Alumni Thriving on Locust: Poppa’s Custard – A Wharton MBA Serves Simple, Healthy Desserts

Many cultures celebrate their family legacy through sharing recipes, memories, and food. Josh Johnson, Wharton WG’2015, celebrates his dear Aunt LaDessia Johnson through her custard recipe. Josh is one third of the founding team for Poppa’s Custard, a chilled custard dessert. The remaining ownership is with his wife Christen Johnson, Penn Graduate School of Education C’2017 and Josh’s sister Jewel. Jewel is a rock star pastry chef that recently appeared on the Food Network hit show Beat Bobby Flay – and she beat Bobby Flay!! This all-star family business is elevating the inclusive dessert scene for foodies, and they are just getting started!

I met Josh at a Wharton Alumni Happy Hour in Philadelphia nine months ago, when he was sampling his custard at the event. I managed to snag a 4 oz jar and Josh encouraged me to caramelize a peach with butter and cinnamon to compliment the chilled custard. WOW! This dessert was delicious – and I’ve been keeping tabs on Josh ever since. Interestingly enough, Josh and I also attend the same church – Antioch Christian Fellowship – but I did not connect those dots until the interview.

Josh is an engineer by training and worked at McKinsey for nine years before pursuing entrepreneurship in the consumer-packaged goods industry (CPG) full-time. Within three years, Poppa’s Custard has expanded to 20+ retailers across the Northeast. The product has been featured in countless food and trade shows and has an award-winning executive chef. Poppas’s Custard is a budding CPG start-up with a passion for family, togetherness and has so much momentum. Check out the interview below for Josh’s ownership journey, efforts to scale the business, and tips for rising entrepreneurs in business school.

AZ: Share your journey to Wharton and ways that you leaned into entrepreneurship during business school.

JJ: “My journey to Wharton is storied and while I knew I wanted to attend a top tier business school, I didn’t have the greatest undergrad experience and faced adversity during my freshmen year. I subsequently spent the remaining years during undergrad improving my scholastic outlook. Then I participated in a technical master’s program focused on engineering and earned my Masters of Science in Engineering (MSE) in 2009. I knew I wanted to build a general business experience as the next layer of my technical training. I met my wife, Christen, in undergrad, and we got married one week before pre-term started at Wharton! I was admitted off the waitlist in late July. While I was ecstatic to spend my first two years of marriage with my wife at Wharton, we did not have any accommodations together when classes started! I drove from Detroit to Philly overnight, and I found a place for us in University City.

I have always recognized my calling towards ownership. While I didn’t have any idea about the business or the idea, I knew ownership was my terminal career goal. I did not want to be a senior executive or CEO, acknowledging that these roles are stepping stones toward ownership. I see them as a means to an end to substantiate my skills so that my resume qualified me. My vision for ownership became a North Star as I navigated business school. Interestingly, I did not take advantage of the entrepreneurship curriculum or specific start-up related opportunities. Reflecting, I truly recognize this as a miss on my part. I was more focused on my short-term goals to become a consultant at McKinsey as an interim step towards ownership.

The vibrant student community at Wharton was a highlight for me. I recall spending a lot of time with the African American MBA Association (AAMBAA) and the Veterans Club. Outside the classroom, I spent most of my time preparing for case interviews during my first year, and my passion for mentorship led me to pay it forward by case prepping other first year students during my second year. The community showed up for me during a societal shift when in 2014 Eric Garner was tragically murdered by the police in Staten Island, New York. I was deeply conflicted, seeing another viral moment of social media of another Black man become a victim of police brutality. Eric can’t breathe, and I can’t breathe either. I actually showed up to the Huntsman Hall cafeteria wearing all black with an “I can’t breathe” sign and just stood there in solidarity for Black men. I attended all classes in that same attire all day – as an ode to Eric Garner and other black victims from police brutality.

I needed a space to process my pain and cope with the tragic reality of how Black men were treated in America. I was met with compassion by some students, but not all – and my answer was to support rising Black leaders in their career journeys. I would block my calendar for 12 hours and spent 12 hours case prepping member of the African diaspora community of students that need coaching to interview at consulting companies. I took this moment as an opportunity to build authentic relationships with others who understand my reality, and supported the cause for equitable treatment for Black people in America.

