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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

D2C

Emily Elyse Miller Wants to Reinvent Breakfast Cereal. That Means Vegan Ingredients, Edgy Mascots, and (Of Course) NFTs

Emily Elyse Miller knows a thing or two about breakfast.

Not only has the one-time journalist and fashion trends forecaster written a book on the topic (complete with 380 recipes from 80 countries), but she’d also run a consulting company that helped world-renowned chefs like Enrique Olvera develop breakfast events.

But after years of writing and teaching about first-meal, Miller realized that cereal, the centerpiece of the American breakfast for generations of kids and adults, had gone stale. So she decided to start a cereal company of her own to reinvent the category.

Called OffLimits, Miller’s company created a line of irreverent brands like Dash and Zombie, each with its own ‘moody mascot’ and a clean ingredient list.

The funky mascots were important for Miller, because while she loved the rainbow-colored pop culture she grew up with in the cereal aisle, she felt it was time for something new.

“Tony the Tiger is not cool,” said Miller. “Cereal is one of the only products that carry culture in this unique way, and that culture has not been updated in decades.”

Emily Elyse Miller

Miller worked with artists to design the cereal brands’ characters and boxes. Now, she sees NFTs as a natural evolution to bring the creations to life and connect directly with the OffLimits’ community.

“The mascots have moody personalities, and there are highs and lows to those personalities too,” said Miller. “They have mental health issues as much as they have kind of successes and wins, and I think that’s what makes the brand so right for building out in the Web3 space.”

New to Web3, Miller initially started small by giving away NFTs during a pop-up at the Art Basel art fair last December in Miami Beach. Attendees of the pop-up scanned a QR code to claim an NFT for what Miller describes as the first-ever “NFT cereal toy.” The giveaway was gamified, so some who scanned got an “exploding cereal” NFT and given an OffLimits cereal variety pack.

The Art Basel NFT giveaway gave Miller confidence to go bigger. “My first NFT protect was just so I could understand who would claim it and if people would care at all,” said Miller. “People very much cared, so that helped just like solidify that I get to pay a lot more attention to this.”

That extra attention resulted in a new NFT project announced this week called “Best Cereal in the Metaverse.” The project will feature a collection of 2,500 NFTs (.111 Etherium (~$290)), each with its own unique artist-created spin on an OffLimits’ mascot. In addition to unique artwork, NFT owners gain access to the private discord and can participate in the custom cereal box design process by submitting an NFT they own to be featured on a custom-designed cereal box. Each NFT holder will also get four of the custom-designed boxes of cereal shipped to their home.

OffLimits is part of a bigger trend of upstart food brands pushing into NFTs. Startups like Bored Breakfast Club, Liquid Death, and Yerb have all launched NFT projects over the past few months as a way to directly connect with their customers and create a new commerce model. For Miller, while all of this is exciting and represents opportunity, there’s still lots of work to do.

“While people were excited to learn about an NFT (with the first project) and potentially claim it, the amount of questions that we got and education that we have to do for our community who are not crypto native is a lot,” said Miller. “So brands need to take their responsibility.”

That responsibility also means talking to other brands curious about the Web3 space and conveying what she’s learned.

“I’ve been talking to so many brands about how they can be more involved in the space,” said Miller. “For me, everything’s about functionality, which is why I wanted this project to have a lot of layers. I wanted to involve our existing community to help grow a larger community of artists and just keep a circle of engagement going. That’s why I feel like there needs to be a physical product for something digital, trying to keep a good balance.”

If you want to sign up for the OffLimits NFT, you can do so here.

HelloFresh Co-Founder Launches Well Seasoned, a New Meat-by-Mail Service

We write so much about the growth of plant-based meat sales that it can be hard to remember that traditional animal meat industry is still huge and the primary source of protein for most people. And to help people up their meat game, a new meat delivery service, Well Seasoned, launched today.

Well Seasoned was founded by Dan Treiman, who previously co-founded meal kit company HelloFresh. Unlike HelloFresh and other meal kit players, Well Seasoned is focused solely on meat. It offers pre-seasoned cuts of meat that are frozen and shipped directly to consumers.

