Disrupting the Freezer Aisle: Dr. Bombay Ice Cream

BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the stories behind groundbreaking Harvard Business School case studies.

We are recording this episode just a few days shy of National Ice Cream Day, which falls on the third Sunday of July each year. Americans love ice cream. So much so that the average American consumes about four gallons of the stuff annually. So, today, it feels right that we chill with a business case that’s as bold and flavorful as the product at its center, Dr. Bombay Ice Cream. This new venture is redefining what it means to launch a food brand in a crowded consumer packaged goods space, focusing not just on selling ice cream, but building a dynamic lifestyle brand. We’ll talk about profit versus growth trade-offs, brand building and partnership with celebrities, navigating retail and distribution hurdles, and making tough choices about funding and scaling. We’ll also get a taste of what it takes to turn an entrepreneurial dream born on a hot summer day into a national sensation.

Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor William Kerr and case protagonist Sam Rockwell to discuss the case, “Dr. Bombay Ice Cream.”

I’m your host, Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network. Professor Bill Kerr’s research focuses on how companies and economies explore new opportunities and generate growth. He’s also a fellow podcaster as co-host of the HBS podcast “Managing the Future of Work.” Bill, we’re thrilled to have you back on the show.

BILL KERR: Brian, thank you for having me.

BRIAN KENNY: Awesome. Today, we’re really thrilled also to have one of our case protagonists here. Sam Rockwell is joining us. He is the co-founder and CEO of Happi Foodi. Sam, welcome.

SAM ROCKWELL: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Good to be here.

BRIAN KENNY: Great to have you both here. So, I pointed out that National… I didn’t know there was a thing, National Ice Cream Day, but it’s coming up.

BILL KERR: I bet Sam did.

BRIAN KENNY: Sam, I saw you nodding.

SAM ROCKWELL: It’s marked in the calendar, and I’m looking forward to it.

BRIAN KENNY: As well, it should be. So, Bill, I want to start with you. I’m always curious about why HBS faculty choose to write about a particular case, and I’m curious about why you thought Dr. Bombay Ice Cream was worth writing about and how it ties into some of the themes that you explore in entrepreneurship.

BILL KERR: Yeah, well, Brian, sometimes we go out in the world to look for cases, and sometimes cases come to us, and Dr. Bombay was one of those second ones. We have an annual Executive Education program called “Launching New Ventures,” and Sam’s co-founder, Cordell, who’s also Snoop Dogg’s son, as we’ll be discussing in this podcast, was an attendee of that program along with Lil Baby, who became an investor in Dr. Bombay’s. My co-author on the case, yet another of the students of that program, Michael Liu, was there. We’re seeing a lot more of these pairings of the person who can generate the demand, an influencer, a creator, an entrepreneur, and then the companies that can deliver the backbone, that can get it into Walmart and the like. There’s some real key things that we picked up off of that. So, the cold call question to start the case conversation is simply: what is the most important ingredient to Dr. Bombay’s success so far? And you’re really trying to say, we see a number of things. They’re going to make $20 million in sales right out the gun at Walmart, but what was the thing that was the most important aspect for them to make that success?

BRIAN KENNY: Do people think that you’re kinda cool? Because you wrote a case that involves Snoop Dogg.

BILL KERR: Well, I have a 12 and a 14-year-old, so I try my best.

BRIAN KENNY: All right. Sam, let me turn to you. This all started with a Bored Ape NFT, and I have to point out to our listeners that if you’re curious about non-fungible tokens, that’s what NFT stands for. We actually have an episode about the Bored Ape Yacht Club that we did last year. It explains everything you would need to know about NFTs, but Sam, I’m wondering if you can walk us through how that digital image was the spark for a full-fledged ice cream company, and what you all wanted the brand to stand for from the beginning.

