The Ultimate Guide for Creating Products People Trust | Seth Goldman (Honest Tea)

One of the suppliers, had sent me a note and just said, you know, this is very it's it's a gut punch for us too economically, but it's also is was this a failure to to move towards organic and fair trade? And that was the probably the note that best spurred me to action. So I got together with my Eat the Change cofounder Spike Mendelson, the chef, and I said, you know, this is an opportunity. Are you interested? And he said, yeah. Welcome back to the Eric Ries show. Today, I'm joined by my friend Seth Goldman, who has defined being a mission driven entrepreneur in our generation. Seth is a founder of an iconic product you've seen at the grocery store called Honest Tea. He grew this from nothing, literally brewing samples of iced tea in his kitchen to eventually selling the company to Coca Cola. Today, he's running a new iced tea company called Just Iced Tea, the fastest growing bottled tea brand in The US. But his impact goes beyond iced tea. He's also the chair of Beyond Meat, helped build PLNT Burger, and is one of the mission guardians of Tony's Chocolonely. What these companies all have in common is the idea that business itself can be a force for good in the world. In our conversation, Seth opens up about how to scale a company with values. He talks about pioneering organic and fair trade supply chains to literally hearing Coke CEO tell him, we want Coca Cola to be more like Honest Tea, not the other way around. And of course, he tells the story of what happened next. If you have kids, you probably serve them an Honest Kids box drink. He also shares the emotional story of how when Coca Cola ultimately discontinued Honest Tea, he had to rebuild the entire company from scratch in just ninety days and why he saw that moment not as a setback, but but as a chance to bring justice back into the bottle. This conversation was an honest, hopeful, and deeply human look at what it means to lead with purpose even when the odds are stacked against you. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Seth Colvin. Alright, Seth. Always a pleasure to have an excuse to have a conversation. Thank you for making time. Great to be with you. So I wanted to start you know, you're you're obviously very well known now as a mission driven entrepreneur and, you know, one of the pioneers of of the iced tea category and so many other things. But I wonder if we could start before that. You know, I know you had a career in politics and in government before you got into business. And I think if I read right if I remember right, at the Yale School of Management, you had this epiphany that business could be an instrument of change. And I wonder if you could take us …