In 1980, Greg Steltenpohl bought a box of oranges and borrowed a couple of hundreds bucks to buy a hand squeezing machine so he could sell fresh orange juice out of a van around San Francisco.
“That was my first taste of business entrepreneurialism in the beverage industry,” Greg describes.
The small start-up would one day form the basis of Odwalla, a multimillion-dollar US supplier of fresh juice and nourishing healthy beverages, which Greg founded. The brand, later purchased by Coca-Cola, remains one of the fastest growing beverage ranges in the company’s suite of products.
“Odwalla was a huge education in the business world of beverages,” Greg says. “I built it from scratch into a medium-size business. We were a publicly-owned company for a while and it became one of the first natural food companies that broke out into American mainstream culture. I’m extremely proud of that.”
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