SAM ROCKWELL: The inspiration did come from the Bored Apes who Snoop purchased a Bored Ape and named him Dr. Bombay. That is not the official name that I think the Bored Ape Yacht Club gave our particular Bored Ape, but Snoop named him Dr. Bombay. Our orientation behind the genesis and ethos of this brand has been more than just an image of a Bored Ape, which you’ll notice that when you look at the brand, there’s not a lot of reference to the Bored Ape. We want the brand to encompass what we think the world looks like through Dr. Bombay’s eyes, this retro Afro-funk but also futuristic blend and fusion, which is very much indicative to the flavor profiles that we’ve created in all of our different items.

Dr. Bombay as a brand really is hip-hop style ice cream though. Who better to be the co-founder and anchor to the brand than Snoop Dogg? We’ve looked at his image, his creativity, the ways that he’s affected culture throughout all of these different decades and said, Well, one area that you haven’t had an impact yet is in food. In fact, hip-hop specifically has infiltrated culture in fashion, in music, of course, but never in food. When I think about hip-hop, I think about a combination of sounds, a combination of rhythms, and I think that lends itself very much so to an opportunity to disrupt food. How do we bring things together? Going into the product now, once you take the brand platform and say, Well, how does the product market fit within the parameters of the brand? It’s like, Let’s take ice cream, let’s take sherbert, and let’s blend those together. When you look at the ice cream space in general, it’s dusty, it’s stale. No disrespect to cookie dough because I still eat cookie dough, but it’s cookie dough, it’s chocolate, it’s vanilla, it’s caramel. 95% of the pint ice cream space is chocolate, vanilla, caramel. Nobody’s ever really tried to disrupt the space by creating new flavors and fusions with fruit. That’s what we’ve done. So, we’ve taken Orange Creamsicle, which is an orange sherbert with a vanilla ice cream, blended that together.

BRIAN KENNY: God, I love that.

SAM ROCKWELL: Tropical Sherbert Swizzle, which Snoop has a really good way of naming these things to make them stand out. So, tropical sherbert swizzle. We have a new one, which is a sticky caramel apple that’s coming out, long beach fruit cart, which is mango and coconut based, a peanut butter and jelly time, and then a baked blueberry muffin.

BRIAN KENNY: No “fo shizzle swizzle” though, I was looking for that.

SAM ROCKWELL: So maybe in the hopper, maybe coming soon. When it comes to the names, I always am very keen on creating great products and then bringing the names to Snoop to do because that’s an area where he’s better than me.

BILL KERR: One other aspect of this, which was more personal to Cordell and Snoop, his father, was that they had a deep relationship around ice cream. When he was growing up and after his football practices, he and his dad would go and get ice cream, and there’s even a little bit of ice cream entrepreneurship in the background that has come earlier. So, it wasn’t just looking for a product space that they could go into among many. It was also I think a deep personal connection to this particular space.

BRIAN KENNY: That makes perfect sense. Sam, this was not your first foray into the frozen food space, right? Happi’s been in that space for a while. It’s a terribly competitive space, probably with razor-thin margins, I’m imagining. Why did you decide that you would take a chance on ice cream and try to go into that crowded market?

SAM ROCKWELL: I think I was a bit naive when I got into this, but long story short is that I started this business back in 2010, height of the recession, undergraduate in business school. I really believed wholeheartedly in my ability to build a career. If I were going to bet on myself, which I did, I’d rather build a floor and not a ceiling. Let’s go out and do something and build something where the downside at this point in my life was very limited, and I think the upside could be unlimited. I wasn’t a rocket scientist. I was a consumer. So, there were certain food items. We started out by making frozen Belgian waffles that I thought tasted great and were underrepresented in grocery stores. Really those combination of ingredients and thoughts is what fueled me into this space.

I learned the frozen food business from making product in my home kitchen, which we didn’t say that to the people we were selling to, but at the time, we were making them in our kitchen to freezing product, delivering it to the back door of a store, bringing it out to the front and stocking the shelves. So, we learned it from the ground up and scaled the business as organically as possible. Ultimately we were able to scale the business by making select investments in the infrastructure that enabled us to be a viable supplier to the largest retailers in the world and to also open up capabilities of products where we felt as if there was an opportunity for disruption in what is otherwise an oversaturated and dusty space being the freezer in general. So, taking that 11 years of building, understanding, learning, having infrastructure, putting together a great team of people who I like to say “their yesterdays are my tomorrows,” experienced people that have been there and done that and pushing them and driving them, we settled on ice cream.

