Sometimes it takes a while for an idea to become reality. 19 years ago this week, the Arkansas Razorback women's basketball team was in Canada for a four-game exhibition tour against foreign teams. Now, stay with me for a minute. This will make sense. I was the radio play-by-play announcer for the Razorbacks at that time. While in the Vancouver metro area, I interviewed a University of Arkansas alum who worked for EA Sports, the sports video game producer. Part of his job was to help make sure the next version of EA Sports' NBA game was as aesthetically accurate as possible, from team uniforms to players' facial hair.
The conversation aired on Ozarks at Large and made me realize there were thousands, tens of thousands of UofA alums whose lives and careers had traveled unexpected courses. All of that preamble to say, 19 years later, we're ready to start (?), resume (?) our series about Arkansas alums. And it seems fitting for a series that took 19 years to get going that our first installment focuses on an alum whose path covers time and isn't a sequential route of this happened, then this. Rather, all of the experiences influenced each other.
Elizabeth Lily McLaughlin's post-college career includes telecommunications, investor relations, infant formula, coffee, Africa, and now she runs her own advisory firm, Red Wagon Group, and is the founder of Common Path Collaborative, a nonprofit helping other nonprofits grow.
All right, let's back up. Elizabeth says one thing that was a constant for her growing up in Little Rock: she always wanted to be a Razorback.
"But you know, Kyle, I thought the University of Arkansas was too big for me. So growing up in Little Rock, I'm an only child really close to my family, was in just kind of a pocket that I thought, I'm going to go and get lost. So I almost went to a small school in Alabama, accepted admission there. Literally had to help my dad help me. Right? How do I back out of, I'd never backed out of anything before. And so I just felt it wasn't right.
"And I came up one weekend with a friend of mine. We stayed in the dorm, stayed in Humphreys back, which I later lived in as a freshman. No air conditioning. These kids have it a lot easier now. And I just got hooked. So I always knew I wanted to do it, felt like it was going to be too big. Thought I'd get lost. And so thankful that I came on that visit. We went to a football game at Razorback Stadium and I said, I think I can find my people here."
She did. She credits a class taught by the late Hoyt Purvis for inspiring her to switch majors to journalism, with an emphasis on advertising and public relations. Three days after she graduated, she had a job in corporate communications with Alltel in Little Rock, later working in investor relations. In 1999, she moved to Virginia to run southeast marketing for Alltel, and then a switch. While there, a switch to a small company called PBM Products.
"A small private label infant formula company. So I went from telecom to infant formula. I wasn't a mom at that point, so I'm like selling baby formula to Walmart and infant nutritional items around the world as a private label company. So it really was a transition from being at Alltel, being in that 360 market, to a small company based in Virginia."
Elizabeth says she did that for a few years. Then, as a self-described big believer in data and research, bought a marketing research firm she'd worked with previously. She didn't know it yet, but she wanted to move back to her home state.
"Along the way, we had a son, and honestly, Kyle, we would bring him back to Arkansas to visit family and literally sit in the driveway and say, okay, Jackson, this is who we're about to see, and this is this relation to this person. And we said, this isn't how we want to raise our family. And so can't get too far from Arkansas. So we moved back from Virginia to Arkansas."
This is 2013. She's back home and considering what she wants to do next. She reached out to her friend and former colleague at Alltel, Scott Ford, who is now at Westrock Coffee. So she soon started at Westrock Coffee.
"Literally not ever having had a cup of coffee, but being drawn to what Scott was trying to do with the second part of his life professionally, which was how do you help these smallholder farmers in Africa? And so I was drawn to the mission. So I immediately went over to Rwanda while we were moving back from Virginia to Arkansas along the way that summer, went to Rwanda to see it firsthand and kind of never looked back for a dozen years."
Elizabeth McLaughlin did have her first cup of coffee soon after in Rwanda, and she says she fell in love with her work for Westrock, both in Arkansas and Africa. And Westrock began to percolate and grow.
"That was the beginning of starting to get into private label. And so I had spent the last several years working in private label, meaning how do you take something that is as good as or better than the national brand and bring it in a more affordable price point? And so I spent a number of years already working with Walmart, Kroger, all the big names in retail and said, let's try to do this on a private label standpoint.
"Westrock didn't have money to be a brand, and the intent was never to be a brand. It was the brand behind the brand or the brand inside the brand.”
Kellams: I think that's what they used to say it is in the commercial.
“It's like the Intel inside, right? And so we wanted to make a superior product and partner with retailers. And at the same time, Keurig's patent for K-Cups was coming off. So we were able to bring private brand store brand single-serve cups. They might have a patent on that name K-Cup. So we would say single-serve cups, to retailers. And so we did that with Sam's Club and started that. And then Walmart, and from that grew and knew that we needed to figure out what was coming next. And so what that was, was kind of this move to liquid coffee and ready to drink.
"And so Westrock's sustainability story really set us apart from others. And so we were pretty picky about who we wanted to partner with and got the opportunity to be introduced to a company in North Carolina called S&D, long history in the food service background, food service industry, but also did sustainability the right way, meaning wanting to take care of the producer or the farmer. So we kind of had this shared culture. Both had been very focused on how do you do things the right way for the producer.
"And Westrock at that time, we had already developed a digitally traceable program, which was, people said no one in the coffee industry could do it because you've got coffee being grown in some of the poorest countries of the world. Think about going to East Africa. You're not literally tracking things with an iPad. And so anyway, we developed a system to be able to trace the coffee and show the transparent pricing so that the end buyer, whether that was going to be Walmart or a mom who wanted to put coffee on her table from the Member's Mark or any of the other private brands that we would offer, they could trace it and know it was good.
