Beating The Recession

BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4) ― A Boulder-based, organic peanut butter company is thriving despite the recent salmonella outbreak that infected, commercial peanut butter found in hundreds of different products.

In fact, Justin's Nut Butter just saw its biggest week of sales in the history of the company.

It also just received hundreds of thousands of investor dollars in the past few weeks.

It's secret? Founder Justin Gold says the fact that it's a small company means that the employees can pay close attention to the product they're putting out, personally overseeing and testing each batch to make sure it's ready for distribution and salmonella-free.

Gold also was able to assure his customers and retailers that the peanuts he buys aren't from the infected farm in Georgia. As soon as that news got it, sales began to soar.

"At first, there was a lot of fear from our consumers, and they wanted to know if this product is safe to eat," said Gold. "We just really got the word out that we're a trusted, small brand and our peanut butters are safe. We really make sure that everything here is a safe product.

"With organic companies, we're much smaller companies and we have an intimate relationship with the products and the people. Consumers understand that big brands and big conventional companies, they don't have that connection to the product and the consumers because everything is a large scale kind of process."

But Gold's consumers weren't the only ones looking for something they could trust. Investors were also looking for a trustworthy place to invest their money, a place other than the stock market.

In the past few weeks, Justin's Nut Butter has collected $600,000 in investor dollars.

The money is just in time. Gold says they're trying to raise about $1 million to launch a marketing campaign that will turn their brand into a national brand, getting them into big chains like Safeway and Costco. It's an effort that is expensive and time-consuming.

"People were still believing in small businesses, and our business," said Gold. "They're looking for something that they can believe in, and looking for something that has an opportunity to make a difference, and I think that they found something with us.

"They love the brand, they love the fact that we care about our consumers, they love the team we've assembled, and they love the product that we're selling."

Justin's Nut Butter was originally launched in places like Whole Foods and the Vitamin Cottage in Boulder.

Gold says Boulder is the perfect place to start a business because so many small business that have made it big got their start in the community -- especially businesses that deal with organic and natural foods.

"Without the town of Boulder and Colorado in general, it would have been really challenging for this product to work," said Gold. "No. 1, Boulder has a history of extremely successful natural product companies starting from Celestial Seasonings ... and you have Horizon Organic Dairy.

"So, the mentorship and the leadership is in this town to help out small companies develop their natural products; it's almost like an incubator.

"Probably the best thing about Boulder is the consumer acceptance of local, natural, organic products. So without the right mentorship to develop the product and the right consumers in Boulder to want to buy the product, this would have never started."

Additional Resources

For more information on Justin's Nut Butter, you can go to their Web site at www.justinsnutbutter.com

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