Justin Gold’s story of success

Justin Gold, the founder of ground-breaking US nut butter company ‘Justin’s’ and a huge Nelson fan, shares his story of success and reveals what New Zealand companies need to do before trying to crack the North American market in Episode 8 of The Nelson Pod. Justin started his company as a university student in Colorado in 2004 and sold it 12 years later for $US 286 million. It’s fair to say, however, that the road to success was a rocky one. A keen mountain-biker looking for a protein snack, Justin came up with the idea of putting his nut butters in squeeze packs. Unfortunately, none of North America’s squeeze pack manufacturers wanted to do business with him because of concerns about nut allergies. Convinced the idea would work, Justin borrowed US $75,000 and bought a second-hand squeeze pack machine. He spent a year figuring out how to how make it, launched the product in the energy bar sections of a group of supermarkets and, to his horror, watched the product spectacularly flop. After three months of the packs not selling, the supermarkets’ buyer asked Justin to remove them from its shelves. As a last ditch effort, Justin moved the packs to the spreads section and sales took off.

Not only did the squeeze packs turn out to be a success, they also led to more people buying them as tasters, which led to even more sales of jars of the company’s products.

Justin has spent the last 12 months living with his family in different spots around New Zealand.

Nelson wasn’t originally on the Golds’ radar but numerous mountain bikers they met told them they would love it. Those people were right because upon arriving in Nelson the family quickly came to the conclusion that they should have spent the whole year here and just done trips to other parts of the country.

“I love the community. I love how it’s a very safe community, it’s a very warm and welcoming community and it’s a cycling-friendly community. I love the markets. Unlike some other communities that we’ve visited in New Zealand, it’s not overly fancy; there aren’t massive homes everywhere and there isn’t a lot of ego in the community and I really appreciate that, Everyone’s really in it together and I really like that,”

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