Ep 554 $325M Exit After Coke Walked Away From Suja Juice | Built to Sell Radio

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Hi there, and welcome back to another edition of Built to Sell Radio, the podcast designed to help you punch above your weight in a negotiation to sell your company.
Now, before we get started, if you're enjoying the show, please take a second to like it, subscribe to the podcast, and recommend it to a friend who's thinking about selling their business. It's the best way to help us keep bringing you these stories. And today's story is one they're going to thank you for. In 2012, Jeff Church co-founded Suja Juice with $300,000 and a green juice that had a four-day shelf life. Three years later, Coca-Cola and Goldman Sachs invest $150 million at a $300 million valuation. Then in 2018, Coke passed on the option to buy the rest of the company, leaving Jeff with $40 million in maturing debt and a business losing $9 million a year. And in this episode, you're going to hear how Jeff got on Coke's radar before they invested, how a 2X liquidation preference nearly swallowed his angel's return, and how a line of wellness shots drove a $30 million EBITDA swing that led to a $325 million sale. Without further adieu, here is John's conversation with Jeff Church. Enjoy.

**John Warrillow** (1:30)
Jeff Church, welcome to Built to Sell Radio.

**Jeff Church** (1:33)
Hey, John, how you doing? Nice to meet you, nice to see you.

**John Warrillow** (1:36)
Yeah, it's good to see you. Six or seven businesses now under your belt. We decided to talk about one that has got a really interesting story. Suja, which is a cold-pressed juice company. Walk me through the founding story. Like, take me to San Diego.
I think that you stumbled into Annie and Eric. Like, give me the, kind of take me back to that moment where you met Annie and Eric and how it all became.

**Jeff Church** (2:03)
Yeah, a crazy story. One of my partner's co-founders, let me James Brannon, who's a pretty prolific investor, and also very full of storytelling and sometimes a little bit of BS, came to me and he has these dark green juices with him. And he says, dude, he's got this New York, heavy New York accent. Said, dude, you got to try these juices. They're like changing my world. My hair's growing faster, my fingernails are growing faster. I'm a meat and potatoes guy from the Midwest.
I'm like, green juice to me was a bit of a foreign thing. I'm like, no, no, no.
He kept coming back to me and said, this is amazing. My wife, everybody's like drinking this stuff. It's amazing. So I eventually said, okay, just to humor him, I'll try it. And I actually tried this green juice. It was called Green Supreme. It was the flavor. And it was apple, kale, lemon. And I loved it. And I felt like if I can drink this juice, anybody on the planet can drink this juice. I mean, truth be told, apple was the first ingredient. So it had quite a bit of apple sugar in it. But I was just taken by the product. And it wasn't Suja. It was a different company that Eric and Annie had started, which was just a home delivery product that they were selling for like a three-day cleanse for people. And cleansers were really hot in the early 2012 type timeframe.
But it had no FDA approvals. And I mean, there was nothing legal about it. It had a four-day shelf life to it. But James and I were stunned by how much people love this product and how good it was. And Eric is an incredible formulator. So we said, well, maybe we have a business here. We have to figure out a way to get the shelf life though beyond three or four days, because that's not really commercially viable. And we didn't want to do pasteurization, which was kind of a, you have to have a kill step in when you're doing a food or beverage product so that there's no pathogens that a consumer can end up inadvertently getting. And usually that's done with heat and it's done through what they call heat pasteurization. And there had been Naked and Odwalla and some other brands that were out there already. We didn't want to just copy what was already being done. We wanted to do something disruptive, something innovative.
We learned about a technology called HPP, which is High Pressure Processing, which basically, you put the bottles after they're done, has to be plastic bottles, into a big vat, and into these giant machines, and you pressurize them to about 87,000 psi, which is about five times the pressure of the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the ocean, so it's a lot of pressure. And that pressure basically might switch cheese out of pathogens, but because there's no heat, it doesn't affect that micronutrition.