Salt & Straw founder and CEO Kim Malek shares how she’s reinventing her business and her own leadership.
The business landscape is in constant flux, shaped by geopolitics, market volatility, and rapid technological advancement. Organizations of every size, from global enterprises to emerging startups, are rethinking how to accelerate growth and adapt with speed and scale in this environment.
At the EY annual Strategic Growth Forum®, business leaders convened to explore strategies for implementing AI and building future-ready organizations.
Central to the conversation was a critical question: How can enterprises harness transformative forces and accelerate growth amid mounting external pressures? Meeting this challenge demands empowering workforces, embracing human-centric leadership, and leveraging AI-powered innovation as catalysts for enterprise reinvention.
Fortune Brand Studio sat down with Kim Malek, founder and CEO of Portland-based artisan ice cream company Salt & Straw, to discuss her growth mindset. She reveals how she’s reimagining her business and her own leadership, offering valuable insights for organizations striving to thrive in a rapidly evolving world.
How have you had to rethink your business model to stay competitive?
Over the past 15 years, Salt & Straw has become known for these ginormous crowds and lines surrounding our shops. That community aspect has become central to who we are.
But we wanted to meet people where they were and introduce the ability to order ahead. We spent a lot of time carefully crafting how we could do it with a heavy-handed touch of hospitality. We didn’t want to lose that human connection when customers pop in, grab their ice cream, and go. We staff and message in such a way that the human connection and element of community is still strong.
How are you reimagining Salt & Straw today to stay agile and keep up with the rapid pace of change?
Reimagining our business in ice cream has been all about the product. We’ve come up as this artisan brand with high-end ingredients. About two years ago, we were approached by Taco Bell, of all places, to collaborate: The Choco Taco had been discontinued, so our brands got together to imagine how we could bring it back in a new way.
To me, that’s a sign of the trends: Bringing high-end artisan food makers to the masses through collaborations like this. The response we’ve gotten from this “Tacolate” has been out of this world. It’s all new technology that we developed and imported, and we’re creating these in a way that’s never been done before. It’s revolutionizing the future for novelties.
How have you had to adapt products, supply chains, and more to keep up with macroeconomic and geopolitical changes?
The macroeconomic situation right now in the U.S. forces all of us to be agile. On the good news side of things, tariffs have been good for us in some ways because dairy products aren’t being exported as much. We’re able to realize some benefits and then use that to reinvest in our ice cream to make the quality even higher.
People are stretching to make their paychecks go further, so little indulgences like ice cream become important: “Maybe I can’t go out for dinner, but I’m going to treat my family to nice ice cream at the end of the meal.” For us, it’s about taking our brand to a higher level of ingredients, innovation, and hospitality.
How does technology, including AI, play into unlocking growth and value?
AI is being interwoven into the back-end operations of our company. Every single one of our departments is looking at how we can scale without adding excessive resources. Leveraging AI has been critical to enabling us to grow while keeping our cost structure down.
But our core—the team at the front lines scooping ice cream—can’t be done by AI. Our ability to provide that real-life, human experience becomes even more critical. We’re investing heavily in training and resources for our client-facing team to advance their careers. When you’re a fast-growing company, everyone gets to benefit.
About 96% of our general managers have been promoted from within. Everybody says you’ve got to scale your systems to grow, but we feel you have to scale your people to grow.
How are you reimagining the customer experience?
Salt & Straw releases a new menu every month, and we give our loyalty customers an early heads-up so they can engage with the new flavors. That symbiotic relationship is so important to our following: People feel that at the center of it. Our loyalty fans got early access to the chocolate taco, which was an incredible benefit because it sold out within hours.
How do you balance taking bold risks with staying true to your core purpose and long-term vision?
Saying no can be almost more important than what you say yes to when you’re a CEO or an entrepreneur building your company.
We’ve repeatedly been asked over the years to launch our ice cream in grocery, but we’ve stayed focused on our scoop shops. That’s enabled our company to realize incredible top-line revenues and volumes that are just category-crushing and unheard of within our industry. We’re three times the average unit volume of our closest competitors, and six times that of an average ice cream shop.
Funny enough, saying no to expanding into grocery over the years allowed us to have an opportunity to potentially launch in that channel—maybe in the near future—in a way that we could never have done before.
Sometimes, magically enough, if you stay focused on your mission, vision, and value, saying no can turn into a bigger opportunity down the line.
How do you maintain a strong culture during transformation?
Culture is always evolving. Being a values-driven company, over the past 15 years, I’ve heard from employees who are worried our culture’s changing. But I’ve come to realize that’s natural: It’s alive, growing, and changing over time.
I always tell my teams that change is fine, but we never want to compromise our values. If that ever happens, they should be the first in my office so we can course correct. And they are. We’re not perfect. Those are the times that we’ve probably realized the greatest lessons.
How have you adapted your own mindset to stay ready for change?
With the world as noisy as it is, the CEO must get quiet. Remember why you started this journey—your personal mission, vision, and values—and stay true to that. For me, that’s my personal health journey: diet, sleep, water, cutting out alcohol.
The bigger you are, the more you have at stake, the more people bring their own agendas to the table. Balancing that is critical. You have to get clear with what you know to be true and tap into the intuition that got you where you are.
The views reflected in this article are the views of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.