CAMBRIDGE — A good entrepreneur has the foresight to identify largely undiscovered product or idea, recognize that it fits today’s zeitgeist, and present it in a way that people can’t resist. A great entrepreneur can do that across many different industries. Over and over again. Jon Flint and Terry McGuire, who are among the partners at Polaris Founders Capital, the Boston-based investment firm, are great entrepreneurs.
Flint, who lives in Lincoln, and McGuire, who’s in Weston, first founded Polaris Partners in 1996 and had tremendous successes with ventures like Living Proof, the haircare brand that Unilever acquired in February 2017 for an undisclosed sum, and deCODE, an Icelandic genetics research company that was founded in 1996, long before 23andMe and Ancestry advertisements became ubiquitous. Now they’re diving headlong into the dairy industry. Their company, Icelandic Provisions, created a skyr with a dairy co-op in Iceland and, having launched in the beginning of 2016, today it’s the fastest growing yogurt product in the United States, according to Nielsen.
“The timing is always good for food that’s healthy, delicious and doesn’t need preparation. But the timing for anything Icelandic is particularly good now. Nordic food has been just so popular in the past few years and Iceland is such a hot destination, not least because of their food and healthy outdoor traditions,” said Flint, noting that celebrated Icelandic chef Gunnar Gislason opened Agern, a Michelin-starred restaurant in New York’s Nordic Food Hall, located in Grand Central Terminal, in spring 2016. Gislason actually helped the Icelandic Provisions team develop its newest flavor, cherry-black currant, which launched in February. Scandinavian food and drink is easy to come by in New York these days. Fika, a Swedish coffee chain, has been opening stores throughout Manhattan at a steady clip over the last few years. Mikkeller, a longstanding Danish brewer known for creative, eccentric beers, opened a brewery/gastropub at the Mets’ Citifield in Queens in March.
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