I also prioritized my wife and my marriage during business school. We did not live in Rittenhouse, and we only attended treks and global trips if both schedules and financing could be accommodated. Christen and I wanted a shared experience together, so we prioritized clubs and activities as a unit. If you knew me, you knew my wife and we had shared friends. I also made it clear to my wife that my last employee gig would be at McKinsey, and we actively cultivated a network that reflected owners, and people with ownership acumen that aligned towards our goals.”

AZ: Tell me more about the family business, the family recipe, and your approach to honor family through cooking to keep your ownership dream alive.

JJ: “Poppa’s Custard started as a pandemic business to honor my Aunt Laessia. She passed during the first wave of COVID in 2020, and we were not allowed to have a proper celebration of her life. She was always creating hot sauces, had an amazing recipe for limoncello, and she always hosted the fish fry! It was very challenging to not adequately pay our respects to my aunt; we only received a photo of her in the casket from the funeral home. My sister has been a professional chef for over 10 years. Jewel has been featured on the Food Network six-plus times to compete and showcase her food. We are all so proud of her recent accolade to Beat Bobby Flay! We wanted to pay homage to our aunt, and this business was a forcing function for us to spend more time together. I was an Engagement Manager at the time at McKinsey. My wife is a nonprofit executive, and we all had three separate but equally intense schedules. We wanted to build a business around family, togetherness, and our shared love for food.

So we took this custard recipe that Jewel pioneered, the same recipe she would use for service when she was cooking in a restaurant. Funny story: I used this recipe to impress my in-laws when I first met them. Christen and I are happily married with three kids, so this recipe is tried-and-true! The recipe has two flavors, original and chocolate, and we offer a vegan option in both flavors since my youngest daughter has a food allergy. The name “Poppa’s Custard” isn’t because of grandpa. I was born premature. When my family prayed over me in the NICU, my mom gave me the nickname Poppa; she called me her “Poppa-son” since I looked like an old man! My aunt Roselyn, the remaining matriarch in my family, affectionately calls me that to this day!

We started selling the product at local farmers markets. That was a journey for us, and we decided to put the custard in jars and sell it at a certain price – and some people looked at us and thought we were crazy!! We receive a lot of side-eyes on the price when people are unfamiliar with the product, so there is a lot of education that comes with selling it. We realized that once customers taste it, they understand that our product is quite literally the filling for a crème brûlée and desserts on a menu sell for $15 each. Our jars are $7, so that was really the impetus of our product/market strategy and every step since has reflected a gradual measured risk.

Depending on the market, some days we sold 20 jars and other days we sold more. We had a breakthrough, and we sold $30K worth of product in a 10-day period. We took a step on faith and vended at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s annual flower show, which hosts up to 250,000 people over 10 days. At that time, this became the biggest investment that we had made as a business. We were subsequently featured on 6ABC Action news, providing excellent press and product awareness at a random market where people who had no idea who we are, [learned] our story! Customers saw us at this place, tasted our product, and knew immediately that it was quality. I left McKinsey to pursue this business full-time, and we connected during our rebranding of the product, after having just landed our first distributor.”

AZ: Wow! Let’s discuss the scaling phase and how the Wharton community has shown up for you!

JJ: “As of this year, we have transitioned to a contract packager, meaning we have a small, intermediate size company that produces and packages our products. We are in the process of onboarding our second distributor. Poppa’s Custard is going to be in the Specialty Food Association’s Summer Fancy Food Show, the largest, most prestigious food industry conference on the East Coast in New York in June. This is the Oscars of specialty food, and we won a free placement bid because they saw our business, and believed in us! We recently won another pitch competition in Philly, so we are focused on exposure to new channels and discipline expansion on the East Coast, since we are self-funded with the added challenge of being in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry.

In CPG, and particularly in food, the venture funding is tough because it is a capital-intensive industry. If you don’t already have an established business, meaning $1M+ annual recurring revenue as a start-up, your scale is not attractive to venture funds, as a prevailing sentiment. Further, people are scared about the economy, so not a lot of friends and family and angel investors have been willing to write checks. We have to invest the cash that we have to grow profitably period, because if we don’t grow profitably, there’s no funding from another source. We run our business profitably, as that is the only option and it’s very challenging – but that’s ultimately the goal of entrepreneurship: running a healthy profitable business. We constantly evaluate how the business decisions translate into the gross margins and analyze how that margin stacks down to net profit. If it’s not going to stack down to net profit on day one, then the team needs to have a pretty clear idea on how it stacks down to net profit [within an agreed upon time frame] because it can’t always be scaling.

