John Lowe
Attorney John Lowe didn’t plan on having a career in the specialty food business—nor anticipate he’d oversee a recall crisis—but that’s exactly where he is. And he couldn’t be happier about it.
Inspiration
Lowe, 42, was such good friends with Jeni Britton Bauer and Charly Bauer, founders of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream, he joked about doing their incorporation paperwork in exchange for ice cream and beer. This was the early aughts and he was enjoying his career as legal counsel for GE Aviation, able to afford plenty of pints of his favorite flavor, Salty Caramel. His law job began to take a toll, however, when the financial crisis hit in 2008.
“Those were personally very difficult times,” Lowe says. “Out of the blue, the Bauers called me and said, ‘Come be our CEO.’”
At the time, there were only four Jeni’s shops so he wasn’t sure they needed a CEO. He and his wife discussed it for six months. “Jeni and Charly are on a very, very short list of people we knew we could trust,” he says. He was well aware of the Bauers’ integrity when it came to high-quality ingredients and philanthropy for local organizations, which led him to accept their offer. In 2009, Columbus, Ohio became home base. “I was very excited because Jeni’s might be the finest ice cream in the world, but it had not yet started its wholesale business. I had to figure out how to maximize her great talents.”
Impact
For six years, Jeni’s had tremendous success, growing to 20 scoop shops across the country, from Los Angeles to Charleston, South Carolina. By 2015, more than 1,800 retailers carried the brand nationwide. “We were feeling great about the company and the team we had built and the opportunities in front of us,” Lowe says. “We were having a heck of a lot of fun.”
Last spring, however, the fun stopped. That’s when Lowe learned the FDA had called saying they might have found listeria in a pint of Jeni’s in Nebraska. Food contaminated with listeria monocytogenes, a genus of bacteria, can cause serious illness and even death. Because of a recent recall of Blue Bell Ice Cream, the FDA had been randomly testing brands in a store in Lincoln.
“It was a gut punch beyond all gut punches,” Lowe says. “We realized if there was listeria in a single pint of ice cream, we had no basis for knowing if it was just in that batch or everything we’d made.” A decision had to be made quickly. “We decided to go very broad very quickly so as not to harm anybody. I couldn’t be more proud of our leadership team. There was unanimity that we would close down our shops and recall everything.”
This was a voluntary move, not ordered by the FDA. Millions of dollars worth of ice cream was destroyed. No one ever reported getting sick from any Jeni’s products. Within a month or so, Jeni’s was up and running again, having addressed and corrected every possible issue and making sure its facilities and ingredients were safe. One month later, however, listeria was discovered again during a routine swabbing of the floor at the Columbus plant. It was not detected in any of Jeni’s products, but Lowe and his team again shut down production and all shops.
“There’s a strong argument we overreacted the second time,” Lowe says. “But we didn’t feel comfortable continuing to produce ice cream until we figured it out. This time, they took months to fully perform an investigation on food safety protocols. Lowe believes the problem originated with a poorly designed water cooling tower. They got rid of it and resumed production last fall.
The Future
Lowe says he is excited about leaving 2015 in the rear-view mirror, and not only for professional reasons. Three weeks before the phone call from the FDA, an array of tests pointed to advanced lung cancer. “For a month, it appeared I was looking into a world where my three boys [ages 10, 7, and 5] were going to grow up without a dad,” he says. “I had to prep our leadership team since I thought I was going to have a procedure done and start chemo. The company I loved was melting down and I thought I had Stage IIIB lung cancer. It couldn’t have been a worse few months.”
A biopsy finally proved he had a fungal infection in his lungs, histoplasmosis, tied to bat guano he may have picked up in Costa Rica.
“We began making ice cream again on the same day I had the biopsy,” Lowe says. “Tears of joy don’t quite do the moment justice when the doctor comes running in, yelling, “It’s not cancer! It’s not cancer!”
Following several months of anti-fungal medication, Lowe is feeling fine again and able to indulge in his current favorite Jeni’s flavors: sweet potato pecan praline and buttercup pumpkin with Amaretti cookies.
“We took a lot of really tough punches and we are better for it,” he says. “We learned a lot about our team and our capabilities, and boy is it fun to get to play offense again. There’s a limitless possibility for the things we can do going into the future.”