
This Week in CPG 02/10/25
News from W, Lotus Foods, Glonuts, My Better Batch, Tiny Sprouts Foods, Spritzal Cookie, Koia, Rotten, Daddy’s Homemade, Curious Elixirs and Daily Crunch Snacks.
Let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there. How did your company get started and why?
My co-founders and I met while we were all in grad school pursuing degrees in Food Science & Technology at Cornell. We were taking a product development class and the final project was to make a product based off a current food trend. The product the group developed was a chickpea bite dipped in chocolate and the rest of the class absolutely loved it, so we felt like we really had something special. So we ended up forming a company (of course we had absolutely no idea what we were doing at the time) and rolling with it. What we were lacking in business experience, we more than made up for in pure dedication to changing the way people eat and addressing the gap between better-for-you and food that actually tastes good.
What is your product and how would you describe it?
Our first product is called Grabanzos, it’s a crunchy chocolate snack that tastes like a malt ball or chocolate covered pretzel. So you get that great sweet and salty combo with the initial crunch of the slightly savory core and then the chocolate that melts over your tongue to create a deliciously indulgent experience. The crunchy center is the key to Grabanzos- it crunches the same as products made from ingredients like wheat, potato, rice, and corn, but it’s a lot more nutrient dense with prebiotic fiber and plant protein plus the benefits from chickpeas (like slow carbs).
How have you pivoted your business this year?
2020 was definitely a wild ride. When Covid hit, we rapidly had to reevaluate our business model. All but about 2 of our brick and mortar retailers closed down and we didn’t know if or when the world would return to “normal.” We rapidly pivoted to e-commerce and focused our energy and resources into digital marketing. We thought about how we could reach our customers and started outreach to get Grabanzos into meal delivery kits and snack boxes, or even delivered to your door with your alcohol order! And we also launched a “big bag” since prior to Covid we sold all single serving for on-the-go and now everyone was eating their Grabanzos at home. Even so, we didn’t reach the sales growth we had hoped to in 2020. But on the positive side, we learned a lot about our customers. Retail will still be a critical piece in scaling our business, but now we know a lot more about who our customer is and where to find them.
What is your next challenge to overcome?
Understanding how to scale our business in this new era will definitely be our biggest challenge in 2021. Hopefully at some point this year we can start to move closer to normalcy, and I’m really interested to see how people’s behaviors shift. What elements of our current lifestyles will we abandon and what will we keep? What’s the future of office work, online shopping, and in-person interactions in general? We’re planning to start working with distributors this year, but the success of that path is uncertain. Even if distribution does unlock the doors to a lot more retailers, figuring out how we can get people to try us is an interesting problem. Not much brand discovery is happening in stores right now as sampling programs are off the table and consumers are generally sticking to their tried and true brands as they try to get in and out of stores as fast as possible. Navigating these challenges is something we could definitely use help with right now.
What do you predict for the food industry over the rest of the year?
Plant-based and regenerative agriculture. People are thinking a lot more about their health and also on the effect animal and plant agriculture is having on climate change (and its exacerbation of the spread of diseases, stress on food supply, and ecosystem destruction). There’s a ton of great innovation happening in plant-based meats and also in alternatives to commodity crops and this is only going to grow.
Learn more at: Antithesis Foods
News from W, Lotus Foods, Glonuts, My Better Batch, Tiny Sprouts Foods, Spritzal Cookie, Koia, Rotten, Daddy’s Homemade, Curious Elixirs and Daily Crunch Snacks.
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