How Joolies’ Founders Turned Dates From a Forgotten Fruit Into a Buzzy Better-for-You Brand

Small business takeaway:

• Joolies turned Medjool dates from a sleepy produce item into a modern better-for-you snack brand at major retailers by treating customer feedback as product strategy; using operational control to preserve pricing discipline as it scaled; and expanding into new snack and candy-adjacent lines only after proving shoppers would embrace dates as an everyday, year-round option.

Dates have often been considered a mature category for a mature crowd. That was until Joolies Co-founders Greg Willsey and David Kohl reframed the fruit into a vibrant snack with brand recognition. Even the name Joolies, short for Medjool dates, injects fun and modernization into the product line as the owners focus on thoughtful growth through sustainable expansion.

Building the Joolies brand by responding to customer feedback 

Greg Willsey worked in mergers and acquisitions at the Wonderful Company, the owner of Pom Wonderful, Wonderful Pistachios, and Halo Clementines. In 2013, he consulted with David Kohl, owner of La Quinta Date Growers in California’s Coachella Valley, one of the largest domestic growers of Medjool dates. They stayed in touch as Willsey moved on to private equity.

By 2018, Willsey had started Venice Brands to build portfolio companies, and Kohl was frustrated by the lack of branding that came with selling through an agricultural cooperative. They partnered to form Joolies that same year and spent the next four to five months building their core team and bringing in a branding agency and product development group.

Joolies launched at Natural Products Expo West in March 2019 with two products: organic Medjool dates, pitted and whole. The Medjools are hand-picked and hand-pitted, so it is a labor-intensive product, Willsey told CO—.

The co-founders started out selling where they could get customer feedback: Natural retailers like Whole Foods Market, Sprouts Farmers Market, Erewhon, Bristol Farms, and Thrive online marketplace were early channels. “After we built their following, we began to look at larger chains like Albertsons, Kroger, Target, and Wakefern,” Willsey added. Joolies also sells online through Amazon and its own website.

Responding to the feedback they received was critical. For example, although their first packaging was a “cute box,” he said, customers liked resealable pouches for produce, so they switched to address that preference, keeping a brightly colored design and label to stand out in the produce section. Similarly, though the brand is organic-forward (80% of the farms it works with are organic) as the owners broke into larger retail chains, they learned that buyers often don’t want to use two vendors for organic and conventional dates. Joolies began expanding its portfolio as a result.

COVID hit as they were scaling the business. “As far as challenges, it was no joke,” said Willsey. “It was hard to get meetings with retailers, and getting customers to try something by reading the story on the packaging at a time when they were not touching things made brand discovery difficult.”

‘Brands take a while [to grow] if you build them the right way’     

Even in better times, dates are not a category retail buyers tend to be very invested in, Willsey added. “It’s not where they’re going to make their bonus, so convincing them to take a meeting wasn’t easy. Now, we have data to show that with Joolies, they will grow sales, but then we didn’t.”

At first, Joolies used Kohl’s fruit exclusively. In 2020, they were approached by a broker to look at Desert Valley Dates, which buys some fruit from Kohl’s company, La Quinta Date Growers. Desert Valley is also one of the largest packing houses in the United States, so the switch allowed bringing that process in-house. “With the change to the pouch, as well as in-house production, we were able to keep pricing flat at a time when other vendors were raising theirs and offer more fruit for the same price,” said Willsey.

As they came out of COVID, Willsey and Kohl were intentional about growth. “With fruit, you have to contract six months in advance of a harvest, so you want to be thoughtful about who you’re partnering with so you don’t get ahead of yourself,” Willsey cautioned. Growth was up 46% year over year in 2025, with annual sales surpassing $10 million.

Joolies does not rely on venture capital. “We want to grow at our own pace without arbitrary pressure,” said Willsey. “Brands take a while [to grow] if you build them the right way.” Plus, his own background gives him access to the same networks that venture capital would offer, he added.

[Read more: Three Company Founders Disclose How They Discovered Their Niche]

Making dates a year-round go-to snack and ingredient

“Our marketing team helped dates trend,” Willsey said. “They realized that other categories had brands you could name, like Chiquita bananas. Joolies wanted a vibrant, exciting brand to bring to a new audience.”

They set out not only to build brand recognition but also to turn dates into a year-round product. “They traditionally sell well around Ramadan, and we still want to maintain that market, but we wanted to make it a snack all through the year. Something you put in smoothies, something you bake with,” he explained. Women ages 20 to 50 who were health-conscious and interested in clean ingredients were the primary target audience for a product as nutrient- and fiber-rich as dates.

After building a reputation on fresh fruit and a strong social following, Joolies expanded into new categories. Date Rolls and Date Pops came first, and Willsey views them more as healthy energy products than as an alternative to sweets. There is no sugar added to any of the products, except for the Brownie Date Pop that has a little bit of chocolate chip in it, he said. Instead, all products rely on dates’ natural sweetness.

The most recent addition is Date Sours, more of an entry into better-for-you candy, a $68 billion category, according to the National Confectioners Association. The sours are a gummy-style confection, thanks to the date’s natural texture, with a sour twist to offset the fruit’s sweetness.

Date Sours are available in four familiar flavors — watermelon, cherry cola, peachy, and blue raspberry — to create a gateway for trial. They launched in May exclusively at Sprouts nationwide and Target until the end of July. More retailers signed on in August and are on tap in September, said Willsey, including new ones like H-E-B and Costco.

Joolie’s products are currently sold in 45 brick-and-mortar retailers, or 12,000 stores, nationwide and online. While the company doesn’t sell to food service or hospitality, the brand is available on Faire, an online platform, where resorts, boutiques, bodegas, and the like can buy their products on a one-off basis.

In addition to Date Sours, Joolie’s offers three varieties of Date Pops — lemon bar, brownie, and cinnamon bun — and Date Rolls in coconut and almond, in addition to fresh fruit options. No new products are currently in production as Joolies focuses on building its existing lines. However, new flavors are always under consideration, said Willsey, and retail requests have been growing for seasonal flavors.

Organic pitted fresh fruit in the 9-ounce pouch remains the bestseller, he said but noted that could change with large-volume retailers like Costco taking on the Sours.

[Read more: Seasonal Brands From Ocean Spray to The Elf on the Shelf Pivot to Stoke Year-Round Sales]

‘Many successful companies had to do some pivoting early on to get something right’

Willsey’s advice to startups? Test, learn, tweak, and understand that it all comes down to the customer. “Many successful companies had to do some pivoting early on to get something right, the same way we did by switching to reusable pouches,” he noted.

“Friends or focus groups may think that what you have is great, but you don’t really know until customers can give you feedback when you are on the shelf,” he added. “If you can find customers who get excited about the product, and you have a line of sight to good margins, you are onto something.”

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