This places Well Seasoned somewhere in between full-on meal kits like those from Blue Apron, and straight (unseasoned) meat sales a la CrowdCow. You still get cuts of meat, but they are fancied up to make them more flavorful.

Right now, Well Seasoned offers cuts of beef, pork and chicken. Options include items like Tuscan Herbed Whole Chicken, Tri-Peppercorned Skirt Steak, and Garlic Soy Pork Tenderloin.

Customers purchase Well Seasoned boxes a la carte, so you don’t have to sign up for a subscription. You can build your own box for $138 (six servings), $168 (24 servings), $198 (thirty servings). Or shoppers can pick up a curated box like “Thrillable Grillables,” “Well Seasoned Selects” (each are $98 for five lbs.), and “Well Seasoned Prime Cuts” ($128 for five lbs.).

The meat is shipped frozen, which also gives consumers a little more flexibility over traditional meal kits that ship food fresh. Well Seasoned’s frozen meats don’t have to be prepared right away and can be kept in the freezer until they are ready to be consumed.

If this sounds at all familiar, that’s because Firstchop tried something similar a few years back. It, too, sold only chef-prepared meats that were shipped frozen to your door. The difference though, is that Firstchop wanted people to cook their meats via sous vide — a pretty labor- and time-intensive process. That company eventually pivoted to something else entirely before going under.

Well Seasoned hopes to avoid a similar fate by letting people cook their meats as they like. To assist users however, each cut comes with a QR code that links to specific cooking instructions for that dish.

This is certainly an opportune time for launching a D2C meat service. Thanks to the pandemic, more people are eating at home, and consumers are shopping for more food online — including cuts of meat — than ever before.

Well Seasoned is open now, but is only currently shipping to the East Coast.

Startup CPG’s Free Databases Help Emerging Brands with 3PL, Logistics and Donations

The phrase “The Passion Economy” refers to the increasing ability for people to build real businesses around whatever they are, well, passionate about (it’s also an excellent book).

And while there are a ton of fledgling founders passionate about food and launching a ton of upstart CPG brands, those same founders probably don’t hold the same zeal for things like logistics or inventory management.

That’s where a trio of free online databases from Startup CPG can help. Startup CPG is a volunteer organization of various experts and founders that provide knowledge, networking and community to small brands. Startup CPG membership is free, and includes access to an ongoing Slack Channel as well as events where members can learn more about things like venture capital, product law and marketing (full disclosure that I have volunteered and spoken at a Startup CPG event).

Earlier this year, Startup CPG created three free databases for its members that serve as national and regional directories for direct to consumer third-party logistics companies, e-commerce retailers where goods can be sold, and places where food about to expire can be donated instead of being destroyed. Last week, the list was migrated to a Google spreadsheet to make it more accessible, and its available to any brand that provides their email address to Startup CPG.

The database was created by Startup CPG volunteers crowdsourcing information and searching the web to include the name of relevant companies/services, as well as things like what regions they serve, the types of food accepted and the appropriate contact to reach out to.

In other words, these databases can help answer a lot of the business type questions a new brand just starting out might have. And with at least some of those questions answered, founders can continue to focus on what they are most passionate about.

Barn2Door Raises $6M for Platform that Connects Farms and Consumers

Barn2Door, an online platform that lets farms sell directly to consumers, has raised a $6 million Series A round of funding. Geekwire was first to report the news, writing that Bullpen Ventures led the round with participation from Quiet Capital, RAINE Ventures, Lead Edge Capital, Global Founders Capital, Sugar Mountain Capital, and others. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Barn2Door to $11.6 million.

Barn2Door’s software helps independent farms through just about every step of the e-commerce process: inventory, fulfillment, packing, invoicing and support. A Barn2Door software subscription costs anywhere from $59 to $149 a month, depending on the scale of the farm operations.

