Justin’s Nut Butter: Justin Gold. He Was Waiting Tables, Then...He Reinvented Peanut Butter.
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Guy Raz | Wondery
4.7 • 31.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2026
⏱️ 87 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
At 25, Justin Gold was making experimental peanut butter in his home kitchen with a food processor and a stack of recipe journals. His singular obsession: bring new life to a tired lunchtime staple.
What started as late-night experiments with honey, cinnamon and banana eventually became Justin's — one of the most influential natural food brands of the last two decades.
At first, Justin got rejected by most grocery stores he approached. He worked overnight in a shared industrial kitchen, hand-filling jars one at a time. He couldn’t get a distributor, so he stocked the shelves at the Boulder Whole Foods himself.
And when growth stalled… he had an idea during a mountain bike ride that would transform the company: What if peanut butter came in a squeeze pack?
In this episode, Justin explains how relentless experimentation and stubbornness helped him build a category-defining brand — and how, with each entrepreneurial milestone, an even more challenging one emerged.
YOU’LL LEARN:
- How Justin reverse-engineered flavored peanut butter in his apartment
- How launching in Boulder gave him a big advantage
- How he learned when to listen to feedback, and when to ignore it
- The deal he made with Whole Foods: “I’ll stock the shelves myself.”
- How the squeeze pack transformed the business, and why it almost didn’t work
- The power of naïve persistence in entrepreneurship
Timestamps:
- 00:09:35 — The obsessive recipe experiments that became Justin’s edge
- 00:16:25 — Getting support from Boulder’s startup food community
- 00:21:28 — Raising $35,000– and shocking his family: “I wanna make peanut butter!”
- 00:42:51 — The farmers market feedback that changed the product line
- 00:46:56 — Justin talks his way into the first Whole Foods
- 00:51:47 — Justin’s gets into more stores, but sales start to stagnate
- 00:53:35 — The mountain bike ride that sparked the squeeze-pack idea
- 01:19:43 — The brand gets sold, Justin gets fired…and invited back
This episode was produced by J.C. Howard, with music by Ramtin Arablouei.
Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Alex Cheng.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You can imagine the confusion when you are studying to become a lawyer. And then I moved to Colorado and I'm waiting tables and I'm like, yeah, I'm getting closer to go back to school. You know, I'm in a college town now and everyone's. So then I come home and I'm like, hey, I've got something I want to show you guys. I'm really excited about it. And they're like, oh, you know, is this a college application? Are you going back to school? And I'm like, and I take the lid off the shoebox and I'm like, I want to make peanut butter. |
| 0:42.6 | Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. |
| 0:58.0 | I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Justin Gold used his home food processor to make a better-tasting peanut butter and turned Justin's nut butter into a category-defining brand. |
| 1:13.6 | Thank you. nut butter into a category-defining brand. There's a strange thing that happens when you build something successful, and you'll hear this from a lot of founders. |
| 1:20.6 | The chase? It never really ends. You get your first customer, and then you want 100. You hit a million in sales, |
| 1:29.8 | then you go for 10 million. The more you grow, the more complicated it gets. And the bar just |
| 1:35.8 | keeps kind of moving. All of this was definitely true for Justin Gold. Justin started with a simple |
| 1:42.9 | idea. He wanted to make a peanut butter that was |
| 1:45.8 | better than the stuff sitting on the supermarket shelves. And at first, he just wanted to sell a few |
| 1:51.6 | jars around Boulder, Colorado, where he lived. At the time, he was waiting tables and working at |
| 1:57.6 | the local REI, and he thought, hey, this could bring in a few more bucks. |
| 2:01.8 | But every time he sold a jar of peanut butter, every time a customer reacted, it opened the |
| 2:07.3 | door to a bigger ambition. So eventually, he pitched his local Whole Foods, and then more |
| 2:13.1 | whole foods, and then grocery chains across the country. And along the way, Justin kept experimenting. |
| 2:19.9 | What started with a food processor in his kitchen became a business built around flavored |
| 2:25.0 | nutbutters, flavors like maple and honey and cinnamon. But there was a problem. A typical jar of |
| 2:32.5 | peanut butter in someone's pantry lasts a long time, |
| 2:36.0 | especially if you're not making PB&J for kids on a daily basis. So after some early success, |
| 2:43.3 | sales of Justin's nutbutters started to stagnate. And that was a problem because, well, |
| 2:49.0 | what do you do when you hit a wall that seems immovable? |
| 2:52.9 | Well, in Justin's case, he climbed over that wall with an idea he got while working at REI and going for long bike rides. |
| 3:00.8 | An innovation that would help propel Justin's nutbutters into a huge nationally known product, |
... |
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