hung up on brand and like brand language and brand flavors and what we what what would we do as a flavor versus other people? I think you have to get hung up on your customers because you don't have to worry about anything if you just worry about customers. And so when we think about flavors, you you're it's always people first. So

You wouldn't want to be in a situation where like a flavor that you really want to do doesn't fit with the brand ethos or whatever. You've got to think about your people first and like pleasing at Jenny's, where we say, let's please the shit out of people. Like it's just like this silly thing that we say in the background all the time. Just like constantly, how do we make someone just please like tickled? You know? And so that's kind of how we think at Floura too. And and we think flavor first, and then we will, you know, the brand is gonna always support how.

us serving our customers and delighting our customers and making their day and bringing joy, you know?

Jordan Buckner (15:03)
I love that. I absolutely love that. That's okay. I mean, I think that's a a really strong component. And yo, you mentioned brand. I'm kind of curious. You've already built a nationally recognized name for yourself. Tell me about the decision to name the brand Floura, not Jenny's fiber bars.

Jeni Britton (15:17)
yeah, that's it's funny. I I didn't really consider doing Jennies for this and I don't I think I think mostly because it already exists and I already did that. But but also I'm just a big mythology classics, history, telling stories, mm folklore person. And I was literally at Pompeii with my kids and I was walking

through Pompeii and there's this very famous fresco of Floura. She's kind of a minor goddess. she's the Roman goddess of blooming and springtime and flowers and this very specific moment of the year. And it's this beautiful image. And I walked right into it and I was like, that's what we're doing. It's just like blooming. I've always sort of believed that you like you are nature inside and outside. And I love nature I love being in the forest and

I just literally have always felt like the forest is inside of me and outside of me. And somehow she seemed to embody that idea of like wildness inside and out, blooming inside and out. And so for me, it was like this idea. And then there's this sort of idea in f in philosophy of flourishing and what does it mean to, you know, have a good life? But like, what does flourishing mean? And I so we added that you because flourishing also gets back to that sort of.

inside and out, the more your insides are are sort of connected with the what's going on around you and outside of you. and the more it sort of is is in sync, the better you feel. And that's what we're learning is there's so much to do with your microbiome in that in that sort of inner garden. So so Floura with a U just seemed like the perfect name for this company. And and something that I feel like I can unpack for miles, you know, which is always great as a founder if you

have those meanings behind everything you do, even if you never get the chance to you're never gonna be able to tell everybody why you do everything. But to always know what that is is important.

Jordan Buckner (17:12)
Yeah, I love that creation story. And I'm a huge fan of knowing in the process of how companies and brands are named. I think it's so amazing. You have now built retail shops, you've built a CPG brand, you're on to the next one. I'm curious about what you have intentionally brought with you from your experience with Gennies into Floura and any habits, assumptions, or ways of buildings that you have left behind for this new version.

Jeni Britton (17:38)
So many things. Everything we're doing is based on things that I learned, of course, over the last 30 years at Jenny's. And, you know, you don't learn from the successes. And that's just a fact. You don't, you learn from your failures, your personal failures, the failures of the whole the the organization as a whole, the things that you thought were great ideas and that didn't work. And there are far more of those than there are successes at Jenny's. and that's true of every company. And so that's kind of interesting. I mean, specifically though, what we'll bring in is like,

a an attention to every ingredient, like and how and how we do it. So before Jenny's and and really to this day in in many ways, you know, most ice cream companies would buy a mix, an ice cream mix and flavor it and then put a label on it. You know, we wanted to go to the dairy. We wanted to know what are the cows eating and how is that impacting the way the milk tastes. Like we want to go direct to the source. And so at at Floura, the idea of like we're making this, we are not a bar company, we are literally a fiber company.

Jenny's is a is is a dairy company. We're actually certified as a dairy. We work with a fifth generation dairy now, but we are a dairy company and we, you know, for the life of our company, we've processed so much produce and, you know, fruits and vegetables and things like that to the for the for the, you know, just the idea of like, we want to be the company that's doing it, not just co-packing or whatever. And that's the same at Floura. It's like first we're a fiber company and then we make bars, and then we can make anything else that we want to as well.