This is certainly an opportune time for Barn2Door to raise additional capital. The COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent shuttering of dine in restaurants and general stay-at-home suggestions, has spurred people to adopt online grocery shopping in record numbers. This rising tide has lifted a number independent farm-related boats including a spike in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) memberships, and an increase in sales for sites like CrowdCow and Grass Roots, both of which sells craft meats.

Barn2Door’s tool is also helping usher in a new wave of direct-to-consumer sales. Big brands like Pepsi and Impossible Foods each launched D2C channels this year. Chipotle launched a service allowing consumers to buy direct from its farm suppliers like Niman Ranch and McKaskle Family Farm. And smaller players like regional restaurant suppliers and startup CPG snack brands like Pig Out! and Renewal Mill are selling direct to consumers.

As this pandemic continues here in the U.S., there’s a good chance that buying direct from more sources will become the new normal for people, creating more opportunity for software services like Bar2Door’s.

Irreverent Wines’ Delivery Service is Out to Destigmatize Bagged Vino

If you’re looking for a nice wine to buy for yourself or as a gift, odds are you probably avoid wines that come in a box. Boxed wine — or really any wine not in a glass bottle — carries with it a stigma: quantity over quality.

A new company in Walla Walla, Washington is hoping to overthrow that stigma with an e-commerce line of bagged vino. Irreverent Wines is a subscription service that chooses to package their wine in bags because it’s cheaper for the consumer and better for the environment. The service launched today and is now shipping nationwide.

Irreverent’s founder, Chris Dukelow, was a former CFO for tech startups in the Seattle area and began making wine out of his garage a few years ago. He then got the idea to start putting wine in pouches, which he said are cheaper and more environmentally friendly than bottles. “A pouch is a great container for wine,” he told me over the phone last week. “It’s recyclable, self-standing, can sit in the refrigerator or counter, [and is] great to throw in your backpack if you’re going camping.” In short, it can do most things that wine bottles can, but is lighter and more easily recyclable.

All of Irreverent’s wines are sourced from independent and family-owned vineyards in Washington and Oregon, including Irreverent’s own grapes. The company offers the full gamut from reds to whites to rosés (though no sparkling because the liquid wouldn’t keep its fizz in the pouch). According to Dukelow, the wines Irreverent ships would retail for around $30 a bottle.

By putting them in pouches, Irreverent is able to sell the wine for a significantly cheaper price. A 1.5-liter pouch (the equivalent of 2 bottles) costs $39-$49 a month, and a 3-liter pouch (the equivalent of 4 bottles) costs $49-$59 per month. There’s also an option to add an additional pouch of wine to each shipment for $39. Members mark their wine color preferences on Irreverent’s site and the company sends them a different style or blend every month.

Bagged wine stays fresh for four weeks by keeping the wine away from oxygen; consumers use a spout at the bottom to extract only as much wine as they want right then. That means you can have a glass with dinner without having to worry that the wine could go bad. “It’s more flexible,” Dukelow told me. Bottles of wine, on the other hand, generally only last a day or two once opened. Bagged wine is also easier and cheaper to ship than bottles, which are heavy and breakable.

I was able to try Irreverent’s bags wine and found the whole experience frictionless and — most importantly — delicious. The wines arrived in a fully recyclable box; since they didn’t need to be chilled, I didn’t have to dispose of any pesky ice packs or styrofoam. I popped the rosé in the fridge and kept the red wine out on my counter. Over the next week, my roommates and I enjoyed grabbing as much or as little wine as we wanted in the evenings from the pouches. Both wines were light and crisp — perfect for warmer weather — and the wines stayed fresh for days.

Irreverent isn’t the only company trying to make shipping liquids easier. In Italy, Olivery ships olive oil refills in plastic pouches that can fit through a mail slot. So can the flat wine bottles from Garçon Wines.

Considering our current global state, improved shipping methods are actually critical. As much of the country continues to shelter in place due to COVID-19, consumers are increasingly looking for ways to get goods delivered so they don’t have to brave crowded grocery stores. Considering many of us are also drinking more during quarantine, Irreverent Wines just might be coming around at the right time to upend our notion of boxed wine.

