In Person of Interest we talk to the people catching our eye right now about their projects past and present. Next up is Jeni Britton, founder of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, who spoke with Bon Appétit about her new fiber brand, Floura.
What’s the thing Jeni Britton needs most in her life right now? The answer to that question changes with the time, day, and seasons. At one point she craved community and a place to express the creativity surging through her. That’s how she arrived at ice cream, opening a scoop shop that she built into a beloved brand and empire, with locations in 29 cities and pints of ice cream in grocery stores across the US. During the pandemic, long walks in the woods and a daily habit of eating lots of fruit led Jeni to realize what she needed was something simpler—fiber. And she had an inkling we needed it too. Now, 23 years after founding Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, she is back with a new offering. Floura is a fiber company, one that luxuriates in flavor and roots itself in the senses. Its first product is a fiber bar with the same name. It features 13 grams of fiber and 12 whole plants, such as watermelon and apples, all sourced from food trimmings previously destined for waste. In the end, this fiber bar is meant to deliver on the same promise she made with ice cream: to make you feel good. We caught up with Jeni to hear all about it.
How did you arrive at fiber as your next project?
JB: It’s a bit of a long story, but I started eating a lot of blueberries and I started to feel better than ever before. My business partner, Mark, was like, “the blueberries are fiber.” My whole body started changing because of fiber, and the more I learned, the more I wanted to make sure I was getting enough. Something like 95 percent of people are deficient in fiber. Many of the chronic illnesses we have lead back to the fact that the industrial food system has removed fiber from our diets. So this ends up being a roundabout way of saying, whatever my most pressing need is kind of becomes my whole life.
How did food become the pathway to a solution and transformation for you?
JB: I’ve always been very aware of my sensorial thinking or wisdom. I think that’s probably one of the reasons I fell in love with ice cream because it is so deeply sensory. Being in the world of ice cream for so long is probably why I felt like there’s a food product there, and you know that I’m probably the best one to make a fiber bar now.
Is there a direct sensory experience attached to your new bars?
JB: The first thing is scent; they have a sort of candied fruit aroma. I love it when I’m on an airplane and as soon as I open one, a little cloud of raspberry rose or brambleberry lavender fills that space. I wanted to make something that was really beautiful and also very different from what’s in the nutritional bar space.
When I first learned about the bars, it felt like they were creating their own category.
JB: With Floura we want you to taste and feel the color of each bar. In the bar world everything’s brown, especially when it comes to fiber bars. Most bars are date paste, which is brown, but it’s also a very specific flavor. I mean, of course, we love dates. But to a point.
Amen!
JB: Ours are made with an apple base, and you can layer other flavors on top of that.
Do you feel like what you’re doing is disruptive?
JB: If you look at the bar aisle, there are still hundreds of companies launching every day in the protein space. To me that represents the past. It’s not that it’s not important, but why are you walking down somebody else’s already carved path? When you start to look and ask yourself what’s actually important right now, it’s that people eat fiber. Floura would be disruptive even if we were just using single-source fiber the way that other fiber companies use psyllium. But we’re 10 steps ahead of that with the inclusion of whole plants.
Say more about that.
JB: Your microbiome really wants diverse fiber. We’re working with fruit trimmings, fresh and whole fruits and vegetables, and more. What’s going to nurture the diverse population of microbes living inside of you, to nurture you to feel better, is a diversity of fiber sources.
When I think of Jeni’s, I think of seasonality and produce. How is that showing up in how you’re producing these bars?
JB: From the very beginning we were in the farmers market buying flats of strawberries on Saturdays when they were perfect for two weeks in Ohio. Over time we started buying an entire field, and our farmer was growing special strawberries so that we could have strawberries coming in at a certain clip. Understanding what that looks like definitely led to an immediate connection and to the facility where we exist now.
F&S Fresh Foods is in Vineland, New Jersey, and that’s where we source all our ingredients. It’s 600,000 square feet. It’s an unimaginable scale of produce and trimmings by-product—including watermelon rinds. Seeing that scale made me immediately think of my grandmother, who used to pickle watermelon rinds. She had no idea that there were prebiotics, or the microbiome existed, but she knew eating them was good for you. That was an aha moment for me and connected me to my history of processing produce.
The branding and visuals for Floura are beautiful. How are you packaging and presenting all the creativity behind Floura to your customers and audience?
JB: I was in Pompeii two years ago and saw this beautiful fresco of the goddess Flora, who’s about spring, blooming, and rebirth. Letting go is hard, but also it’s about moving on and allowing for the new.
I like this idea of putting all my stuff out there as a gift to the world. Then we listen and learn about what is resonating. It becomes an act of cocreation. Jeni’s is not just me. It’s thousands of amazing people who are influencing what we become. And that’s what I love so much about literally blooming.