Ode to Odwalla

Last night, I heard Greg Steltenpohl, founder of Odwalla and co-founder and CEO of Adina, speak on the topic of entrepreneurship. He emphasized the importance of Angel Investors instead of Venture Capitalists (who often only want to sell a company, not create one with hopes of longevity) and highlighted that businesses will often has chasms in their growth cycle (see Odwalla’s e. coli fiasco). But, while all investors rationally accept that their will be bumps in a company’s development, they prefer to see unrealistic business plans overripe with pure growth projections. People looking to invest their money, Steltenpohl noted, are ultimately looking for something to place hope in, not a levelheaded, dry projection of the future.

Beyond all this business advice, we also gleaned trinkets of background info on Odwalla, the company Steltenpohl founded in the 1980s in a brushy shack in Santa Cruz. Steltenpohl started the company because he hated his job and didn’t have any money – pretty simple, eh?

Steltenpohl’s girlfriend at the time was a waitress. She often complained about having to hand squeeze the “freshly squeezed orange juice” they advertised on their menu. No one in the restaurants liked making the juice themselves, but it had the larges profit margin of any item on the menu and the owners wanted to keep the fresh-squeezed stuff around.

Armed with the awareness of this “problem that no one yet recognized as a problem,” Steltenpohl borrowed $200 from his girlfriend and bought a juicer. From the day the company started all through the following year, he woke up at 3:00 a.m. to juice oranges. He’d then take his freshly squeezed orange juice to the back doors of local restaurants where he’d sell it in bulk. Every week for the first year, his business doubled. Eventually it grew to where it is today, complete with many different flavors in juice (including a green drink no one but Steltenpohl believed would sell, and now is the company’s biggest seller) and even energy bars.

Eventually, the company went public and was sold to Coca-Cola (Steltenpohl left before Coke took over. He told us “he didn’t start the company to become that [a division of the Coke empire]”). Steletenpohl has since started Adina drinks. He cites a young Senegalese woman as his inspiration. Coke and Pepsi, this woman once explained to him, only moved into Senegal in the last 10 years but have already usurped the market that traditional, healthful drinks such as Hibiscus and Ginger juice occupied for centuries. Steletenpohl hopes that Adina will eventually reintroduce the native flavors that were taken from such African countries.

And, as a final note on the night, I learned what "odwalla" means (it's actually pronounced "ODE-wayla," not "ODD-walla"): apparently it is from a song by Roscoe Mitchell called "Illistrum," that Steltenpohl and his friends loved. I guess I need to start listening to mythical lyrics more closely!