Dukelow told me that they were already planning to start Irreverent this year, but that COVID-19 had definitely “accelerated” the timeline. “It’s a good time to launch.”

Taika’s Canned Adaptogen Coffee Ticks the Boxes for Wellness-Loving Millennials

During quarantine I’ve been drinking more caffeine than ever, which means that by 10 a.m., I’m usually about to rocket out of my chair.

Maybe that wouldn’t be the case if I was sipping on the java from new startup Taika (“magic” in Finnish). Founded by an ex-Facebook employee and a champion barista, the company makes cans of “perfectly calibrated coffee.” The startup uses a patent-pending process to reduce the amount of caffeine in each can to 130mg. A 12-ounce cup of regular coffee has 200mg. It also features adaptogens and mushrooms like ashwaganda (for calm) and reishi (for immunity).

Taika is launching with three flavors: Black Coffee, Oat Milk Latte, and Macadamia Latte. The coffee is sourced from a roaster in Vancouver, BC, and the lattes are plant-based and don’t have added sugar.

The caffeine curious can get a variety pack of six Taika drinks, two of each flavor, for $36. A 12-pack of a single flavor costs $59. As of now, Taika’s coffee is available for two-hour contactless delivery in three cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. It also sells product to a handful of retailers in the San Francisco Bay Area and L.A.

Taika is clearly trying to appeal to consumers interested in the beverage wellness trend — especially younger people, like millennials and Gen Z. In fact, if you had a list of all the attributes of a trendy CPG beverage company, Taika would check literally all of the boxes. Cool, brightly colored branding? Check. Minimalist packaging? Check. Cheeky marketing? Double check. Taika’s cans even feature a phone number, which consumers are encouraged to text to make sure they got home safe. (I tried it and got a question about the Turing Test, then no response.)

With this wellness focus, Taika is clearly aiming to capture the same demographic as other good-for-you beverage brands, like CBD soda company Recess or Dirty Lemon. Price-wise, it’s in line with both.

Taika isn’t the first company to put adaptogens in coffee, or the first to create lower-caffeine coffee. But combining those two aspects, along with marketing explicitly geared towards wellness-conscious consumers, could help this startup rocket to success.

PepsiCo Launches Two Sites to Deliver All the Snacks to Your Doorstep

With quarantine keeping us all at home and near our pantries, we’re buying more food staples online — and snacking more, too. So it’s no surprise that PepsiCo announced today that it’s launching two ways that people can buy snacks (and other pantry items) directly.

On PantryShop.com, consumers can order curated bundles of popular PepsiCo products with names like “Family Favorites,” “Workout & Recovery,” or, of course, “Snacking.” These bundles have goods from PepsiCo brands like Gatorade, Cap’n Crunch, and Quaker. The Standard Size for the packs costs $29.95, while the larger Family Size is $49.95.

PepsiCo also launched Snacks.com, which is even more snack-specialized. On the site people can order crackers, nuts, and dips, as well as a whole litany of chips from Lays, Cheetos, Ruffles, and more. Orders over $15 ship free.

According to an email sent to The Spoon, the majority of orders placed on PantryShop.com or Snacks.com will arrive within two business days. Obviously that’s not going to sate any chip cravings happening right now, but in a time when finding a grocery delivery spot is almost as hard as finding the golden ticket, two days is actually not that long. And considering everything that PepsiCo is sending is shelf-stable, speed is not exactly of the essence.

Considering the meteoric growth of online grocery since the coronavirus pandemic began, it’s no surprise that PepsiCo is trying to take advantage by launching its own direct sales platforms. With Instacart orders, PepsiCo is competing with other brands to get in your cart. By taking the process onto their own site, they own your purchase 100 percent.

That is, if consumers will go for it. There may be increased interest in online grocery shopping, but I’m not sure if consumers are willing to add another marketplace to their digital purchasing habits. Do people have enough loyalty to PepsiCo brands to place an entirely separate snack order on Snacks.com, as opposed to just adding a few bags of Hot Cheetos to their regular online order?