To support the test-and-grow model that is helping us scale, I have tapped many sources of the network from personal friends, Wharton classmates, and former colleagues from work. This extended network helps me to better understand the industry, define success, make connections, and encourage me in this journey. I have had conversations with Wharton connections to review materials and the pitch deck for commercial opportunities, to adjust the approach to be more attractive to this type of customer and leverage their word of mouth to make an introduction to someone else that can be really helpful. These networks and these connections have helped to open the door or started the conversation for meaningful transactions. It’s essential to start building credibility in this space, when you don’t have venture backing.

Another tangible example: I was pitching to the food service company that runs the cafeteria at Goldman Sachs. I sent text messages to my Wharton network saying that I would be in this building, during this time, and invited classmates to sample products for a few moments. I just wanted folks to try the products and give me honest feedback. Having 15 familiar faces show up to encourage me was absolutely massive for my confidence. [I left professional services] spaces not too long ago, but here I am [in a new domain in these spaces]. These moments of tasting my product have led to meaningful business conversations and have added to a fresh perspective of classmates advocating for the brand. [It’s all a part of the hustle and] Poppa’s Custard is now in 20+ retailers across Philly and expanding to NY and DC in the near future!”

AZ: What advice do you have for budding entrepreneurs and current Wharton students/MBAs interested in building a start-up?

JJ: “My advice is to clearly define your goals and success outcomes up front and know what you want out of the experience. The MBA is fundamentally different from the undergrad degree. The more that students can define these objectives for themselves – and are hyper-specific on what these goals are – the more they can focus their time on the activities and opportunities that get them where they want to go to achieve their goals. FOMO isn’t really a thing if you know what your individual goals are and are taking deliberate steps to achieve them. This can be confusing for budding entrepreneurs because you have to be insane to be an entrepreneur, particularly if you are trying to raise capital. Jokingly, unless you built a business, and you’ve already exited and earned millions of dollars, then capital is not really a risk for you.

Entrepreneurs have to intensely believe in your business or start-up and have tough skin. Do not understate mentally the effort you have to make to grind through those hard spots because entrepreneurship is comparable to being out on the skinny branches of a tree all the time and every gust of wind feels like a hurricane! It’s essential to be rooted in your WHY and be centered on something other than this sexy entrepreneurial thing.

Another layer of advice that I have for entrepreneurs and really anyone interested in a start-up is to get simple, practice experience running a business. There is a tremendous opportunity to gain experience running a low or no tech business – a taco truck, for example! Consider this a teaching moment for entrepreneurs to internalize the day-to-day aspects of physical hard work, where the hands, back, and feet hurt. This mentality of physically making something happen that’s going to build on the conceptual knowledge base for growing a profitable business. Using the taco truck example, if you can’t do the taxes on time, square up all the money, and manage payroll, then it will be difficult to run a business.

There is a valuable knowledge transfer into how much investors may need to lean into a support a tech business. It’s important to be self-aware of how your experience is positioned in early-stage start-ups, and it’s important to avoid investors who might have to babysit and have more oversight into operationalizing the business idea. There is more merit and value when entrepreneurs can pitch their idea and demonstrate their abilities and skill set towards running a business.”

AZ: Josh, it’s been a pleasure to spent time understanding your journey to building Poppa’s Custard. Your journey to ownership and creating a business built on inclusive desserts and family togetherness to honor your Aunt LaDessia Johnson is an inspiration. It’s clear that God has His hand on your life and your steps are ordered – from the NICU to the NY food show. Thank you for sharing wisdom to guide the next group of rising entrepreneurs, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

Azline is a Waterloo, IA native and a National Gates Millennium Scholar. She earned a B.A. in International Studies and French at Spelman College. She has visited 52 countries, having lived in Geneva, Switzerland, and interned in Dakar, Senegal and Accra, Ghana. Azline worked for Delta Air Lines for seven years before earning her MBA in Finance from The Wharton School and her M.A. in French African Studies from the Lauder Institute. She currently works at Vanguard in Philadelphia.

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