The Reason Justin’s Nut Butter Worked Had Nothing To Do With Peanut Butter
Guy Raz Newsletter – May 28, 2026
There’s a moment in every great founder story where you realize the person across from you wasn’t just building a company.
They were building a new way of seeing a category that everyone else had stopped looking at.
Justin Gold is the founder of Justin’s Nut Butter, which he started in a Boulder apartment with a food processor, a journal full of numbered jars, and a stubborn conviction that peanut butter deserved the same variety as jam. He eventually sold the brand to Hormel for $280 million.
And…as you will hear…later bought it back!
Here are five things I learned from our conversation:
1. Look at what everyone else has stopped looking at
Justin was a vegetarian waiting tables in Boulder when he noticed something that nobody in the industry seemed to care about: the preserves section at his local co-op was three times the size of the nut butter section.
That observation became his entire business thesis.
He wasn’t a food scientist. He had no CPG experience. But he was still seeing the shelf the way a customer does, not the way an industry veteran does. Familiarity is the enemy of opportunity.
The founders who build category-defining companies tend to be the ones who walk into a room and notice what’s missing, rather than cataloguing what’s already there.
2. Naivety is a competitive advantage, so use it before it runs out
When Justin started writing his business plan, he didn’t know what an S corp was, how UPC codes worked, or where to find an FDA-certified kitchen.
So he just asked.
He walked into the CU business school library, started talking to a librarian, and ended up with free access to business professors who would tear apart his plan. He cold-called salsa companies to learn about jar fillers.
He talked his way into a 40-year-old industrial grinder from an equipment rep who probably shouldn’t have sold it to him.
Experienced people stop asking basic questions because they think they already know the answers, or because they’re embarrassed to reveal what they don’t know. Neither problem applies when you’re just getting started.
That window closes. Use it.
3. Watch what people actually do, not what they tell you
When Justin’s squeeze packs failed to move at Whole Foods, he stood at the shelf for half an hour and watched customers shop. What he saw: people picked up the packs, got confused, and put them back. The product made sense to him in the athletic aisle, next to energy gels.
But customers had no mental model for peanut butter in that context. When he moved the packs next to the jars, where peanut butter already lived in people’s heads, they started selling.
Most founders kill good ideas because early feedback is discouraging. The better diagnostic is observation.
People will tell you they don’t want something while their behavior is showing you exactly what they need.
4. Hire the person who knows things you don’t, then actually listen to them
Justin talks about Lance Gentry, the former IZZE executive who joined Justin’s and pushed him to raise a million dollars, repackage the brand, and go national. Justin’s description of that partnership is blunt: Lance knew what he was doing, and I was learning.
This sounds obvious, but most founders hire people and then spend enormous energy second-guessing them, or surrounding themselves with people who confirm what they already believe.
Justin handed Lance the wheel on the things Lance understood better, and focused his own energy on the things only he could do: quality, culture, the brand’s soul. The division of labor was honest rather than political.
That’s rarer than it sounds.
5. Build it like you’re going to keep it forever. That’s also how you sell it
Justin spent 13 years building Justin’s before Hormel came calling with $280 million. He didn’t engineer the outcome. He followed the advice he’d been given early: build the best company you can build, and let someone want to buy it.
The founders who are always half-focused on the exit tend to make decisions that optimize for the story they’re telling investors rather than the business they’re actually running. The ones who stay obsessed with the product, the customer, and the next problem to solve tend to build things that are genuinely worth acquiring.
The exit, if it comes, is a byproduct of that obsession. Not the cause of it.
Justin spent 13 years making peanut butter before anyone wrote a check with eight zeros on it. He wasn't managing toward an exit.
He was managing toward the next problem: the right grinder, the right shelf placement, and the right partner.
The outcome followed the obsession, not the other way around.
That sequencing matters more than most people want to admit.
P.S. If you loved the episode, follow the show in your podcast app so you never miss one. And please SHARE this newsletter so others can learn from some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs!
On HIBT This Week!
