How Koel Thomae built Noosa from a holiday taste to a national yogurt brand

Executive overview

Koel Thomae tasted an obscure Australian yogurt once on holiday and spent years obsessed with bringing it to the US. She had no dairy experience, no manufacturing, and no business plan — just a licensed recipe and a cold call to a Colorado dairy farmer.

Starting with $400k between three partners and 10-gallon Home Depot buckets, she grew Noosa to ~$45M revenue before bringing in private equity to scale further. A majority stake sale in 2014 and an eventual acquisition by Campbell's gave her two profitable exits.

Passion for a product, not a payday, is what carried the business through its hardest years.

From holiday discovery to licensing deal

• Tasted Queensland Yoghurt on the Sunshine Coast in 2005 — whole-milk, honey-infused, passion fruit — and found nothing comparable in the US
• Cold-called the maker (Matthewson family) on the spot; spent two years obsessing before returning to Australia in 2007 to pitch a licensing deal
• Over a three-hour lunch, agreed: Matthewsons would license the recipe for $1, invest cash, and send a yogurt-maker to help with startup
• Equity split: Matthewsons 50%, Thomae 25%, dairy farmer Rob Graves 25%

Building manufacturing from nothing

• Colorado's Pasteurized Milk Ordinance blindsided her — the state health inspector sent her home with a binder and told her not to come back until she understood it
• Cold-called Rob Graves of Morning Fresh Dairy (fourth-generation, already selling bottled milk at Whole Foods) after spotting a coffee-shop flyer
• Convinced Rob by shipping her mother's frozen yogurt samples from Australia through customs
• Made yogurt in 10-gallon Home Depot buckets for over a year; Rob's engineering skills eventually cracked how to scale the cultures without losing flavor

Getting into retail

• Whole Foods hated the packaging (an 8oz hummus-style tub) but loved the taste; Thomae wore them down by promising to demo in every Colorado store herself
• Launched January 2010 in ~10 Colorado Whole Foods; initial shelf life was just 28 days
• Sampled store employees as well as consumers; built relationships with stockers and managers
• Boulder Farmers Market created a groundswell and generated inbound from out-of-state retailers

The ShopRite disaster — and the lesson

• Said yes to 250 ShopRite stores in New York in 2011 without a proper cash-flow model
• Missed delivery windows by minutes meant rejected loads; stores were inconsistently set; slotting fees and spoilage drained cash
• Pulled out after ~6 months, writing off at least $100k — ShopRite said they'd never carry the brand again
• Key takeaway: no inventory control discipline in the first two years; every opportunity was accepted without strategy

Scaling on Target's coattails

• Stealth Target buyers tried Noosa at Expo West 2012; Target offered a test in ~250 Super Target stores
• Four months later, expanded to 1,000 additional stores — forcing Thomae to stop signing new retailer contracts entirely
• Grew to nearly $20M revenue by end of 2012; extended shelf life from 28 to 45 days through manufacturing investment
• By 2014, revenue was ~$40-45M with six copycat whole-milk yogurts from Dannon, Hain Celestial, and Kroger entering the market

Partner tensions and the PE deal

• Three-way veto structure with no defined decision-maker — worked while growth was easy, became a bottleneck on the rocket ship
• Core disputes: paying salaries, giving equity to hires, how aggressively to grow
• Hired an investment banker in 2014; Advent International took a majority stake — the most stressful period of Thomae's career while the deal was in diligence
• New professional management team installed by early 2015 was a "game changer" — Thomae credits it as the business's second, better chapter
• Sovos Brands acquired Noosa; Campbell's later acquired Sovos — Thomae collected a second payout on her rolled-over minority stake