Most ice cream companies hide their calorie count in the small print. Justin Woolverton’s Halo Top took a different route: They put it right there, in large print, on the front of the pint. In doing so, they took away decision friction and put the pint in the hands of happy customers.
Just like David Greenberg of Updater, Justin Woolverton began his career by taking the safe (if still challenging) route of becoming a corporate lawyer. But Greenberg had found a measure of career satisfaction as a lawyer before heading out on his own to start Updater. Woolverton had no such luck. Four years into his law career at white-shoe firm Latham & Watkins, he realized that he’d made a huge mistake.
Just like medicine or finance, the legal profession tends to beat up on its new recruits, handing them all the grunt work in exchange for the promise of a better tomorrow, when, as a senior lawyer, one is able to push all the grunt work onto the latest young lawyers. “You think you can see a light at the end of the tunnel,” he says, “when things will get better.” But sometimes they don’t.
His breaking point came on a case that should have made him happy. He got to fly to Hong Kong. He got to stay in a nice hotel. He found himself in front of a tribunal. “It was all the stuff you dream about,” he says, “and then I realized that I still wasn’t having a good time—that if this was the light at the end of the tunnel, I shouldn’t have been in the tunnel in the first place.”
How did he decide to start an ice cream company? Did he do a TAM analysis? Did he sense a chance to go direct to consumer? Was he going to leverage efficiencies from the cloud? Nope. None of that. He decided the old-fashioned way: “I’d made that ice cream for myself and I loved it,” he says. “And I’m not that weird of a guy . . . I’m pretty much middle-of-the-road . . . so it just hit me that if I liked it so much, then there must be a market for it.” In other words, he realized he was average, and it was the secret to his success.
Put another way, he went with his gut. “I didn’t do some sort of MBA SWOT analysis or anything.” (SWOT, a core of most entrepreneurship courses, stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats.) Once he realized that the idea could be real, he did what any intelligent person does and researched how to make ice cream on the Internet. Did you know that there are some universities in Canada that offer ice cream science as a major? Well, Woolverton didn’t either, until he did, at which point he downloaded and absorbed all the free course materials they have online. A year or so of trial and error with a local ice cream maker followed, and then it was go-time.
“For me, that was the really appealing part,” he says. “I don’t know about you guys, but I really enjoy figuring out how something works—even an entire industry.” That’s one of the signs of the true entrepreneur: a desire to first figure it out and then figure out how to do it better. It’s a personality trait.
And so he dug in. First, he learned how to make ice cream. “That’s really fun,” he says, “and I don’t mean that sarcastically.” Then, how to start a business. (“Also fun, also not sarcastically.”) And so on: how a P&L works, how to go to market in the consumer-packaged goods industry, pricing, margins, distribution.
The result: Halo Top, a pint of ice cream with just 300 calories, 20 grams of sugar, and 20 grams of protein. And flavors like Red Velvet and Pancakes and Waffles. It used to be that going low-calorie meant giving up an enjoyable experience. As one writer wrote, “Halo Top delivered on the promise that it was possible to somehow be both decadent and healthy.”11
Woolverton never once considered raising venture capital. Instead, he spent about $150,000 of his own savings. That got him through the R & D phase and another year thereafter. At that point, he and Doug Bouton, his cofounder and another refugee from big law, raised $300,000 from family and friends, which gave them another two years. And then another $700,000, also from family and friends. “I say I regret going to law school and becoming a lawyer,” he says, “but it did have its benefits—one of which was learning how you can found a company and still end up losing control of it.” Woolverton gave up some equity, but retained 100 percent voting control at Halo Top.
Halo Top isn’t for everybody. But the product has been good since the beginning. Despite that, they almost went under several times. Ask any entrepreneur: that’s not your worst-case scenario. It’s your always-case scenario. But they managed to stay the course until . . . things went bonkers. In a good way.
What happened?
First, they changed the packaging to make it clearer what Halo Top was—a low-calorie ice cream that still tasted good. They put the number of calories on the front of the container, in big numbers. “When you’re competing on the store shelf, that’s your billboard,” he says. “With that change, we were able to say what we were—and how we were different—from all the other nameless ice creams.”
Second, they made some improvements to the science behind the ice cream to make it more resilient through the supply chain, so that it wouldn’t deteriorate in any way before it got to the end customer, the consumer.
Third, a bomb—the good kind—landed in their lap. A writer for GQ magazine decided to try and eat nothing but Halo Top for ten days straight. “We had no idea it was coming, and when it landed in my Google news alert, I could barely bring myself to read it,” says Woolverton. “He tried to eat nothing but Halo Top for ten days straight? But it was an honest and funny and ultimately flattering article. After that, the thing just utterly exploded.”
And by that, he means, for a brief moment, Halo Top was the bestselling ice cream in the country, ahead of both Ben & Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs. Armed with the knowledge that they were consuming far less calories than from the two name brands, consumers started buying two, three, or four pints of Halo Top at a time. That was unprecedented, at least for . . . your average person.
The GQ article hit in January 2016. By the end of the month, they’d sold more than in all of 2015. In February, sales doubled from January. In March, they doubled again. They haven’t looked back. From just $230,000 in sales in 2013, the company topped $100 million in 2017. By late 2018, they’d gone international, and it was following the same kind of trajectory as had happened in the United States.
Next up: opening a handful of company stores around the country, expanding even more internationally, and adding new flavors—Peanut Butter Cup and Birthday Cake the most recent entries among them.
About 150 people worked at Halo Top just before press time, when it was announced that Wells Enterprises, the second-largest ice cream manufacturer in the United States, had purchased the brand. Woolverton did not stay with the company, meaning that his foray into ice cream is done for now. The big question is why he even went on in the first place.
Ice cream hardly seems like the kind of industry that would benefit from the Internet, but it’s just like everything else in that regard. “It sounds almost corny to say it, but without the Internet, without the social media networks, I doubt that a new company could challenge incumbents like we did,” says Woolverton. “You just have that built-in magnifying glass to where if somebody likes something they can tell four thousand people at once versus just talking to a couple of friends.”
If he’d tried to launch in 1980, he continues, the best he could have done in terms of advertising would have been newspaper ads (expensive), billboards (expensive and inefficient), and maybe food magazines. Today, Halo Top can target online ads using psychographics, geographics, and demographics. “It’s absolutely crucial to making our limited marketing dollars work,” he says. “If we didn’t have that, I doubt Halo Top would be able to exist.”
Or consider this: because Halo Top is more or less Greek yogurt in ice cream form—all natural to boot—the company tracked down people who liked, say, Chobani enough to post about it, sent them a coupon for a free pint, and let social media do its magic. “That’s not quite organic growth because we had to give away free pints,” says Woolverton. “But the ROI was great. And it’s a lot more organic than a paid Facebook ad.” But they buy those too. And Instagram ads. And Twitter ads. But they’re all targeted to people who are more or less likely to at least consider trying a pint of Halo Top. Where there was once friction in a marketing budget, there is now precision.
Social can cut both ways, though. Halo Top has been dragged across the social media coals not once but twice—it was accused of understating calorie counts and of underfilling its pints. When we asked Woolverton about that, he said he couldn’t comment, because of ongoing litigation, but he did tell us something else. “This job is already way too stressful. To be sitting there trying to cheat people at the same time? I wouldn’t be able to handle that kind of stress myself.”
Not only that, it grated that someone was suing the man who brought us Halo Top when what we really should have been doing was give him awards.
Woolverton came, he saw, and he conquered territory in ice cream that no one knew existed. We’d bet a pint of Birthday Cake that he’ll be back soon enough, that the party isn’t over yet.