Jeni Britton Bauer is the founder and chief creative officer of Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams.
Before she started Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams, Jeni Britton Bauer attended Ohio State University, and studied art history and fine art. While in college, one of her friends was a chemistry graduate student who gave her vials of scented chemicals, which led her to gather essential oils, make her own perfume, and sell her perfumes for a few years.[2]
Britton Bauer experimented with the scentless but spicy essential oil of cayenne pepper, and decided to mush it into chocolate ice cream to make a spicy frozen chocolate. She realized that ice cream was "the perfect carrier of scent," and she immediately started making many other flavors of ice cream with essential oils. Two weeks later, she decided that she wanted to make scented ice cream as a business, and dropped out of Ohio State.[2]
Britton Bauer teamed up with one of her friends, and attempted multiple times to open up a stall in the North Market area of Columbus. However, the market constantly rejected them because it did not believe that an ice cream store had a place at their market. It wasn’t until PBS aired a feature about ice cream being sold at a market that the North Market reconsidered.[2]
As a result, in 1996, Britton Bauer opened the first prototype store in the North Market area of Columbus, and she called it Scream Ice Creams. Some of the first few flavors were Salty Caramel, Wildberry Lavender, and Hot Chocolate. After making her own ice cream for four years, Britton Bauer closed Scream, and decided to attend the ice cream short course at Penn State.[2]
Britton Bauer had served one flavor a day at Scream, but realized, when a coffee shop was out of her favorite orange scone, that such a limited selection could be disappointing for customers. Afterwards, she realized Scream's mistakes and wrote a new business plan. Britton Bauer got a job at the North Market, and proposed opening a new ice cream store at the market for nearly a year without success. Meanwhile, her boyfriend bought her an Italian gelato machine that she could not afford at the time, and began making her own ice cream again at home.[2]
Later, the first Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams opened in 2002, also in the North Market, which was different from Scream in several ways. While Scream offered its customers only one flavor at a time, Jeni's offered customers several flavors. From opening day of Jeni's, the store was incredibly popular. Within the first year, her boyfriend's brother joined the company, making him the third member of the company in addition to Jeni and then-boyfriend now-husband Charlie.[2]
Three years later, in 2005, a state regulator alerted Jeni's that they didn't have a proper license that was required to sell ice cream in a market. As a result, Britton Bauer and her colleagues realized that they needed to open a brand new ice cream production facility instead of making the ice cream in the market. In 2006, Jeni opened her first store out of the market, and continued to expand into other locations in the area. In 2009, after Jeni, Charlie, and Charlie's brother realized that they needed a CEO, their close friend John Lowe quit his job at General Electric to become the company's first and only CEO.[2]