Business View Magazine - August 2016 65
able from its Elkhart-based location. “We can go to the
state of New York and open up a franchise,” he says.
“We have the real estate opportunities with our part-
ners at Wal-Mart; we have real estate openings with
our partners at Meijer, and all the mall locations. But
feeding those folks with the product – we wanted to
make sure that our efficiencies and our capabilities
were met and that’s why we partnered with Gordon
Food Services. It’s a big deal in our business, because
we can flip a switch and within several weeks, we can
have a distribution network set up to feed those loca-
tions with Ben’s Soft Pretzels proprietary ingredients.
They have distribution centers throughout the East
coast as well as all of Canada. So their model works
for us.”
Jillian Koeneman is the company’s Vice President
for Marketing. She also reflects on this past year’s
achievements: “From a marketing perspective, we’ve
grown leaps and bounds,” she declares. “We appeared
on Fox and Friends; we appeared on the Today Show.
So we’re reaching a large amount of people. We just
experienced National Pretzel Day and we reached over
95 million people on that day, alone. We partnered
with the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund - they provide
medical funds and all kinds of support for men and
women who came back from the war injured. And on
National Pretzel day in April, we raised $30,000 in one
day for that organization. And we’ll raise money again
for them in October.”
Jones reports that Ben’s is targeting new franchise
opportunities in cities such as Cincinnati, Louisville,
Milwaukee, and Detroit, and all states east of the Mis-
sissippi, as well as Texas and Oklahoma. “We have
readily-available real estate and we have the ability