Justin’s Nut Butter: From An Obsession To A $280M Brand
At 25, Justin Gold was a waiter in Boulder with a food processor and an obsession.
He’d noticed something strange: the jam aisle had endless variety. But the peanut butter section? Not so much…
So he started experimenting. Late nights. Hundreds of jars. Meticulous tracking different flavors and ingredients. Batch after batch after batch.
And after months of this, he decided to turn his hobby into a business – Justin’s Nut Butter.
But there was just one problem…
Almost nobody wanted it.
Stores said no. Distributors flinched. The only way he could make his butters was if he worked overnight in a shared kitchen (in a facility 1 hour away, mind you.)
And even after all that effort… still, he struggled.
Then one day on a mountain bike ride, he had an idea that sounded laughably simple. But that little idea would transform the entire company.
So how did a former law school student build one of the most iconic natural food brands in America? And what was the idea nobody would help him make?
Learn all this and more in the latest episode of How I Built This!
HIBT Advice Line: Go Slow on Purpose
This week on the Advice Line, I’m joined by Jeffrey Hollender, co-founder of Seventh Generation. We dig into a question that I’ve been thinking a lot about: do consumers actually care whether a product is sustainable, or do they just care that it works?
First up, Kristina: Is social media still worth the effort?
Kristina’s Twenty Five and Pine designs furniture that works for both toddlers and parents. She’s questioning whether organic social is a dead end and wondering where else to spend her energy. Jeffrey and I were emphatic… she’s thinking about the channel wrong.
Next, Phil: How do you market a product people don’t know how to use?
Phil’s Red Truck Orchards makes farm-made cherry vinegar from his Michigan orchard. It sounds like regular vinegar, it looks like regular vinegar, but it isn’t. The burden is on Phil to show people the difference, and we pushed him toward a content strategy he hadn’t considered.
Finally, Caroline: How do you sell a product that’s inherently polarizing?
Caroline’s Petaluma makes plant-based dog food, a concept that meets real resistance from pet owners. Our advice: stop positioning it as an alternative. There’s a stronger frame that converts skeptics into buyers.
Jeffrey leaves us with this: Today’s startup culture is obsessed with scaling fast. His advice? Be patient. A slower, more deliberate trajectory is often the healthier path.
If you would like to be featured on an upcoming episode, call and leave a 1-minute message at 1-800-433-1298 or send a voice memo to hibt@id.wondery.com
Wow in the World!
Why Mosquitoes Pick YOU!
What starts as a simple game of mosquito tag turns into a bonkerballs scientific mystery when Thomas Fingerling gets covered in mosquito bites while everyone else stays bite-free!
We dive into incredible research that reveals exactly how mosquitoes choose their victims like tiny flying detectives. Here's the mind-blowing discovery… mosquitoes don't just randomly attack people! They LOVE dark colors against bright backgrounds, plus they're obsessed with carbon dioxide from human breath, body heat, and certain smells.
Can scientists use this mosquito-attracting combo to build better traps and protect people from dangerous diseases? Tune in to discover why you might be a mosquito magnet!
From the HIBT Archives!
Seventh Generation: Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender
In the late 1980s, when most consumers had never heard the term “eco-friendly,” Alan Newman and Jeffrey Hollender saw an opportunity hiding in plain sight.
They believed people would pay for household products that didn’t harm the environment: paper towels, diapers, and cleaners made from sustainable materials.
Starting as a scrappy mail-order catalog, Seventh Generation became one of the first successful green brands in America.
The company’s mission was deeply personal for both founders: they wanted to create products safe enough for the seventh generation of children to inherit the earth. Their timing was prescient. Environmental consciousness was growing, but the market was wide open. Seventh Generation’s products proved that being green didn’t mean sacrificing quality, and their success paved the way for an entire industry.
But success couldn’t save the partnership.
In the early 1990s, just as the company was gaining momentum, Alan and Jeffrey had a bitter falling out that ended their business relationship and their friendship.
Their story became a cautionary tale about the fragile nature of partnerships, proving that even shared passion and commercial success can’t always overcome personal differences.
See you next time!
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