Pomegranate Princess.(PomWonderful's Lynda Resnick)(Brief biography)

One Thursday morning last October, Lynda Resnick--who is perhaps best known as the marketing force behind PomWonderful, the pomegranate juice in the zaftig little bottle--was presiding over one of the company's weekly marketing meetings. PomWonderful is co-owned by Lynda and her husband, Stewart, and Lynda had gathered a team of employees to sample possible flavors for their latest Pom product: PomxCoffee, a "healthy" take on Frappucino-style bottled coffee drinks. The beverage would be made with shade-grown coffee, organic cane sugar, and milk from cows that had not been treated with growth hormones. It would also include something called Pomx, a high-antioxidant concentrate made from pomegranates. (Despite this ingredient, PomxCoffee would not taste like pomegranates. "That's too gross," Lynda said.) The meeting was held in a third-floor conference room at Teleflora Plaza, the company's headquarters, in West Los Angeles. Lynda was dressed in an olive-green knit shirt, matching pants, and spiky brown leather boots. Diamond bangle bracelets tinkled like tiny wind chimes along one arm. On a square tray in front of her were five small plastic cups containing liquid in varying shades of murky brown. Lynda picked one up, the mocha, and took a sip. After a moment, she narrowed her eyes and scrunched her mouth into a half smile-half grimace, the face she makes when forced to suffer a situation that is not to her liking. She took another sip. "Something's wrong with it," she declared.

"We've spent the last week researching the category," Grant Beggs, the vice-president of marketing, told her, his voice quavering slightly, "and mocha is the top-selling flavor." Beggs, a pale man with brown tufted hair and wire-rimmed glasses, had worked at PomWonderful less than a month, and seemed flustered by Lynda's reaction.

"Not this mocha," Lynda said, lowering her voice to a stage whisper. Lynda trusts her palate. When she and Stewart were first married, he used to trot her out at parties, blindfold her, and give her a glass of wine: she could identify the vineyard, the vintage, the shipper. Even oenophiles were impressed. She's not sure where this skill comes from, or how to explain it, but it can be a problem--complex dishes create a kind of sensory overload, what she calls "a cacophony of tastes." At home, she asks her chef to keep meals simple; at restaurants, she sticks to blander fare like salads and steaks. Still, she claims her ultra-sensitive taste buds have come in handy. In 2003, when she and Stewart were deciding whether to buy Fiji Water, then a boutique bottled-water company that sold mostly to hotels and restaurants, Stewart arranged for her to blind-taste-test a few bottled waters. The Fiji Water stood out, and, in November, 2004, the couple bought the company for a reported hundred and fifty million dollars.

Lynda and Stewart also own Teleflora, the largest national flower-delivery service; Paramount Farming Company, the world's biggest supplier of almonds and pistachios; and Paramount Citrus, the country's leading producer of fresh citrus. At roughly a hundred and twenty thousand acres, the Resnicks' orchards are said to make up the largest acreage of tree crops in the world. The Resnicks previously owned the Franklin Mint Company, purveyor of "collectibles," but sold it in late 2006. This eclectic collection of holdings falls under the banner of a privately held Los Angeles-based company called Roll International. The Los Angeles Business Journal has estimated the Resnicks' net worth at about $1.3 billion.

At the end of the conference table was an assortment of coffee beverages and Red Bull-type energy drinks with names like Speed Stack, Amp, and Go Girl. Lynda picked up a small cream-colored bottle containing Starbucks mocha-flavored Frappucino, unscrewed the cap, and drank. "Oh, that is vile," she said. Lynda had initially planned to create an energy drink, but after a year of research she'd abandoned the idea. "I realized I couldn't do it," she told me. "The stuff they put in those energy drinks is poison. High-fructose corn syrup! Taurine! Taurine is from the bile of a bull. Is that what you want to drink?"

Lynda is in her mid-sixties (she refuses to disclose her exact age--"If I see it in print, I'll projectile-vomit") and is petite even in stilettos. She has dark, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, expressive mouth. Her auburn hair is teased into a kind of latter-day shag, like a jazzed-up Carol Brady. (It adds another half inch to her height.) The spectacle of Lynda in the boardroom is a little like a game show in which she is always the top contestant: she is assured and quick-witted, and usually the first to articulate a new idea. John Cochran, the president of Fiji Water, recalls that, during one of their earliest marketing meetings, Lynda asked about the process of bottling the water: "She was like, 'You mean it never touches the air, never touches environment? That's huge!' " Lynda and her creative team immediately set to work promoting the water's "untainted" origins. (Fiji Water comes from an aquifer on the island of Viti Levu.) The bottle's label was ...