Jeni Britton Bauer and Pooja Bavishi on ‘Telling Stories Through Ice Cream’

Well, after this event, we decided that if this ever happens again, we will not get a second chance. We became really strict about all of this. We learned that you never bring fresh strawberries from a farm into your kitchen where you’re making ice creams. You have to have them processed somewhere else.

You’ve got to survive your recall, which was 265 tons of ice cream in March when we were going into summer. As a company, we couldn’t open stores. We have employees we didn’t want to have to lay off. Then we had to restructure all of our ice cream so that we could get help, which was awesome. I hadn’t considered it until all the ice cream companies started calling me and they’re like: “Let us help you. Let us make your ice cream for you.” It was amazing.

Then there was the whole coming back from that as company and as a brand. I will say, being further out, when I look back, I think of it as a time when we were kind of clarified by fire and we learned about ourselves. I learned about myself as a human being, but also as a company in a way that we never would if we hadn’t had to burn it down that far down to the ground. Now, we can choose what we bring back to life. We pretty much thought we were done, and that gave us the freedom, the permission, to fight harder.

BAVISHI Ice cream is hard. The customer shouldn’t feel that when they walk into an ice cream shop. It should feel really fun and magical and like a really great experience at all times. But the ice cream industry is not for the faint of heart. Like, just the fact that it’s a frozen product — it’s a game changer. We have to use third parties all the time. Any change in temperature can change the entire quality of your product.

But I think the thing that makes Malia and Jeni’s so similar is that we’re telling stories through ice cream, one of the most nostalgic foods that are out there. And I think that that’s what really makes this industry really special.

BAUER I’m so glad that you said that. I have really loved this adventure, of course, but it is brutal. Ice cream is so infinitely complicated and complex, and that’s probably what keeps us in it. But it is also about storytelling. We can tell our stories, and then we can go experience other people’s stories through their ice creams as we travel around the world. That’s what’s so beautiful about it.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/28/business/jenis-ice-cream-bauer-malai-pooja-bavaishi-leadership.html