I suppose, like so many things right now, we’ll have to wait and see. If PepsiCo does see some healthy interest you can bet we’ll see other Big Food brands like Coca-Cola or Nestlé following suit with their own online marketplaces. What better to go with your PepsiCo Snack Pack then a Coca-Cola Soda Pack to wash it all down?

NUGGS Announces Retail Launch of Plant-based Chicken Nuggets

NUGGS, a startup that delivers plant-based chicken nuggets directly to consumers’ doorsteps, announced today via an emailed press release that it will launch in retail this spring.

Founded in 2019, NUGGS makes meatless “chicken” nuggets out of pea protein. The company started delivering the nuggets directly to consumers last July in the U.S. In addition to this D2C model, NUGGS has said it will create new iterations of its product based on consumer feedback (the company claims to be on version 2.0 right now). NUGGS will begin selling the nuggets at 10,000 retailers through CPG distribution agencies Acosta and Green Spoon. Exactly which retailers will carry NUGGS was not disclosed in the emailed release.

Said release came from McCain Foods, the world’s largest manufacturer of frozen potato products, which has also invested $7 million in NUGGS. The affiliation makes sense since NUGGS will debut in the frozen section of the grocery store, where it’ll have some competition from alt-meat stalwarts like Morningstar and Quorn. It’ll also face off against Tyson’s Raised & Rooted line of plant-based nuggets, though those have egg in them so they aren’t technically vegan.

A 10.4 ounce box of plant-based nuggets will retail for $5.99. That’s slighly pricier than a similarly sized offering from Morningstar, but significantly cheaper than Quorn. The NUGGS price tag is also in line with Tyson’s Raised & Rooted nuggets, which cost a whopping $6 for a bag of nine.

Retail has always been in the gameplan for NUGGS, which also expects to branch into foodservice. That’s where the company could actually face more competition: KFC is rapidly expanding its tests of the new-and-improved Beyond Fried Chicken, startup Rebellyous is selling its plant-based nuggets at cafeterias, and just a few months ago Scottish startup Daring Foods inked a deal with Rastelli Foods Group to start selling its meatless chicken pieces to both restaurants and retailers.

When I first wrote about NUGGS last year, I was skeptical that their young team would be able to compete in the white-hot alternative protein space, especially when faced with the challenges of scaling and mounting competition in plant-based chicken. This retail launch will be the first real test to see if I was right.

Equal Parts Bundles Coaching With Cookware In Effort To Lure Millennials Into the Kitchen

For those new to cooking, it’s easy to feel lost the first few (or few dozen) times in the kitchen.

But what if you had a personal cooking coach to text with questions about techniques, meal suggestions or even dinner party tips? That’s the idea behind Equal Parts, a cookware brand from Millennial-focused direct-to-consumer startup Pattern Brands.

Here’s how Equal Parts coaching+cookware works:

When you buy a new cookware set from Equal Parts, you get an accompanying bundle of cooking guidance as part of the package. Guidance comes in the form of eight weeks of seven-days-a-week text messaging access to cooking coaches that provide advice on pretty much anything related to the meal journey, from teaching new cooking skills like sautéing to walking through a meal plan to grocery shopping guidance. Coaches are available each day from 4 PM ET to Midnight ET.

The cookware + coaching kits range in price from $65 for a utensil bundle all the way up to $499 for a 20 piece “Complete Kitchen” bundle that includes pans, knives, mixing bowls and more.

Once your eight weeks of text-based coaching is up, you’re ready to spread your wings and fly solo or, as the company puts it on their website, it’s time to “build your intuition in the kitchen” because, after a couple months, “you won’t need us anymore”.

Guided Cooking For The Millennial Generation?

In a way, Equal Parts offers guided cooking, only instead of using connected pans and software, the Millennial-focused brand offers up personalized guidance in a delivery format that is second nature to pretty much anyone in the under-35 crowd: texting.

Another difference with connected products is the temporal nature of the guidance. While products like the Hestan Cue offer the prospect of continuous guidance over the lifetime of product, the reality is most folks usually have a few go-to meals they cook, so the idea of weaning people off of their coaching makes sense. I also suspect giving a limited time window to use the coaching probably is enough to incentivize many to actually use it and not shove their pans in the drawer.

