Lifestyle

Exclusive Interview with Pinkberry CEO, Ron Graves

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Last Thursday was the pre-grand opening of the fourth Pinkberry to be opened here in San Diego.  Taken place a day before the actual grand-opening at the Fashion Valley location, Pinkberry celebrated the opening of the event with a complimentary sample of the brand’s famous frozen yogurt with your choice of toppings.

For the past six years, Pinkberry has been leading the frozen yogurt market with its fresh motto, a bold sense of design, and great customer service.

“Back in 2005, there was nothing else like Pinkberry,” Ron Graves, CEO of Pinkberry told SDEntertainer.  “It was really one of a kind when Pinkberry launched and it just really reignited the frozen yogurt category.”

And this is because Pinkberry doesn’t just focus on giving their customers “authentic and high-quality treats that their customers can resonate to.”  When someone enters a Pinkberry store for the first time, they know they are in a Pinkberry.  And Graves makes the point that one of the values that his company upholds is social connections.

He states that one thing Pinkberry team members like to do most is engage over the topping bar, share what they like, and ask new visitors what they’d like to try.  With over 30 toppings and 6 flavors that you can mix and change around, there’s definitely an abundance of potential combinations to try.

Pinkberry’s interactive spirit gets easily carried onto the company’s growing sense of community.  To Pinkberry, whose profits come from a niche product, connecting with people fosters not only a sense of community, but when the yogurt company decided to take over the formerly D’Lush beverage joint inside Fashion Valley Mall,  location also factored a great deal into the planning of the facility.

And it wasn’t just the physical attributes of the facility that affected the progress of opening a Pinkberry inside the mall.  A lot of attention was galvanized towards how Pinkberry could connect locally.

That was solved when Pinkberry decided to donate a dollar to the USO with every purchase of the newest Pinkberry flavor, the Peanut Butter + Jelly, which has been getting equally rave reviews from avid fans of the older flavors.

Graves reinforces that Pinkberry, who is known for their “fresh, high-quality ingredients, with a taste profile that balances sweet, and tart, light, refreshing, and clean,” spends a lot of time and effort into each new Pinkberry creation.

Graves gives the latest Pinkberry recipe as an example:  “We don’t just launch a flavor. We go through a lot of work to get it out there.  [For the PJ & J,] it’s the organic jelly.  And we make sure it’s paired well together.  The toasted bread crumbs—they’re unique and it all works well together.”

Even when a flavor that is launched does not work out, Pinkberry doesn’t see it as a setback.  The people behind the tasty frozen treat factor in customer feedback and use all the information they can gather, not excluding global trends, to provide Pinkberry customers the best possibly product.

Because at the end of the day, Pinkberry is presenting to you more than just an ordinary frozen yogurt treat; they are extending a culinary offering.

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