Pint Sales in Grocery with Tim Berg of Ice Cream for Bears

Yeah, I remember getting a LinkedIn invitation to sit in on a, I guess it was kind of like a pitch slash competition slash, hey, we have some students here that have got these different concepts and businesses and you're an ice cream guy.

So you want to kind of jump in on this and And I think that was the first time I met Tim Berg.

It looked like you were up in an attic in your apartment or somewhere pitching this ice cream for bears stuff.

And, yeah, it obviously had legs.

And it's interesting as we talk about, you say, you know, this vast and growing empire of stores that your product's in.

But I remember back in the day, I mean, this was your life.

This isn't someone who's, oh, come up with an idea, get a manufacturer, roll it out.

I mean, you were at the facility making, scooping, coming here on the weekend, getting tubs taken to farmer's markets.

What role do you think that kind of those early years played in where you're at now?

I think... those like that really the two years of ice cream for bears before we had any sort of nationwide distribution when everything was being

you know

manufactured and distributed in st louis by uh by me and katie basically um i think those in in the the time when we were kind of selling in honeymoon chocolates a little chocolate shop in st louis where we had a dipping cabinet Um, and I would, you know, work in there scooping ice cream in the evenings after making it at your place in the morning.

Um, but yeah, I mean, those, uh, I think those days are, were just pivotal, pivotal as we grew because just working with the product every single day for years and developing the product and making little formula tweaks and, and seeing how that then affects scoop ability and just really becoming, um, a student of like ice cream science that it's like served me very well moving forward as we went into larger manufacturers and co-packers, especially when you have a product that's very unique, like co-packers manufacturers, they like doing things the way they know how, and they're very, they're formulaic.

And just to, you're going to get told no a million times, you know, with any sort of product that's even slightly innovative and, and just to be able to confidently push back and be like, you know,

no, I

think, I think we can do this and this is how, or I, or I've done it before and it's worked.

So I think just having, yeah, having that experience of, of really developing the product over years and, and being like very close to the product has, has been critical.

Right.

I would say that for

anyone starting a food business, like if you don't know your product, if you're not the, the foremost expert in your product, it's gonna be hard.

Right, absolutely.

So when you spoke in Vegas and you were in those stores, the kind of beginning of this process, what were the basics of that? Was it the process of teaching people and interested in your experience, I guess, a quick recount on, is it going into specialty grocery stores? Is it as simple as going in with a couple of pints and say, hey, this is our product.

This is a strategy that I can help you sell some product.

What did those early, early days look like for retail?

early, you know, it, it, it is simpler than you would expect.