Ep. 17 | Doug Bouton - From Big Law to Big Ice Cream
Manage episode 349538697 series 3325495
Doug Bouton is the CEO of Gatsby Chocolate, a low on sugar, high on taste, chocolate brand (now that’s Doug’s claim – I haven’t tasted it yet, and when I do, I’m sure it will be amazing, but if it’s not high on taste, I’ll be sure to lie about it. Nah, Doug has a good track record). He’s also the CEO of Halo Top International, a low calorie, high quality ice cream brand.
Doug went to the University of Virginia for Law School and aced their famous ice cream making class. I’m kidding. There’s no freaking ice cream making class at the Virginia Law School, nor in any law school in the country. Now here’s the scoop folks (get it, the scoop?!) – while Doug didn’t take a course in law school on ice cream making, I actually did. And no I’m not kidding this time.
When I was in law school, I audited an undergrad course at Harvard called the Science of Cooking. (And you can take actually take that course on edX.) It was an unbelievable class, each week one of the best chefs in the world would visit. Now one of the classes was dedicated to, you guessed it, the science of making ice cream.
Doug graduated law school in 2010 and did corporate work at Proskauer for two years before leaving to start Halo Top ice cream with fellow lawyer Justin Woolverton out of Justin’s kitchen. The two of them grew the brand to more than $300 million in sales and turned it into the #1 selling ice cream in the United States, outselling the likes of Ben & Jerry’s, Haagen-Dazs, and Breyers. (And that's before Ben & Jerry's stupid boycotting Israel decision.)
Halo Top’s US operations were sold in 2019, and Doug now serves as the CEO of Halo Top’s international operations. In 2021, Doug founded Gatsby Chocolate, the first-ever low-calorie chocolate brand with the goal of doing to chocolate what Halo Top did to ice cream.
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Joseph Gerstel
26 episodes