Why did we settle on ice cream? Ice cream is a space that is dominated by a couple, few, huge conglomerates. It’s Unilever. It’s Froneri, which is Haagen-Dazs. So, Unilever is the big brands that you know are Ben and Jerry’s and Talenti, and Haagen-Dazs is part of Froneri. Then there’s Wells and Blue Bunny, and they collectively own about 90% of the space. When you layer that with the fact that 95% of ice cream pint space is chocolate, vanilla, or caramel, you say, Wow, the retailers are over-leveraged by the big guys, and there’s not a lot of innovation.

The retailers can’t really push those big consumer products companies around because they need them. Conversely, the big consumer product companies need the retailers. Then I sit there saying, Hey, I have the ability to build something and scale it to the place where I can be a viable supplier to you, and I’m willing to disrupt. We’re not a public company. Innovation takes time and has a cost to it. So, that’s a bottom-line impact with not a lot of top line upside, at least in that given period of time, that window. I’m sitting here saying, Well, I want to be the disruptor. We don’t have the dollars to advertise on a national platform. We don’t have the dollars to pay for the rights to an arena, name it after ourselves like some of these big guys, but we do have the ability to build strategic partnerships to start at the ground level with individuals who not only have reach and charisma, but authenticity and legacy.

That’s where I thought to myself the idea of partnering with somebody like Snoop, who really does stand for something and is super unique. I call him the “uninfluenced influencer.” He is who he is. This is an opportunity to do something that he understands and likes and disrupt a space that is so overdue.

BRIAN KENNY: All of that makes perfect sense, but Bill, he’s making it sound easy. This is not easy. The case talks about the fact that they opened up in 4,000 Walmart stores at the same time. So, this is an operation going basically from 0 to 100 and scaling all at once. What can you learn from that, and just how difficult is that?

BILL KERR: Well, let us backtrack a little bit. There are things that happen before they open in 4,000 Walmart stores. So, there is an ice cream truck that works in the background where there’s some early product testing and seeing whether or not this is going to be viable, people aren’t going to be repelled by this idea of it. But the flip side of when Snoop starts to promote your product, you can’t have it only available in Massachusetts. It’s a pretty broad sweep that’s going to look for it. So, that’s where the pairing with Walmart becomes very important right from the beginning.

But let me go back to what I think is the most typical and really the answer from the cold call that I think is also at its heart, the truest, is it was not Snoop’s presence or involvement that really is the key that made this the most successful outcome. In fact, most people don’t mention that until maybe the 10th or 11th thing on the list. The thing that they most frequently want to bring forward is there was an underserved market in this space that because of the things that Sam just described of four big flavors, incumbents that are focused on these massive brands that aren’t going to really want to vary too much from their formula, this company is able to come in and realize that there’s a whole bunch of inner-city markets that are not being served well by today’s ice cream flavors. They don’t have a lot of passion around that. So, they’re able to come in and really basically disrupt that space from inside of it and then go to the retailer and say, Look, we can show you data that says a huge chunk of the people that are buying this ice cream haven’t been buying ice cream at your store before. They’re new to ice cream. So that unlocks a lot of opportunities for them to take off. I think that is the connection of first, the power that some of these platforms, like if you can get in Walmart so early on and you can be connected across all of these opportunities and you can use social media to be your engine for demand generation, you can scale these things up very quickly to something new.

BRIAN KENNY: Sam, I want to talk a little bit about the partnership with Snoop and Cordell. It’s different than what we’ve seen in the past where brands have aligned with a celebrity of some sort to promote their product, but it’s not really a partnership. Those folks are like celebrity spokespeople, let’s say. What I read in the case felt very different to me and Bill’s talked about the authenticity of Snoop Dogg and the personal connection they have to ice cream. How did you structure the relationship? I mean, did it evolve organically? Were there specific discussions about the roles that each of you would play?