And then one other thing that I'll add, there's a lot of stuff, of course, that we brought from Jay's. I mean, retail strategy, for instance, understanding that it's all about velocity. So don't go too quick. Because if you can't sell on the shelf, if your brand isn't strong enough to sell on the shelf, then you just gotta go really, really slow and you gotta show up and you gotta give samples. And there's no, there's no skipping that part. You gotta build your community. and there's there's a lot of things. But otherwise I will also say that something that I brought in that I learned too late at Jenny's was the value of coaching.

my advisor and coach, and in fact, is my business partner at Floura, and I'm so lucky for that. So he and I now kind of almost coach each other, but but I have benefited so much. He's his 68-year-old man who I think is like the he's really like a 17-year-old, 68-year-old. He's got more energy and more brain power than anybody I've ever met, and more heart than anybody I've ever met. I adore Mark. And he and I work so perfectly together. But one of the reasons is because we have

Absolute communication because we went through all this coaching together. He was my coach. He was my advisor. And so we actually do company-wide coaching. We have a coaching company that we work with. They're actually business partners of ours. In fact, for that reason, I think founders are different than executives in the company. Founders carry a weight that you don't necessarily want. You didn't necessarily ask for. Sometimes they do, but like you don't always understand it. And when you walk into a room, you have to understand it. And so you need a founder coach, somebody who gets that.

Executive coaching is a little different because you know you're working within an organization, you carry a very specific thing and you can be fired. A founder generally can't. And so I would say founder coaching, but I think in general, especially in the area, in the era of distributed work work teams, having coaching has been incredibly beneficial. It helps to sort of stop the sort of behind the scene chit chat of that can start rumors and, you know, things like that. I mean, we're a small team, but it helps us once a month to just come together and say it.

Put it on the table. What have you been struggling with? And we all just have a good conversation. And then we all do individual coaching. And I think it's been huge for us.

Jordan Buckner (21:00)
I love that. I think that's one area that I think more founders should get help with. I don't know where to start, but what have been some of the most insightful lessons that you've learned about yourself from coaching that really have changed the way that you run your business?

Jeni Britton (21:15)
I know that I'm I I want to make everybody happy. I also know that everybody wants to make me happy, especially as Jeni from Jenny's. And that's isn't that nice? It's so nice for people to want to do that. And yet if if if we all just want to make Jeni happy, we're never gonna get anywhere. I'll never learn anything. I'll never expand as a human being. And we're gonna continue to make mistakes. So we have to, as founders, we have to

We have to we have to sort of counterbalance that and create a space where people can and and where you expect people to to just say the truth to you, what their truth is and the and be honest and open. And that has been so, so important. You have to really work hard at that, not just because the company was named Jenny's, because even at Floura, you know, people just generally want to be the happy, the one that brings the happy news. And and you have to kind of counter

balance that in your organization if you want to be, because you can't move quickly if you're not being open and honest. I mean, you just can't. You know, you get tripped up. and that's gonna trip up the company more than almost anything else when you don't have that open communication and when you're not on the same wavelength, I think, frequency. And that's just like that's how you build a really great team.

Jordan Buckner (22:24)
I love that. Great advice and I appreciate it. All right. And now for my hardest question, probably for any founder, what's your favorite flavor of Floura Bar right now?

Jeni Britton (22:34)
The favorite, well, it's the one we have coming out in January, which are I I can't say, but I've been eating so much of it. But on honestly, I also am eating a lot of the mint, the, the brownie. It's like it's like a br it's like a mint brownie. And it is so unbelievably good. It's just like the fudgiest brownie you've ever had. It's like a slightly undercooked brownie and it has this very subtle mint. And it's just like it's the thing is I like to eat chocolate in the afternoon, and that is true of every afternoon of my entire life.

And and so I can now reach for a chocolate Floura bar. And that's literally why we created them because I'm like I need a chocolate every afternoon, I might as well eat a Floura bar. So that's the one I I pretty much I will eat that even if I already got all my fiber for the day. So that's saying something.

Jordan Buckner (23:18)
Absolutely love it. Jeni, thank you so much for being on today. It's been a pleasure talking with you.

Jeni Britton (23:22)
And likewise, Rodin, thank you so much and congrats on this amazing podcast. And and I just would say to all of your listeners, like if you're if you're on the fence about starting something, just start. Just start and learn and learn as you go. You have time to do that.

Jordan Buckner (23:36)
Thank you.

Jeni Britton (23:36)
Enjoy. Take care.