Sometimes the Best Decision for Your Company Isn’t the Most Popular
Sometimes the Best Decision for Your Company Isn’t the Most Popular
An Interview with James Tonkin
Yitzi Weiner Mar 28, 2019
“…reading his book gave me a lot of insight into making good decisions for the right reasons. Sometimes they may not be popular but they’re really important. Nobody told me that before I got in to becoming a leader myself. Understanding how you make good decisions and sharing that decision making process with others so they buy into the concept is really important.”
I had the pleasure of interviewing James S. Tonkin, President and Founder HealthyBrandBuilders
For more than 44 years, Jim has served the private sector as a brand and marketing development professional and Founder and President of HealthyBrandBuilders. He directs the building and design of national infrastructures for food and beverage industry clients.
Tonkin has successfully created and implemented business and financial strategies for domestic and international players focusing from production to branding, marketing through sales implementation and distribution, to include exit strategy. Tonkin has focused branding initiatives in soft drink, bottled water, functional foods and beverages, and non- carbonated “new age” beverage verticals.
His extensive hands-on expertise has stretched across many sectors including domestic cheeses to natural potato chips; bottled waters for people and pets; and nutraceutical-functional-cosmeceutical enhanced beverages. Jim serves as a popular keynote speaker covering new beverage trends, successful branding insight and with his blunt and sometimes stinging humor, pushes the envelope! He has many repeat performances and is truly a respected and admired entrepreneur in his own right!
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I got into the industry kind of circuitously. I graduated from the University of Oregon in 1973 and immediately went into my father’s business, which was a manufacturing operation as well as a distributorship for 7UP, A&W Root Beer, the Crush line, Welch’s…
We had about 60 different brands in the Bay area and Sacramento and up to the Nevada border. I worked for my dad from ’73 until ’82. I went through a massive training program until I became Vice President, General Manager of the business.
Once I got there I realized In 1982 that I did not want to produce carbonated soft drinks anymore and continue to be a participant in this horrible lack of nutritious oriented kind of business. And so I had no idea what I was going to do but I left the business and was in Hawaii on vacation trying to figure out what I was going to do with myself.
I started eating these Maui style potato chips, which are Russet potatoes with the skin left on. Eventually I called the guy on the back of the bag of potato chips and I ended up going to his house and spending three days with him learning how to manufacture the product. I came back to the mainland in the Bay Area and I built a plant to be able to produce in mass the type of products he was producing in the basement of his house.
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