SAM ROCKWELL: Snoop was looking to take a step into being an entrepreneur versus being the face of a brand. He happens to enjoy ice cream specifically after certain activities, which he’s very proud to talk about of which this ice cream is—

BRIAN KENNY: There’s that underserved market again.

SAM ROCKWELL: Listen, right, by the way, that is a market that’s becoming more and more relevant as it becomes more accepted socially and more accepted legally. Taking all that aside, it is also a product like ice cream in general that he likes, but it’s one that he can enjoy with—he’s a grandfather now. This is a G-rated product or I should say a double G when it comes with Snoop, but this is a G-rated product that he can enjoy with his five-year-old granddaughter versus something that is in the cannabis industry or in the alcohol space. So, I think those were some factors for him that were driving him towards this, I’d say, serendipitously because at the same time, we were thinking about creator and celebrity-led brands.

What I said to Snoop very early in the game though, when we met with him, there was a bunch of conversations going on and I got a phone call like, “Hey, would you like to meet with Snoop Dogg?” Yeah, of course. I actually pitched the idea that I think Snoop Dogg would be a great partner for all of the reasons that I had said before. So, we got a phone call about 5:30 PM on a Wednesday. They said, “It’s late notice, but would you be open to meeting him tomorrow?” Now I’m in the New York area. I said, “Sure, where is he?” LA. What time? 9:00 AM. I looked at my phone. There was one flight at 8:00. I said, “I’ll be there.”

BRIAN KENNY: There you go.

SAM ROCKWELL: And so credit to our team, which I like to think that we are scrappy and nimble, and this is a true reflection of that is our R&D team. Some of ourselves, a bunch of us got on a plane.

BRIAN KENNY: No Zoom for this meeting, right?

SAM ROCKWELL: No way.

BRIAN KENNY: You got to do this in person.

SAM ROCKWELL: No way. You can’t taste ice cream through Zoom. As much as I’d love to feed you guys some ice cream right now, you can’t do it. But we got on a plane, took some of, call it “out of the cupboard” recipes of product because we have a full R&D team that has developed ice cream amongst other products. We took it out just to showcase capabilities.

When we went in and met with Snoop, the first thing I said is, One, my job is to build the canvas; yours is to put the paint on it. That’s the art. So, let’s do that together. I said, Two, and I’m truncating the conversation. There was a group of people around lawyers and agents and things, maybe 50 people in the room, but it’s him and I talking and I said to him, I said, Do you have the ability to make your own decisions in business? And he looked at me like, am I out of my mind? I said, The reason I ask that is because when it comes to our business, we’re a small business and the think tank, the group of decision makers is limited to a handful of people. We move quickly and deliberately. I said, But for you, am I going to have to talk to 50 people in order to get back in this room, in order to make decisions about what we’re doing as partners? He said, Absolutely not. I make my own decisions. I said, In that case, how are you doing, partner? And then he shook my hand, and I will say that everything that’s come after that in terms of his actions, his performance, him as a partner have exceeded the handshake, and I’m very grateful for that.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. Bill, this is an HBS case study. So, we always come back to the business lessons that come out of this. One of the things that we’ve talked a lot about on Cold Call over the years is that every entrepreneurial venture gets to a crossroads where they have to think about things like profitability versus growth, and that’s where the case takes us. What are some of the things that they have to think about, that Sam and his team have to think about, as they ponder, are we going for scale here, or are we going for profitability?

BILL KERR: Yeah, they’re both classic questions, but then they’re also in a very interesting context in this case study. I think one of the places we’d always begin with, which is a recognition of, What are you aspiring to build? Is it something that you want to sell off to somebody else? Is it something that you want to hold in perpetuity? Is it something that you could imagine just being a lifestyle business for you alone?

The thing that is interesting in this case is you have a number of different people that are coming together. You have some investors. You have Happi and food company and then Sam and his team coming in. You have Snoop and Cordell. So, there’s going to have to be some conversation about, What does this business want to evolve into and carry from there? And then there’s some additional considerations about as you’re building value, What are the things that are going to contribute most to that value? There’s some easy part of that, which is, hey, the more of 20 million becomes 50 million, that’s going to be value accretive. You can put the multiple on top of that, but there’s also just imagine the space in which this business could operate, and they want to do single serve ice cream and have that be in a bunch of convenient stores across the country. Maybe they’re not going to result in a lot of revenue from that, but it’s going to show that the brand can sell in that capacity.

