We recently connected with DAVID BERGMAN and have shared our conversation below.
DAVID, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
After nearly 30 years protecting investors from corporate wrongdoers as a securities fraud attorney, I retired to the role of late life full-time Dad, getting involved in the community and improving my daughters’ K-5 school helping to run the PTA. When I saw the community cornerstone, Goody’s, listed for sale, it was fate. At a minimum, I knew my young girls would be proud of me as owner of the local ice cream stores. Joking aside, it instantly struck me as the ideal encore career, and the ultimate way to further embed my family in the community where I knew I would raise my children. I knew I had no experience in manufacturing or in retail, so I asked my fellow PTA colleague, mark, to partner with me, to run the stores and factory, so that I could build a business to bring the world’s best local ice cream and candy shoppe to the rest of America.
While I knew that the popcorns, chocolates and ice creams made in Goody’s local factory were the best things I had ever tasted, I quickly realized that the mission was far larger than just spreading great confections. I immediately got to know the ninety or so amazing teenagers working for Goody’s and saw the need to give them the opportunity to build real careers in the beloved institution where they, and many of their parents, worked and loved. Additional inspiration was found in my dying, and since deceased Mom, who dedicated so much of her life to teaching underprivileged children, leading me to develop an immediate microgrant for public school teachers for monies needed for use in the classroom, a profound need I witnessed first-hand helping to oversee a parent teacher organization. With all of these driving forces, and the finest popcorns on the planet, behind me, I set out to take Goody’s outside the confines of Central Oregon and into the mouths and hearts of people everywhere.
Cappy’s was a “five-and-dime” candy store on Johnson Avenue in the Bronx where I would meet my grandpa after elementary school for an egg cream and a box of Milk Duds. Mother’s was a small bakery next door where my Mom and Dad would take me for a black-and-white cookie every Saturday morning. I am 60 years old yet remember those moments as much as I do this morning. Everyone in America had a metaphorical Goody’s wherever they grew up. The place the made some of their strongest memories with the people they care about most. I aspire to bring those memories into people’s homes through Goody’s popcorns, made with the same recipes for 40 years. It’s what we all want…simpler times with our loved ones.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I grew up in Bronx, NY when you could walk yourself to school and know everyone who owned every local shop. My Mom was the hardest working, most inspirational academic, who always drove me to work hard and do as much as I could for others. Her influence put me on a path to success, always doing well by doing good. I was fortunate professionally to be mentored by some of the brightest, right-thinking legal minds, one in particular named Mel Weiss, who were motivated more by helping better the community around them than by their own wallets. I was beyond graced by being able to be part of a team that brought some of corporate America’s biggest wrongdoers to account and helped recover more than $50 billion to get back to investors injured by fraud. I later branched out to help innovate solutions to some other major conflicts and problems on Wall Street, which took me all over the U.S. I ultimately met my wife and we had our first daughter when I was 51. We later had another daughter and relocated to raise our daughters and breed horses on a beautiful farm in Bend, Oregon.
As a dad of young kids, one of the things you do, wherever you are, is take them out for treats. That place here is Goody’s, where not much has changed in 40+ years. There is still a shelf in the stores where kids bring back the stuffed animals they purchased there to leave for a week and regain the waffle-cone scent they had when purchased. It was the feelings evoked by the prior few sentences that literally compelled me to unretire after 8 years and buy Goody’s. And it is that sensation that has compelled me to honor the community in which Goody’s resides, our customers, my Mother, and grow this brand to give it the shine it deserves, so that everyone can feel the way I did when I would take my little girls there. Goody’s has now been owned by 3 families, but uses the same recipes, with the fewest and finest ingredients as locally sourced as possible, as those developed by Marne Parmalteer in her home kitchen over 50 years ago.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
In 2012, after helping to build a business from 2 guys in an office in NYC into a 30 person, 5 state organization, and save investors $100s of millions in trading costs, I decided to go west and open up an office in California. There I talked a fine gentleman out of his secure, pensioned job to come work with me. He was a great guy but was not able to get the job done. Unwilling to let him fail, and knowing I was responsible for his five children, I decided to pivot, leave my entire life of 49 years in NYC behind, and make sure he did not fail. I moved to Los Angeles and finished what I had started there.
It turned out to be the best decision I ever made, as it was there I met my wife, and had my first daughter. Upon her birth I turned over the business to my employees. My wife wanted a horse farm, I wanted winter, and that is how we ended up in perhaps the nicest place I have ever been here in Bend, Oregon.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
Goody’s manufactures almost everything it sells, right here in Bend. As it became time to scale, to be able to supply not just our local retail stores, but also product to share with customers nationwide, we received all sorts of advice. “You need a co-packer,” one friend said. “You need bigger commercial popcorn machines,” said the equipment salesman. I knew next to nothing about manufacturing but this much I knew — “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” So I sourced the small batch popcorn popper and caramel corn kettle and built a second popcorn station. And then a 3rd, and will do the same until I have 42 popcorn stations of the same old-school machinery running in tandem. If there is a Hippocratic oath in making confections, it is the way I feel…”do no harm to the product”.
When Guittard chocolate raised its prices by 25%, many people advised me to find a more cost-effective solution. Poppycock. Our customers are our most prized asset, and deserve to keep getting the same premium product they have enjoyed for 40+ years. So I bought as much as I could get at the old price, and ate the costs going forward, and instead of reducing the 9 pounds of chocolate in every batch of chocolate drizzled caramel corn, I kept it exactly the same. “They don’t make things like they used to,” is a most popular lament. Well here we do.
“You need to innovate” was also a popular voice from digital agencies and the like. “You need to make bacon ranch garlic parmesan sour cream and chives popcorn”! No…I do not. I hope people realize that all of thsoe flavored popcorns are made with powdered flavoring additives, with dyes and dessicated “natural flavoring”, which is another word for low quality. We have six original flavors, all made with just a few ingredients like local organic butter, guittard chocolate, fresh ground organic peanut butter, premium brown sugar. Will I innovate down the road, I am sure I will. But it will be after lots and lots of testing by trained chefs and not by buying in bulk some flavor additive.
The fact is people want good clean snacks. People want food the way their grandma made it. Just because there may be more modern, less expensive and more scalable ways to manufacture does not mean you should follow the easy path. If there is one piece of advice I would give to anyone in business, or to teenagers coming out of school, it is that the easiest path is rarely the correct one.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.goodysofbend.com
- Instagram: @goodysofbend
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/goodysofbend
Image Credits
None. All personal photos