Serial entrepreneur and Boost Juice founder Janine Allis has plenty of advice to give. On Instagram, the 60-year-old investor shares soundbites with her 108,000 followers confessing early missteps, and gently rebukes Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on policy settings.
She shares more with aspiring small business owners who sign up to the mentoring program she co-founded.
On the home front, though, she’s less likely to serve up unsolicited advice. Mother-of-four Allis and her family, who founded Boost in the 2000s and grew it into a chain of more than 1000 stores across 15 countries, are also responsible for the booming frozen yoghurt chain Yo-Chi.
“It was very much [my son] Oliver and his dad’s business vision,” Allis told the Good Weekend Talks podcast. “I’m sort of in the background as a cheerleader.”
The success of the Allis family’s business empire is in no small part owed to the fact that they keep it in the family. Allis opened the first Boost store in Adelaide in 2000 when she was 32 and on maternity leave, and was joined by her husband, Jeff, a few years later. In mid-2020, they bought four frozen yoghurt stores off former MasterChef judge George Calombaris when his Made Establishment hospitality company crumbled.
Helmed by Allis’ son and chief brand director Oliver, and advised by Jeff, who is an owner but is otherwise most comfortable incognito, Yo-Chi has exploded into a chain of 70 stores across Australia and two in Singapore, with plenty of global ambition. It has been dubbed Gen Z’s nightclub, and it’s not uncommon to see queues outside Yo-Chi stores on weekends.
Jeff’s siblings own the stores in Western Australia and South Australia, while niece Claudia Marro designs the colourful, wood-panelled storefronts that have become a favoured hangout spot among young people.
Yo-Chi’s success has astonished even Janine Allis. “I’m the first one to go, ‘You’ve got to be very careful to do to business with friends and family’, but in the case of Yo-Chi, it’s been a really successful story,” she said.
Allis grew up in Knoxfield, 27 kilometres east of Melbourne’s CBD, and got her first job at 14, picking strawberries. She left school at 16 and at 21 set off around the world, picking up dozens of odd jobs including being a nanny in France and lying about her experience to get a job as a stewardess on a yacht that wound up being bought by David Bowie six weeks later.
The working relationship with husband Jeff, who left his job as head of programming at radio network Austereo to expand Boost, has been a highly complementary partnership. But it has had its moments.
“You’ve got to have rules. I would be a shocker. Before he’s about to fall asleep, I’d go, ‘Now have you thought about that problem?’ And he would go, ‘Are you kidding me? I’m about to sleep,’” Allis said .
“There [were] times where, if I had a knife, I could have thrown it at him at the other side of the table,” she said. Not that the kids saw much of it. “I had a very strict rule that we never debated, we never had an argument in front of people, ever.”
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Jessica Yun is a business reporter covering retail and food for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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