Or maybe they want to even move out of the ice cream space and do something adjacent it. So, then ultimately, segue a little bit into there’s a lot of a lifestyle brand that is being developed here where it could go well beyond the ice cream aisle and what they’re building from there. So, how do you want to harness some of that energy towards the next steps? Those are complex choices. Under any circumstances, I think they’re particularly complex here because this company could choose to show it can expand internationally. If it wants to be a lifestyle brand, maybe the next move is to make sure that they’re in every sports coliseum and concert venue across the country as a way of being culturally connected, or they could take it in new flavor varieties.

So, we try to work through, what are some of those decisions, and they can’t remotely do all these things. Of course, it takes five minutes in the class for us to fill up a board with 43 growth opportunities here. So, then it comes down to, how is this team going to be able to prioritize the ones that are most important and deliver against them?

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, so Sam, you got a lot on your plate. You got a lot of things you got to navigate here.

SAM ROCKWELL: It’s a bowl, but yes, I got a lot in there.

BRIAN KENNY: How are you navigating some of these discussions and the tensions that inevitably go about them?

SAM ROCKWELL: Yeah, so first I’ll start where we ended my story from an experience standpoint is that my experience is limited to today. This is what I did coming out of school. So, every single day I’m learning something new and trying to find the best ways forward to navigate. There is no clear-cut answer ever, which I think highlights exactly what Professor Kerr highlights in the case study. It’s not an easy thing, and there’s limited resources, not unlimited resources. So, what’s the best way to direct them?

We have a few unfair advantages that enables us to out kick our coverage or get more juice out of the squeeze that we make. So, one is obviously Snoop, using Snoop and Lil Baby as well. We’ve talked a lot about Snoop, but Lil Baby has been an amazing partner. And so, we try to utilize the areas that we have unfair advantages because it requires less resources. That resource namely being dollars or people.

Of course, the more that the celebrity does, the less dollars that you need because that’s filling top of funnel. But for us, there’s this delicate balance about, how big do we go, how fast do we get there versus, do the resources come after the fact, or are they there and then we deploy? Bill highlighted it in the beginning as well, is that one of those challenges is that when you have somebody like Snoop Dogg or Lil Baby that reaches a national audience, it’s really difficult to tell those people to go to the store on the corner of Seventh Street, but not on the 14th Street store. So, being available and being accessible is a critical thing. What comes with being available and being accessible is this need to support those points of distribution.

How do we do it? What’s the best way to do it outside of just marketing? We’re playing in a space, as you mentioned at the start of this podcast, that is competitive. It’s finite. You can’t create more freezer spaces easily in a store. So, the space is very, very valuable. So, when the retailers place bets on you, there’s a high degree of responsibility. The good news is since they can’t build it to be bigger, there’s not going to magically be a number of more SKUs that you’re fighting against, but we are playing ball against some large incumbents. So, we need to do things that are creative and different. Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. Obviously, the Snoop and Lil baby factor do that. We’re very fortunate to call Live Nation a partner of ours and working on trying to bring this brand to concert venues across the country.

BRIAN KENNY: And how complicated is something like that? I mean, we’ve all been to stadiums. We see the products that they have there, but how difficult is it to build a partnership like that?

SAM ROCKWELL: Well, we’re certainly learning that as we go, but they’ve been really good partners so far. We’re in the first quarter, and they are literally partners in the brand, and now it’s about bringing the brand to their different venues. We have distribution nationally. So, getting the product into the locations is something that we’ve accomplished in the first two years of this business. That’s I think a big hurdle to overcome.

BRIAN KENNY: Sure.

