UCLA Anderson Professor Andres Terech Talks Halo Top Success In LA Times
Halo Top, the healthier alternative to standard ice cream, has ousted Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs, and is now the number one selling ice cream pint in grocery stores. In an interview with the LA Times from Ronald White, UCLA Anderson School of Management professor Andres Terech spoke on whether Halo Top’s model is sustainable.
Halo Top’s founder, Justin Woolverton, another UCLA graduate, perfected the ice cream recipe in his kitchen with a $20 ice cream maker. Woolverton was working as a lawyer at Latham & Watkins when he started experimenting in the kitchen to create an ice cream that would fit into his diet. After establishing Halo Top, Woolverton got the product into Whole Foods and a few other chains via cold-calling.
“It took me a year to figure out how to really make ice cream. I had a good $150,000 in credit cards just to rack up. I mean, it was headfirst. It was a risk,” Woolverton said.
Woolverton’s team does not work in traditional offices, but rather a co-working space in the Fairfax District of LA. The team members generally do the bulk of their work from home. They alternate between getting together at the co-working space and communicating electronically. According to Cal State Northridge Professor and Interim Dean, Deborah Cours, the team’s technique is to outsource production and distribution so that they can focus solely on brand strategy. In this way, Halo Top’s success is widely considered a testament to building a strong brand.
Halo Top has also been in the news lately because of its completely bizarre Kubrick-esque commercial, which is both the year’s most frightening ad as well as its best.
Terech received his Ph.D. in marketing from Anderson in 2004. His work on branding, pricing, and retail has appeared in publications like Case Research Journal and Harvard Business Review.
Top MBA Recruiters: Unilever
A job is possible for any determined MBA graduate. Obviously, the ideal job differs from graduate to graduate, but if you’re into sustainable choices for consumers, Unilever might be right for you. The company specializes in household products like soap, shampoo, and even iced tea. Well-known brands like Lipton and Dove are also underneath the Unilever umbrella.
The corporation consistently makes it on Forbes‘ top companies lists. Currently, Unilever is 103rd on the Global 2000 and 87th for America’s Best Employers. In 2013, it also came in 63rd among Innovative Companies. While students who study health and medicine rank the company highest, business and commerce students ranked it 12th in terms of attractiveness, according to Universum data. Broadly, LinkedIn ranked Unilever 8th in the world in a list of attractive employers.
The company employees 169,000 people with 46 percent of its managers women. With an MBA, maybe you could be next.
Why Unilever?
Unilever’s been around since 1930. It made bar soap a thing. It also helped popularize margarine, fish fingers, and frozen vegetables. The company truly revolutionized the modern age. Who wouldn’t want to be part of a legacy?
Unilever is also global: Its Indian branch, Hindustan Unilever, was ranked one of the world’s most innovative companies this year by Forbes for how it broke up the country into clusters to cater to different regions appropriately. The company has branches in Africa, throughout the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. So a job at Unilever can take you anywhere in the world.
The corporation isn’t like most. It has a clear mission, one dedicated to health and well-being. It’s launched campaigns around the world to help bring facts around nutrition to developing countries. Unilever is currently working on halving the environmental impact of its products.
According to Glassdoor, Unilever offers some competitive salaries. Associate brand and finance managers can expect to make $95,000 a year, on average. Once a person reaches the finance or brand manager (without the associate), the salary increases by about $20,000. Overall, the ratings are high on Glassdoor, where employees are known to be brutally honest.
The company also boasts the ability for graduates to continue learning while at Unilever. It’s a place that allows individuals to grow and build upon their career—the ideal environment for a recent grad.
Working at Unilever
It may not be much of a surprise, but a lot of people want to work at Unilever. LinkedIn compiled a list of North America’s top 100 in-demand employers in 2015, with Unilever coming in 25th: ranked higher than Fox, Warner Bros, and Whole Foods Market.
The company has a global MBA recruitment channel where it looks for MBA holders who have at least three years experience in finance, marketing, or supply chain. The channel connects applicants with available openings for which they’re qualified, like an associate finance manager position with Ben & Jerry’s, another one of Unilever’s brands. Or what about a production support engineer? Unilever offers a variety of positions relevant to MBA graduates.
This is perfect because MBA students have been clear that they’d like to work at Unilever. It sat 34th on a list of 100 employers where MBA students said they’d like. MBA candidates from NYU Stern, the Wharton School, and Rutgers Business School have gone on to work for Unilever.
