One day in 1998, Seth Goldman was thirsty.
Goldman, who was working in New York’s financial sector at the time, went out for a run and stopped by a market. He looked in the beverage cooler but found nothing appealing — everything was too sweet or unnatural.
The rest is history. Later that year, Goldman and Barry Nalebuff, his former professor at the Yale School of Management, founded Honest Tea, an organic, kosher, fair-trade iced tea.
Flash-forward a few decades and Goldman is now co-founder of Eat The Change, a line of kosher, organic snacks, and PLNT Burger, a kosher, plant-based restaurant chain.
Jmore recently spoke with Goldman, 57, ahead of his virtual “Fireside Chat” with Joan Grayson Cohen, executive director of Jewish Community Services, this afternoon, Sept. 28, from noon to 1. The free program will be hosted by the Ignite Career Center, a JCS program, in recognition of “Workforce Development Month.”
Jmore: What’s your background?
I grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in a pretty observant home. We lit [Shabbat] candles every Friday night. We were very connected to Israel. I’ve been there over 11 times.
We belong to two synagogues down in Bethesda. One is Reconstructionist and one is Conservative. I have three sons, the oldest who is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Israel [and] is getting married in October.
How did Honest Tea get started?
Honest Tea started out of my house. I gave a presentation to Whole Foods with thermoses and an empty Snapple bottle, and managed to convince them to carry the product. Then, it really grew very organically.
It took time. We started small, just selling in stores, giving out samples. As the company grew, we continued our mission. We became the first to sell organic bottled tea and then the first to sell Fair Trade-certified bottled tea. It became a national brand.
We sold to Coca-Cola in 2011. I stayed connected to the company through 2019, but I started to get involved in other enterprises.
In 2013, I joined the board of Beyond Meat. Then in 2015, I became executive chair of the board of Beyond Meat and really was helping scale that business. In 2019, after I wrapped up my time with Honest Tea, I got involved in helping to co-found the restaurant chain PLNT Burger and in 2020 launched a new business called Eat the Change, which was all about planet-friendly food. …
Then, we got word about Honest Tea being discontinued by Coca-Cola. That provoked me to get back into the beverage business. We launched a new brand called Just Iced Tea under the Eat the Change umbrella. That’s been the biggest part of the business that I’ve been building these days because it’s quickly become the top-selling tea in the natural foods channel and already recaptured a lot of the volume that Honest Tea had.
You talk a lot about creating a positive work culture. What does that mean to you?
I’ve always placed an emphasis on empowerment, making sure there’s transparency in the work and the organization and that everybody understands how the business is doing. They have full visibility to the results and have a sense of ownership in the results, but they have literal ownership as well. They have [stock] options if they’ve been with the company for more than a year.
Another thing that’s really come, especially post-pandemic, is this recognition and embrace of the employee as a whole person. You can’t just care about them from 9 to 5. And certainly our employees don’t just work 9 to 5. They’re working on weekends. They’re working at a bottling plant overnight or on a sales effort, going early in the morning.
In exchange for that commitment, I want to be supportive for them. If employees have health or family events, we’ve got to support them on those things. Our company is especially unusual in the sense that we have no paid time off. Our policy is to have no policy, which means people can take off whenever they want, however long they want. We care about results and that’s what they’re accountable for.
I also think it’s important when you do terminate somebody to share with the team. You don’t just have these people disappear in the middle of the night.
We have an open-design office. There’s two conference rooms but there’s no closed offices, including mine. Depending on the day you could go in, there might be10 or 12 people there or there might be two or three people. It’s flexible.
One of the other core principles is over-communication. You’re never going to offend somebody or by [copying] them on an email. I also put an emphasis on not having too many long meetings. If we have a half-hour scheduled but [we’re finished] in seven minutes, I’ll say, ‘Great, thanks. We’re done.’
What are the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs today?
On the one hand, they have much more access to information, but financing is hard. In my sector, consumer packaged goods, you can’t go back to what we did with Honest Tea with my five thermoses and that Snapple bottle. The distribution channels require more money and investment, and that is a real challenge. Marketing, too. Entrepreneurs are never going to have the same resources to advertise and promote that the big companies have.
So how do we create awareness? Social media and demos — in-store sampling. That does cost money but we do it with our own team and that’s an investment we always feel is worthwhile.
How do Jewish values inform your work?
Certainly, that notion of tzedakah. We say tzedakah is charity, but it’s really righteousness. And it’s not just that you should be righteous and [how much] you give away, but how you make the money that you give away should have a righteousness to it.
We do that not just through respect to organic, which treats the environment with righteousness, but also fair trade, which seeks to dignify and support the worker. Fair trade means we’re investing back into these communities. A portion of our sales of every pound we buy goes to the workers for them to invest in their community needs, whether it’s health care or education or their own infrastructure.
The whole approach to plant-based goes back to our commitment to not eat meat. And that is actually, I believe, rooted in Jewish values. The inspiration for our family to go plant-based was our son’s bar mitzvah. His Torah portion was from Deuteronomy, which talks all about the proper way to prepare meat and that you should be separating the milk and the meat because one is the life, one is the death and they shouldn’t be mixed together. In his Torah portion he said, ‘If we’re really concerned with not eating death, just don’t kill the animal. If we can meet our nutritional needs without killing animals, why wouldn’t we try to do that?’ That was the catalyst for our family choosing to become vegetarian and later vegan. I do see that as a Jewish values-based decision.
For information about Ignite’s fireside conversation, visit ignitecareercenter.com/event/sgoldman-event/.
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