The company behind Equal Parts is a venture funded startup from Pattern Brands, a company founded by some of the marketing agency whizzes who helped launch direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker, Everlane and Bonobos.  While many of the early D2C success stories have been largely focused on fashion and lifestyle categories, the kitchen and other more “domesticated” brand concepts have come into focus the last few years as Millennials move both into parenthood and up the career ladder.

And while Equal Parts is a new take on cookware, it isn’t the first new take targeted at the under-35 set.  Great Jones is another buzzy cookware brand that launched in the last few years, and let’s not forget Buzzfeed Tasty’s cookware brand partnership with Walmart. Tasty has also tried its hand at guided cooking with the Tasty One Top, a product it seemed to lose some interest in over the past year as many of the core team behind the product like Ben Kaufman  (ed note: Buzzfeed emailed us to let us know that Ben Kaufman is still acting as company CMO through the end of this year even as he focuses on his new startup Camp) have moved on.

So will text-message powered coaching be the secret ingredient to establish Equal Parts as an up-and-coming cookware brand? Too soon to tell, but it’s definitely worth a shot.  While the Instant Pot may have become the first cooking gadget Millennials can call their own, the race to become the cookware brand for a generation is too big an opportunity to pass up.

NUGGS Launches Mail Order Plant-based Chicken Nuggets

Ben Pasternak first gained media attention when he became one of the youngest people ever to get venture capital at the age of 15 for his gaming app. Four years later, he’s started a company focusing on a totally new (but no less viral) type of technology: alternative proteins.

His company NUGGS makes vegan “chicken” nuggets out of texturized pea protein. The nuggets have 22g of protein per serving (twice as much as animal nuggets) and are free from eggs, wheat, soy, and cholesterol. Today, NUGGS is launching the nuggets with a direct-to-consumer model.

The nuggets are currently only available to consumers in the U.S. through NUGG’s website. One box of 40 nuggets will put you back $24, but two boxes (80 nuggets) costs you $29. That seems crazy expensive for one box but pretty reasonable for two, so we’ll see if NUGG’s pricing strategy ends up pushing consumers to buy double. The company eventually plans to expand into retail and foodservice.

So far NUGG has raised $7 million in funding led by Canadian potato processor McCain Foods, who also manufactures the nuggets. Other investors include Greylock Discovery Fund, Rainfall Ventures, and the former president of Tumblr John Maloney.

In an email to The Spoon NUGG claimed to be the world’s first “chicken” nugget startup, but that’s not exactly accurate. Seattle-based startup Rebellyous has been selling its plant-based chicken nuggets wholesale to cafeterias, schools, hospitals, etc. for quite a while. Larger companies have also been embracing plant-based chicken options. Tyson recently released a vegetarian nugget, and Burger King in Sweden has rolled out its plant-based Rebel Chicken King throughout the Scandinavian nation.

But the plant-based protein space isn’t a zero-sum game — especially when it comes to chicken. True, there are a few veteran plant-based companies like Quorn and Gardein who have had frozen vegetarian nuggets to market for a while. But when it comes to the recent wave of companies developing more realistic meat alternatives, most of the innovation has been around burgers, not chicken, leaving ample opportunity for new players.

That might be starting to change. KFC in the U.K. sold out of its vegan Imposter Burger in four days. Chick-fil-A is reportedly looking into alternative protein options. Plus there’s the fact that consumers are hungrier than ever for plant-based protein of all stripes — including chicken.

As of now, NUGGS is untested. I have some skepticism over whether it will succeed. NUGGS’ team of eight are quite young (three of its leaders are 20 and under, including the CEO) and have relatively little experience in plant-based food manufacturing and scaling — issues that are tripping up even veteran, well-funded players like Impossible Foods.

That said, NUGGS is coming to market at an opportune time, before there’s too much competition. If they can deliver on taste (admittedly a big ‘if’), Pasternak and his team might find themselves winning a very different sort of game.