SAM ROCKWELL: Two is setting up the right products for the occasion. Having a pint product in concerts is not the best fit because people in concerts oftentimes want something that they can finish in a relatively short period of time that satiates whatever their appetite may be. Also, something to be mindful of is when we go to concerts, we oftentimes want one hand for the phone, which is a whole new thing. So, Bill also alluded to it is the development of novelty, and that is what’s coming now. We have seven pint flavors coming, a little sneak peek, preview of the announcement.

BRIAN KENNY: You heard it here first.

SAM ROCKWELL: Yeah, you heard it here first. There’s going to be some Dr. Bombay novelties, which are ice cream bars coming out over the next few months. Those are going to be for convenience stores, for club stores, but also for these concert venues and halls. So, a lot of cool things that will happen as a result of this partnership. But to your point, Brian, it’s a challenge to bring those things to life, and there’s no such thing as…We never do anything fast enough, and that’s how I always feel, even though I think we move with urgency and pace that greatly exceeds the big guys. I think that’s one of the reasons why we have the space on the limited shelves that are available that we do. One thing that I’m sure you’re saying after all of these different challenges and solutions and things I said, I didn’t answer the question directly because there’s not one way to do it.

BRIAN KENNY: Right, of course. Yeah, no, we know that at HBS, that’s what makes a case great is that there’s not a single answer to a case. Bill, this case touches on the creator economy, and Sam has mentioned that before. How do you see this fitting into the broader movement of the creator and influence-driven economy?

BILL KERR: Well, I think this is an example of a place that we are seeing enormous amounts of business model innovation and the ecosystems in the consumer space have grown to where there’s organizations like Happi that are able to just deliver very quickly new concepts to a nationwide audience and be able to scale up at an effective rate with an entrepreneur or an influencer that’s joining that. That’s creating then a lot of opportunity on the influencer side to try to think about not selling my time and attention to just something, but what can I be, not an influencer, but an influencer entrepreneur concept where they’re going to want to both be the demand generation but own a stake in the business, build up a longer term operation from there.

So, we didn’t take this back into conversations with executives. So, we have executive programs that have people from these big CPG companies, and part of it is to turn to them and say, You used to be the only place where you could be generating the demand with your enormous marketing budgets that Sam talked about, buying an arena and putting your name on it, but also having the capabilities to deliver against this. Well, if you look out in the world now, there’s partnerships that are coming out that are able to do both sides of that equation. How are you going to compete, and what are the things that you need to do to be able to appreciate these underserved markets or to have the fast data to action cycles that Sam was just describing or being able to be more innovative, but then scale that product up along the path? So, they could learn from that as well.

BRIAN KENNY: I would imagine too, Sam, that your approach to marketing this is much more guerrilla-like maybe than some of those big competitors that you’re working with. Can you maybe describe a little bit of how you go to market?

SAM ROCKWELL: There’s so many different ways that I could use a pun there. It’s ape-like marketing, not guerrilla-like, but anyway, again, unfair advantages is when I talk about this brand. So, the Snoop and Lil Baby partnership, I think that’s somewhat self-explanatory. What we found with the brand after, I guess, we’ve been on shelf for now 23 months, so just under two years, is that we have pretty good repeat purchase rates, over 30% repeat purchase rates. So, as people try the brand, they come back and buy it. Why? Unique offering, I think good price point, high-quality item. So, if we’re able to build this partnership with Live Nation as an example or other venues and places where there’s limited options and assortments and less sensitivity to cost, we’re going to have induced trial. So, that’s another place that I think we shine outside of some of the other competitors that we play ball against.

There’s a virality aspect that I think we have access to because of the players. So, it’s not just when they speak, people listen. It’s also that when they speak, people repost, people make comments, people do all these different types of things. I think there are certain trends, products, and brands that are being made because it’s not necessarily the creator economy, but because in social media, things can go viral. If you go viral, it turns into a marketing campaign that’s the Super Bowl 10 years in a row. So, we’re trying to do different types of things to get there.

