For the Taking the Lead series, we asked leaders in a variety of fields to share insights on what they’ve learned and what lies ahead.
Pooja Bavishi was making ice cream in a shared kitchen space in Brooklyn in 2016, the first time she met Jeni Britton Bauer, who had arrived to mentor emerging food entrepreneurs.
Ms. Bavishi was impressed by the star.
Ms. Bauer, now 49, was an art student who had started making perfume when she turned her attention to ice cream in 1996 and began selling innovative flavors at a Columbus, Ohio, farmer’s market. In 2002, she had started Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, which is now sold in supermarkets across the country and in more than 75 brand stores. In 2021, the company brought in $95.7 million.
At the time, her ice cream was breaking new ground in a field full of mass-produced pints. The texture was almost chewy; her milk and other ingredients came from local farms; and flavors such as salty caramel – one of her earliest – developed cult followings.
Ms. Bavishi, 38, had been an admirer long before the couple first met in the shared New York kitchen where she was trying to perfect the product for her shop in Brooklyn, Malai. She incorporates South Asian spices like masala chai and ingredients like baklava and date caramel into ice cream made with New York dairy. Some flavors are playful, like the Madam Vice President, flavored with coconut and mango and laced with candied lotus seeds. (“Kamala” means “lotus” in Sanskrit.)
Ms. Bavishi’s pints can be found at more than four dozen retail locations in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area and are shipped nationally through e-commerce food platform Goldbelly. She plans to expand the small store she opened in 2019 in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn to a store in Manhattan next year.
On that first day they met, Mrs. Bavishi had tried to perfect a rose flavor, but she couldn’t quite get it right. Ms. Bauer gave her advice on using essential oils to enhance the flavor.
“I remember that so well,” Ms. Bauer said in a recent conversation. “I’ve been following you ever since. I am so proud of you for all you have been able to do. Ice cream is actually a very difficult thing. I know you know how hard it is.”
“It was so important to me as such a young entrepreneur to get that validation from someone who has been through it,” said Ms Bavishi.
This conversation has been edited and shortened.
Why ice cream?
JENI BRITTON BAUER In a way, ice cream just picked me. I know that sounds crazy, but I was at a very creative time in my life and I was 22 years old. I barely got into Ohio State University. I also worked at a French bakery that made everything from scratch. The whole kitchen was French speaking. I was really inspired by that. I dated a man who loved perfumes and chemistry. I got really excited about smell and pastries and telling stories through art. It suddenly dawned on me one evening that ice cream was all about fragrance and that butterfat is actually a perfect carrier of fragrance. Once I figured that out, I knew I was going to start a business and it would take up my whole life.
POOJA BAVISHI There are two real parallels in my life. I had a passion for desserts and I was always super curious about my origins. I am a first generation Indian American and I have always felt the desire to learn as much as I can about how my parents grew up and what it was like in India. I almost felt like I was missing something. Those are the identity issues that many first-generation kids go through. So the way I learned about my heritage was through food.
I never made ice cream until I came to New York. To fully agree with Jeni, dairy and butterfat carry flavors so well, and so does any kind of herbal infusion. And so I flavored these ice creams with Indian spices and experimented a bit and realized that I really yearned to tell my story. It really feels like Malai is me in a product.
Is ice cream… sexy?
BAVISHI Jeni, what do you say when people say, “Frozen foods have no smell. Ice cream melts in your mouth, and then you smell the smell, and that’s what affects the taste.”
BAUER Yes, I like to talk about it because it’s actually so sexy. Sexy isn’t the right word – sensual. You can’t smell it when it’s completely frozen. It should start to relax on your tongue, and then it will start to bloom — and it will bloom into your face, and it will bloom through the back of your nose, and then you can breathe a little bit, and then you can smell that. And that’s how ice cream works.
How do you break into the market?
KIM SEVERSON Jeni, when you first came out with your ice cream, it seemed revolutionary. And it is not a cheap product. How do you put such a product in a world of Baskin-Robbins ice cream cakes and bodega bars?
BAUER We grew with our customers, very slowly. It was a two-way conversation with them, starting at the North Market, our farmer’s market — indoor public market here in Columbus. I was on the front line there for 10 years. I listened to their feedback and then I adjusted them. It’s just constant tweaking. But then our customer becomes the buyer at Whole Foods. And then there were multiple buyers in multiple regions, and you really had to zoom in on each of them. And so – listen, listen, listen and tweak.
