Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Cooks Venture

Cooks Venture Raises $10M Series A for Its Regenerative Agriculture

Cooks Venture, which focuses on regenerative agriculture, announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A round of funding. The round was led by SJF Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox. Cooks Venture had previously raised a $4 million growth equity seed round and secured $12 million in senior secured debt.

The company, founded by Matthew Wadiak (who previously founded meal kit pioneer Blue Apron), is starting with poultry, breeding and raising its own slow-growth, heirloom chickens. Cooks Venture is different from other poultry companies in that it’s vertically integrated, so the company raises chickens on its 800-acre farm in Arkansas and processes the meat at its own processing plant in Oklahoma.

Cooks Venture is also different in that it adheres to regenerative agricultural practices. As we described the process previously, regenerative agriculture involves “holistic farming practices that promote healthy soil, low carbon footprints and sustainable animal husbandry. It also skips artificial inputs like fertilizer and pesticide, instead trying to create a self-sustaining loop: the crops feed the animals, the animals create fertilizer, and the fertilizer grows the crops.”

Meat processing facilities in particular have become hot spots for COVID transmissions. Since Cooks Ventures runs its own, I asked Wadiak how his company has responded to the pandemic when I spoke with him by phone earlier this week.

“We have been very careful from day one,” Wadiak said, “We bought our own facemasks and PPEs.” Wadiak said they even bought their own COVID tests, since there has been so little testing support from the government. “We were zero cases until the Trump rally [in Oklahoma],” Wadiak said, and while there have been some cases, they are “nothing close to big meat numbers.”

Along with the funding news, Cooks Venture also announced a partnership with Food In Depth (FoodID), an organization founded by Bill Niman that aims to provide transparency and accountability in food by testing for antibiotics and “other adulterants” through a real-time proprietary process. With this FoodID partnership, Cooks Venture claims that it is “now the only company that can independently validate that it never uses antibiotics and provides verified Non-GMO feed to its birds,” according to the press release.

Cooks Venture chickens are available around the country via a number of different online and in-store retail outlets. With its new capital, the company plans to scale up further as well as increase R&D into its breeding and regenerative practices.

Cooks Venture Raises $4M to Expand Regenerative Agriculture Initiative

Cooks Venture, a startup focusing on sustainable agriculture and food supply, today announced a $4 million capital raise led by Golden West Food Group. The startup also hired Ankur Agrawal, former VP of Finance for SeatGeek, as its new CFO.

This news comes just three months after Cooks Venture raised a $12 million senior secured financing round. That brings the startup’s total funding to $16 million.

Cooks Venture, which was founded by former Blue Apron founder Matthew Wadiak, has one goal: to promote regenerative agriculture. For those who don’t know, regenerative ag is holistic farming practices that promote healthy soil, low carbon footprints and sustainable animal husbandry. It also skips artificial inputs like fertilizer and pesticide, instead trying to create a self-sustaining loop: the crops feed the animals, the animals create fertilizer, and the fertilizer grows the crops. Etcetera.

So far, Cooks Venture has been moving quickly. The startup began earning buzz in 2019 and has already established an 800-acre farm, hatchery and breeding facility in Arkansas, as well as two processing facilities in Oklahoma.

Its first product is heirloom chickens, which sell from between $15 to $20 a pop (not absurd compared with other organic pasture-raised birds). Cooks Ventures’ “Pioneer” breed of chicken, which is meant to have more flavor than an average supermarket bird, is available online and through FreshDirect. The startup will use its new fundings to expand distribution to more wholesale and retailer partners.

Chickens are just Phase One for Cooks Venture. When I spoke with Wadiak last year he told me that they’ll expand to sell cattle, pigs and vegetables, all of which were cultivated on the same plot of land.

Regenerative agriculture certainly sounds appealing — who doesn’t want to eat food that tastes better and is healthier for the planet? — but it can often be prohibitively pricey (just think of the expensive offerings at your local farmers market). Cooks Venture is trying to break that stereotype and make sustainable products that are actually affordable.

That’s a lofty goal, especially since startup isn’t leveraging agricultural technologies like automation to cut costs. In fact, it’s taking an opposite tack, relying on low-tech traditional solutions to create a viable alternative to environmentally-unfriendly industrial farming.

In short, Cooks Venture is a young David standing up to the Goliath of factory farming — but at least it’s a David with $4 million fresh dollars.

Cooks Venture Raises $12M to Spread Regenerative Agriculture through Heirloom Chickens

Today regenerative agriculture company Cooks Venture announced the close of a $12 million senior secured financing round provided by AMERRA Capital Management.

Founded by Matthew Wadiak, the ex-COO of meal kit company Blue Apron, Cooks Venture is an agtech company selling slow growth heirloom chickens with the lofty goal of saving the planet through regenerative agriculture. As we wrote this spring just after the company’s launch:

Chickens are just the first step for Cooks Venture, whose end goal is to show how regenerative agriculture can slow — or even stop — climate change by sequestering carbon in soil. Next up, they’ll start raising and selling cattle, pigs, and vegetables, all sustained on the same plot of land as the chickens.

For now, Cooks Venture has a farm in Arkansas where it raises its chickens and two poultry processing facilities. Their heirloom chickens cost $15 to $20 and are available through the Cooks Venture website as well as FreshDirect (in the Northeast) and Northern California meat distributor the Golden Gate Meat Company.

On the surface, Cooks Venture’s process might not seem all that unusual. Create a farm that grows crops which can be used to feed chickens, all on the same land. What’s so radical about that?

What you might not know (as this author did not) is that the vast majority of American farmland is dedicated to growing crops — often in huge quantities — that are not destined to feed humans, but to feed animals or produce fuel. In order to grow such large quantities of a single crop quickly, farmers often have to rely on agricultural companies which sell seeds that require inputs like fertilizer and herbicides. That isn’t good for us, or the planet.

Regenerative agriculture, on the other hand, looks at soil microbiology plan which crops to grow and sequester carbon in the process. Wadiak argues that it’s more economically viable than relying on seed companies for constant inputs of fertilizer, pesticide, and the like. “It’s a trifecta of wins: for farmers, for us, and for consumers,” Wadiak told me over the phone earlier this week.

So why isn’t everyone growing their food regeneratively? Corn and soy subsidies are partly to blame, but according to Wadiak, the real reason regenerative agriculture isn’t more widespread is because, well, people just aren’t doing it. At least, not at scale.

Wadiak is confident that Cooks Venture can demonstrate that regenerative agriculture is a viable option through its use of technology. The company employs heat unit mapping and data science to predict which crops will grow best in which soil.

Cooks Venture is growing quickly for company that only started a few months ago — they now have over 100 employees — but Wadiak knows that they have a long way to go. “We’re working on multi-multi-year systems,” he said, referring to the timeline for the company to install its regenerative agriculture plan.

That’s where the new funding will come in. Cooks Venture will use it to renovate and expand its 800-acre poultry processing facility to handle up to 700,000 chickens per week. It will also use its new capital to partner with agroecologists in order to develop new sustainable agriculture practices.