Pinkberry - Investors, CSR, and Crisis Management

In regards to investor relations, Pinkberry has two investment firms that have given them significant capital. Maveron, which is a venture capital firm, gave $27.5 million Pinkberry to take the brands growth nationwide in 2007 according to Wikipedia. A page about the executive team, on the website shows that in fact, two Maveron execs are members on Pinkberry’s board, Howard Schultz (Chairman at Starbucks) and Dan Levitan (co-founder and managing partner of Maveron).  Highland Capital Partners, has also invested heavily in the company. 

Pinkberry at its core is a franchise, and therefore seeks out experienced businesspeople as investors to partner with for additional store locations. They have information and links on the main website for franchise opportunity, including contact information for the licensing team within the corporate office.

As a global brand, Pinkberry has stores located in 5 of the 7 continents worldwide. The brand doesn’t appear to have any out front lobbying strategies at this time. In order to open stores in so many countries I’m sure that they have solid operations that follow governmental rule. They did recently open a store in D.C – I wonder if they give high profile officials free frozen yogurt like cops get free coffee? :-) 

With Facebook pages for several different locations like Russia, Pinkberry has an extensive social platform in order to reach its customer base in every community. Because Pinkberry has only been in business since 2005, they’re still relatively new as a corporation therefore a solid corporate social responsibility strategy isn’t in place just yet. They actually have a relatively small corporate team, consisting of only 40 employees currently. Pinkberry CEO, Ron Graves states this is because they’re still young, “We’re a startup. We’ve got to be responsible and run as lean as we can.” Source. They do currently offer partnership with non-profit causes to help with fundraising, donating a percentage of sales in a specific store to the specific cause being championed.  They also claim to source their ingredients from around the globe, which makes sense since they are more a global then local company.  

Pinkberry has faced a serious crisis in the past, when in their first year of opening in 2005 the Los Angeles Times ousted them for not actually having the correct number of live cultures according to California regulations to call themselves real yogurt. Pinkberry denied any wrongdoing, stating that yogurt indeed was in the frozen treat. Below is a screen shot of what was posted to the website in reaction to the claim (and subsequent lawsuit):

However, they eventually changed the recipe so that they could officially receive the Live and Active Cultures Seal from the National Yogurt Association. This didn’t happen for three years, and in that time they continued to grow, and any negative press didn’t seem to hurt them. While blogs and articles were publishing about the lawsuit, Pinkberry went about growing business, and quietly correcting the recipe.

When faced with a crisis, I would say that reacting quickly, (even if just with a simple blanket press statement that states the issue is being researched) is the most important strategy. With the public being viewed as shareholders in today’s markets, and the ever-expending digital platforms to which news is broadcast, companies must be proactive in response time during any crisis. 

Fast forward six years later, Pinkberry did something right when faced with a crisis about the very integrity of their product, because they’re still thriving.