BAVISHI Jeni’s completely recalibrated the ice cream market by introducing a traditional product. She changed the whole category. We followed the same model – that ice cream can be really delicious if you put really good quality ingredients in it.
We want to make sure we source all of our spices as ethically as possible, but that means costs go up. And so, even though it might be a $12 pint when everyone else was used to a $4 pint, the quality you’re getting is much better than what we’ve come to expect before.
It is of course difficult to change the perception of customers about this. But because there are so many good companies doing exactly the same thing, I think customers understand that it’s worth it for the quality and for the value you get.
How do you go from niche to mainstream?
BAVISHI We are at a crossroads in the business that is very difficult. People know who we are. We are able to make a living, which is really amazing, and we have quite a business. But growing beyond that is something that me and Malai have ambitions for. But how do you get over that hump, right? That first growth bump seems to be the hardest. So how do you make that decision to go from one store to five, from one store to 10, and keep putting capital into that?
BAUER It’s really hard, and that’s where I started not trusting myself. I had two babies and I thought I should get a CEO. Looking back now, what I really needed were three things: a really good coach who understood what it’s like to be a founder leading a company; an incredible attorney who would be on my side for me, not the company; and a business advisor, someone who has been through it all and who can support me.
I especially want female founders to know that you can rely on yourself, that you make good decisions. If it feels right in your body, like in your heart, it’s probably right. I look back now and I see that I lost my ability to trust myself. There were many good reasons for that. Being a mother and being a founder is really complicated. But I see that a lot of my instincts were right. I’m far enough away from it now that I see that.
And there will be all those mistakes. You’re not going to avoid them, you’re just making them work, and so are all the others you bring in – especially if you have a company that is as connected to who you are as I am to my company, and the stories we tell the world.
BAVISHI That’s very good to know.
How do you find good people?
BAUER Sometimes it’s instinct, and other times I’m wrong. I definitely look at their history, what other people say about them, their successes. We’re at a point now where we’re getting top talent into our company. So then it’s really about: is this person going to fit into this culture and/or challenge it in the right way or not? It becomes more of a personality issue.
The hardest part is trying to please too many people, and at some point you just have to put your foot down and say, “It’s going to be my way.” People are really annoyed by that. They do. At some point you have to let people go and realize that you need people to stand behind you, not for you. That’s all.
How do you survive a huge challenge?
SEVERSON What do you do when you have a really big problem? Jeni, in 2015, when the Nebraska Department of Agriculture inspector found listeria in a pint of ice cream, it could have knocked you out.
BAUER It brought us down, and then we came up again. It turned out to be a hairline crack in the floor. We have multiple third parties who inspect our kitchen to make sure we’re doing everything right. We are not microbiologists; we are ice makers.
Well, after this event, we’ve decided that if this ever happens again, we won’t get a second chance. We have become very strict about this. We learned that you never bring fresh strawberries from a farm into your kitchen where you are making ice creams. You have to have them processed elsewhere.
You have to survive your recall, which was 265 tons of ice in March as we entered summer. As a company, we couldn’t open stores. We have employees we didn’t want to lay off. Then we had to restructure all our ice so we could get help, which was great. I hadn’t thought about it until all the ice cream companies started calling me and they said, “Let us help you. Let us make your ice cream for you.” It was amazing.
Then the whole of that came back as a company and as a brand. I will say, as I go further out, when I look back, I see it as a time when we were brightened by fire and we learned about ourselves. I learned about myself as a person, but also as a company in a way we never would have if we hadn’t had to burn it so far to the ground. Now we can choose what to 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 should not feel that when he walks into an ice cream parlor. It should always feel really fun and magical and like a really great experience. 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 constantly have to engage third parties. Any change in temperature can change the entire quality of your product.
But I think what makes Malai and Jeni’s so similar is that we tell stories through ice cream, one of the most nostalgic foods out there. And I think that’s what really makes this industry so special.
BAUER I’m so glad you say that. I really loved this adventure, of course, but it’s brutal. Ice cream is so infinitely complicated and complex, and that’s probably what keeps us going. But it’s also about storytelling. We can tell our stories, and then we can start experiencing other people’s stories through their ice creams as we travel the world. That’s what’s great about it.