There are certain people that have purchased the brand—and no people specifically—but there are people on social media that buy the brand, that talk about the brand because they actually want to get attention of Snoop or Lil Baby. That’s something that I didn’t really think about until we launched this thing, which there’s good and bad to that. The good, I think you guys understand, people talking about it, especially if there’s good reviews of the product, but ice cream that is in the car, especially on a day like today, for more than 10 minutes, it’s not ice cream anymore. So, there are certain people that occasionally don’t understand that, and I’m being somewhat facetious in an example that I make, but there are bad reviews too, which I wholeheartedly disagree with every bad review for the record.

BRIAN KENNY: Of course.

SAM ROCKWELL: But we have to be very delicate in how we balance the product quality, the offering, the assortment mix, how we react to it, how Snoop and Lil Baby will react to it, how Cordell reacts to it because of the visibility that this brand has. So, customer service becomes another factor that, as a small brand, you don’t think about as much because you’re moving at slow speeds. As a brand that has the power of the celebrity, that has the reach and influence and distribution in the Walmarts of the world. We’re in every Walmart, we’re in every 7-Eleven in the country. So, pebbles, when you’re going at high velocities, become fatal objects. So, we have to be really very disciplined. To Bill’s point, we have to prioritize so that the limited resources we have, we put everything we can into the things that are going to make this business better and don’t get distracted by the things that are not going to be impactful.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, no, that all makes sense. I think we all know that virality cuts both ways. Virality could work for you, or it can work against you, and we’ve seen examples of that. This has been a great conversation as I know it would be. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. So, I’ve got one question left for each of you. I’m going to give Bill the last word because he’s the professor. He’s worked hard to get the last word.

SAM ROCKWELL: I follow his lead, and I’m so appreciative of you guys highlighting Dr. Bombay on this podcast and then the case study.

BRIAN KENNY: Got a lot of good business lessons to be learned here. Sam, let me just give you the last question. For you, it would be, if we were to talk again five years from now, what would you hope Dr. Bombay would represent both in the marketplace but also in culture more broadly?

SAM ROCKWELL: That’s a great question. I think in the marketplace, I want it to be a household brand. I want you to be able to say Dr. Bombay and know that it’s a great product and built around, I would say, that fusion of different flavors, and we lead with fruit. So, to think, because when I think about Ben and Jerry’s, I think about Phish Food and Cherry Garcia. There’s an item that you think about that’s a legacy item. I want to have legacy items. If we have those things, we’ll have household penetration and acceptance from consumers. I want to build this business so that we’re not dependent upon an exit. Of course, I think if you ask Snoop and Lil Baby and Cordell, myself, you want to build towards an exit, but we want to build the business sustainably. So, I hope to build a business that in five years, we could still be running because it’s supporting itself. It has household penetration. It’s a brand that’s known and understood outside of just the freezer item, even if those are our core items, as one that represents quality, freshness, uniqueness, and inclusiveness.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, that’s great. Bill, I’ll give you the last question, which is just if you want our listeners to remember one thing about the Dr. Bombay Ice Cream case, what would it be?

BILL KERR: Well, Brian, I think my thing is going to be passion, passion for what you do. I think everyone that has listened to Sam over the last 30 minutes will have felt the passion that comes out of that. But having interacted with everyone in this system, the passion that each of them brings to this is remarkable. You have celebrities like Snoop and Lil Baby going to Walmart’s headquarters on behalf of Dr. Bombay to meet with executives there and push the product and doing so with an energy and a spirit around that. There’s stories of Snoop opening up the canister or the pint of Dr. Bombay’s the machete at parties to hand out to people, Cordell coming up with flavors with his daughter because they were at a bakery. They thought about the blueberry muffin flavor that they could bring to the ice cream. So, we’ve spent a lot of time on unfair advantages. We spent a lot of time thinking about structurally, what made this difficult to enter, but then if you got into it, what that was going to accomplish and we can see in here the seeds of a new CPG ecosystem that is emerging and going to take root. But at the end of it, the thing that I always walk away most from these conversations with the Dr. Bombay team is just the passion that they bring to their work every day. That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty exciting.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. That’s awesome. Sam, Bill, thank you for joining me on Cold Call.

SAM ROCKWELL: Thanks, Brian. Thank you, Bill. Appreciate it, guys.

BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them wherever you get your podcasts. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.