#247 - How to Build a Board with Seth Goldman, JUST ICE Tea

The Startup CPG Podcast

Startup CPG

Startup, Food, Business, Beverage, Cpg, Entrepreneurship

4.9 • 642 Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2026

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, host Daniel Scharff sits down with Seth Goldman—co-founder of Honest Tea, co-founder and CEO of Just Ice Tea, and one of the most experienced board members in the CPG space, having served as chair of Beyond Meat, Plant Burger, and Mission Guardians of Tony's Chocolonely—to answer the questions most founders never get a straight answer on: When do you actually need a board? Who should be on it? How do you manage it? And how do you protect yourself?

Seth walks through every stage of the board journey—from the friends-and-family raise where you probably don't need one yet, to the angel round where you do, to the institutional raise where investors will ask for seats and you need to know how to vet them back. He shares the story of a would-be investor he turned away after learning they wanted management options to install their own CEO, how he recruited legends like Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield and Jeff Swartz of Timberland to an Honest Tea board when the company was doing a few million in sales, and why splitting your lead investment between two partners isn't just smart—it's protective.

Daniel and Seth also dig into what makes a board meeting actually useful, how to avoid the nightmare scenario of surprising your board with bad news in the room, why diversity of opinion matters more than cheerleaders, and what it looks like to navigate a CEO transition as a board member. Plus: Seth's advice on how to position yourself if you want to become a board member someday—and the unsexy pallet configuration insight that saved Just Ice Tea hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Together, they cover:

When you actually need a board—and when you don't
How to vet investors who want board seats before you say yes
How Seth recruited Gary Hirshberg and Jeff Swartz to the Honest Tea board
Board composition: why you want A players, former CEOs, and real diversity of thought
Compensation: options, terms, vesting, and the 1% rule of thumb
The "nose in the tent, hands outside" principle of healthy board governance
How to run a board meeting that passes the test—OKRs, no surprises, every voice heard
Protecting control: why splitting your lead raise between two investors matters
CEO transitions: what makes a founder-CEO hit a ceiling, and how boards navigate it
How to position yourself to become a board member

Just Ice Tea is now the top-selling bottled tea in the natural channel, launching nationally this year with Kroger, Safeway Albertsons, and Publix—and Seth has a lot more to say about how governance helped get them there.

Episode Links
Seth Goldman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seth-goldman-234bb7124/
Just Ice Tea on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/just-ice-tea/
Just Ice Tea: https://justicetea.com/

Don't forget to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoyed this episode. For potential sponsorship opportunities or to join the Startup CPG community, visit http://www.startupcpg.com.

Show Links:

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Episode music by Super Fantastics

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's important to remember the board's most important responsibility is to hire and select,
0:15.3	in some cases, fire the CEO.
0:17.1	The board isn't the one that's say, oh, let's create a marketing jingle or something.
0:20.3	It's their primary duty is hiring and managing the CEO, because otherwise no one else is.
0:26.4	And then, of course, helping the CEO find the right incentives and strategy to grow.
0:29.9	But on the one hand, they do need to look out for my wellness, but it's not at the expense of the
0:36.2	business.
0:36.5	If they come to the conclusion that I'm not
0:38.6	the right person to run the business, it's their job to fire me and find somebody else. So,
0:43.5	I don't want to say it's a tension, but there should be support until there's tension. So one of the
0:48.0	great phrases that I've heard to describe boards is your nose is in the tent, but your hands are
0:52.6	outside the tent, meaning you're looking in
0:55.0	and you're seeing it all and you're speaking when asked or when you feel the need to you, but you're
0:59.6	not going in there and tinkering with the business on a regular basis. That doesn't help the CEO.
1:07.1	Welcome to the startup CPG podcast. If you're like me, you've read the news of CPG companies
1:12.1	adding new board members or you hear about VCs asking for seats on boards, but nobody's
1:17.5	ever explained it to you. When do you need a board? Who do you need to put on it? How should you
1:21.9	manage your board? All of these pretty basic questions, I just don't know the answer to. So,
1:26.8	I am so excited that today we
1:28.2	have the perfect guest to explain it. It's Seth Goldman. Seth is a wildly successful serial
1:34.2	entrepreneur having founded Honest Tea, and he's now on a rocket ship growth trajectory with
1:39.4	just iced tea. He's also been on numerous boards, including having served as chairman of the board for Beyond Meat.
	...

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