Mission: To quintuple SPUD’s annual revenue to $100 million within five years
Assets: Reputation as a creative genius and experience building a venture into a multimillion-dollar enterprise
Yield: Top job and biggest shareholder at the SPUD grocery delivery venture
By Glen Korstrom
Peter van Stolk used his creative genius to turn a small juice company into a venture with a US$900 million market capitalization on the Nasdaq in 2006.
The Jones Soda Co. (Nasdaq:JSDA) founder now aims to do for online grocery delivery what he did for a company perhaps best remembered for releasing a line of turkey and gravy soda at Thanksgiving.
Now CEO of East Vancouver’s Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery (SPUD), van Stolk aims to increase his new company’s $18 million 2010 revenue to more than $100 million within five years.
He invested close to $1 million of his money into SPUD last fall and brought in four other investors:
- Gateway Casinos & Entertainment executive vice-chairman Dave Gadhia;
- Whitefish Group president Jay Garnett;
- Social Venture Network founder Josh Mailman; and
- accountant Frank Uy.
Longtime SPUD principals, such as founder David van Seters, still own a stake in the company, but van Stolk describes the investment that he and four partners made in late 2010 as an “acquisition.”
Casually dressed, the 47-year-old exudes snowboarder-style charisma as he roams around his company’s West Hastings Street office and warehouse.
He enthusiastically greets staff, wishing one that her sore throat soon heals and urging another to stay late to drink some champagne to celebrate one of the company’s best weeks in its history.
“In 20 or 30 years in business, I’ve never met anybody who has the kind of creative juice and imagination as Peter has,” said Seattle lawyer Michael Fleming, who has been on the Jones Soda board since 1997.
Fleming explained that van Stolk’s ouster as CEO in late 2007 stemmed from the need for Jones Soda to have a more experienced hand on the corporate tiller.
“Peter is an absolutely brilliant marketing guy, a brilliant product development guy,” Fleming said. “It would have been a waste of Peter’s talented skills to have him be a bean-counting executive as opposed to a creative thinker.”
Fleming equated the changeover – which led to a succession of CEOs following van Stolk’s departure – to Bill Gates stepping down as CEO of Microsoft Corp. Locally, the situation was similar to when Lululemon Athletica Inc. founder Chip Wilson realized that his skill set and passion was in the creative side of the business and not running a large and growing company.
Van Stolk remained a Jones Soda board member until April 2009, when he accepted a US$350,000 payout and travelled the world before setting up a consulting and a branding company.
“The company prior to our acquisition was in a very challenged position because of its debt,” van Stolk said. “It was ridiculous.”
SPUD had operations in Vancouver, Victoria, Calgary, Seattle and Portland in March 2008, when, for an undisclosed price, it bought two San Francisco-based food delivery companies: Organic Express and Westside Organics. The transactions brought SPUD to San Francisco and Los Angeles.
As CEO at the nearly 200-employee SPUD, Stolk immediately halted the company’s geographic expansion.
“L.A. has 18 million people. They have few farmers’ markets. Everyone spends hours in their cars. We can execute flawlessly in L.A. and succeed. Why would we go anywhere else?” van Stolk said.
Van Stolk believes he can partner with celebrity L.A. chefs, who would build their reputations by having their images on SPUD’s website, where they would also provide recipes.
Site visitors would be able to click boxes next to each ingredient as they compile their shopping list.
The promotion promises to help increase the average size of a SPUD order. It’s also another example of van Stolk’s genius at raising the profile of his products.
At Jones Soda, he cultivated brand loyalty by inviting consumers to send in their photos, which were then reproduced on Jones Soda bottles. Different photos were printed on different varieties of flavoured soda each month. Some fans now have collections of hundreds of different Jones Soda bottles.
Van Stolk plans to replicate the local chef partnership model in each of the seven cities in which SPUD operates to optimize the brand’s local appeal.
He stressed that making the brand feel local is paramount.
Before he bought into SPUD, the text on all SPUD websites was created in Vancouver.
Canadian spellings on the company’s American websites made it obvious that the company was not local for Seattle or Portland residents. In other cases, local niche products were unavailable.
Today, SPUD offers Vancouver residents Avalon Dairy milk products. Those in San Francisco get to buy bread made by Bay Area baker Grace Baking.
Van Stolk is also changing the words behind the SPUD acronym from the original Small Potatoes Urban Delivery to Sustainable Produce Urban Delivery. The change emphasizes that the products are sustainable and that the company delivers far more than potatoes.
He also launched a corporate delivery program and is open to new ideas such as delivering groceries on weekends.
The latter change should appeal to customers who want to be at home when their groceries arrive. Previous logic held that, because Spud deliveries came in an insulated box with gel packs to keep perishable items cold, customers didn’t need to be home when their orders were delivered.
But van Stolk appreciates apartment dwellers’ concerns that items from their orders might be stolen if they’re not at home when the groceries are delivered.
Originally from Edmonton, van Stolk started selling produce out of a church basement as a summer job. A supplier encouraged him to be a juice distributor, and that started him down the road to founding Jones Soda.
He moved to Vancouver in 1989 and obtained rights to distribute brands such as AriZona ice tea. Eager to have his own brand, van Stolk launched Jones Soda in 1996.
He moved the company to Seattle in 2000 because getting bank financing was easier in that city and 90% of his sales were in the U.S.
Outside work, he sits on corporate boards at the beverage companies Steaz and Kor Water. He’s also on the board of Vitamin Angels, which is a non-profit organization that provides vitamin supplements to children around the world.