"So we got introduced to S&D in North Carolina, and they had the liquid coffee and a fantastic team of people doing product development work, kind of in that product category that was coming next. So we bought them. Scott likes to say it was the best timed acquisition ever, really wasn't. They were focused in the hospitality food service. Think McDonald's, think Chick-fil-A, think Circle K, Love's. They were in hotels, in gas stations and in restaurants. Well, we bought them the last day of February in 2020.”
Not even two weeks later, everything changes as the pandemic takes firm hold. Elizabeth says acquiring S&D wasn't without risk, even before COVID was part of the equation.
"So what we did was just double down. Failure was not an option, and a small group of us from Westrock moved over and lived in some temporary housing overlooking a Walmart in Concord, North Carolina, right outside that racetrack area, which was obviously shut down as well. So a small team of us went there.
"But at the same time, the Westrock business here was flourishing because it's a retail focused business. And everybody was going, when they were racing to get their toilet paper, they were also picking up a lot of coffee because they couldn't go anywhere and buy it. So the group that stayed back in Arkansas was instrumental in keeping that alive in North Carolina."
Elizabeth says the team she was part of kept fueled on doughnuts, coffee, Reese's peanut butter Easter egg candy and stress. Her husband and son were back in Little Rock, her son navigating his freshman year of high school on Zoom. But Westrock survived and thrived through and after COVID. In the 12 years Elizabeth was at Westrock, the company evolved from less than $1 million in annual revenue to $850 million. Westrock went public in 2022. She says all of this, the swerves, the trips to Africa, the pressure of the COVID years, the relationships, helped lead her to found her advisory firm, Red Wagon, and the nonprofit Common Path Collaborative.
"There are a lot of amazing moments. And so you might say, oh, it was ringing the bell at Nasdaq, your favorite time, or making the, we got item of the year at Sam's Club, which is a big win for us. But the best memory I have from Westrock is when we opened a school right before COVID started in Rwanda. And so I'm going to get to the Red Wagon story, but you need to hear this first, which is 2019. We went back. We felt so fortunate to be trusted by these farmer partners in East Africa. And so this family feel and the sense of trust and taking a leap, all that started for me at the University of Arkansas. And so now I'm seeing it lived in my professional life. And that moment of gratitude and that moment of people make a difference. And it's who you choose to walk in life with.
"2019, we celebrated 10 years of our farmer partners trusting us in Rwanda, and there was a woman named Christine there, and she had allowed us to come in and be her partner. And we filmed a commercial about her to try to get retail partners to understand who we were then, because we were fighting tooth and nail every day for people to know who we were. And when we celebrated that school opening to commemorate 10 years, I remember the ribbon cutting and the lump we all had in our throats for the privilege it was to be able to give back to these people that had trusted us, and the honor it was to tell their story in America and in other international markets where we serve.
"But then fast forward five years later, we survived COVID. We had gone public and my son who survived, did well in high school, even though his freshman year, I'm on this remote island in North Carolina doing Westrock S&D work. He's on Zoom. And his senior year of high school, he went back with me to the school and saw that was our five year anniversary of what we'd opened in 2019. And so that 2024 trip, and then I turned 50 in the spring of 2025– January of 2025. And all of that kind of, for me said it's time to do something else. I just had this itch and this nudge to go and figure something out. And Westrock had gone leaps and bounds, leaps and bounds beyond what I ever thought it would and is in amazing hands now and was in amazing hands. And I just, it was time for me to go and do something else.
"And so I looked around and thought, what do I want to do? And it was really, how do I take all of the opportunity that I'd been given and try to reinvest that back into entrepreneurs and others who needed a little boost or needed to understand how to take what they were doing and just get some advice on, I love working with someone who says, here's what I'm trying to do. How do I operationalize that? Or what assets do I need to acquire or who do I need on my team? So I've been doing a lot of work with companies, smaller stage companies who aren't necessarily just getting started, but have had enough of a track record to know it's proven. And how do you help that scale and how do you help that go to the next level, like we did in the infant formula company and how I did with Westrock. And so the name Red Wagon."
"Yeah. Came from, so I was a tomboy growing up in Little Rock, and I lived in Hillcrest and had amazing neighbors, but a lot of them were older and needed help getting to the Harvest Foods that was right around the corner. And I loved to go just walk the grocery aisles, that probably had something to do later with the retail game that I loved so much. But I would take my little red wagon and I had a couple of neighbors that would pay me a quarter to go and get their groceries for them. And so I guess that was basically like a DoorDash before that even became a thing. And so I took my red wagon and I would go around and do grocery shopping. And that's what I would do during the afternoons in the summer or on the weekends when I was in school.
"And then that same red wagon is what I would use to collect the cans. And so that sustainability story, and then my dad and I on Saturdays would take those cans and I'd get a penny for them or whatever it was. But I loved to get them watched crush and see them come on. And they were going to go on to something bigger and better. And so that red wagon for me was just symbolic of how it got started and going to go grocery shopping and thinking about those cans."
Elizabeth Lily McLaughlin received the University of Arkansas Citation of Distinguished Alumni in 2022, and she serves on the national board of directors of the Arkansas Alumni Association. We spoke in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio late last month. The Arkansas Alumni Association connects and serves the University of Arkansas family and has more than 188,000 living alumni. You can find out more about them at arkansasalumni.org.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
