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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

yogurt

The Collaborative Raises $7M to Fuel U.S. Expansion of Coconut Yogurt Empire

The Collaborative, a plant-based yogurt startup formerly known as The Coconut Collaborative, has closed a $7 million Series A funding round led by PowerPlant Ventures.

Founded by twin brothers in 2014, The Collaborative started off making coconut-based yogurt and desserts in the U.K. They expanded to the U.S. market in 2018. It’s currently available in retailers nationwide and will launch on Amazon Fresh in May.

It looks like The Collaborative will use its new funds to really put down roots in the U.S. market and expand its retail footprint. The company is also updating its yogurt offerings to include new sizes (like a multi-serve size) and expanding its dessert lineup.

The Collaborative frames its product as a more sustainable alternative to regular yogurt. While dairy has a hefty environmental footprint, coconut harvesting has its own share of evils. To offset its impact, The Collaborative works with Pur Project to plant coconut trees in Southeast Asia to replenish the ones it uses to create its yogurt.

Despite the coronavirus pandemic slowing down the economy, a slew of plant-based companies have announced funding over the past few weeks. Rebellyous Foods raised $6 million for its vegan chicken nuggets, and Impossible Foods announced an eye-popping $500 million raise to help it weather the COVID-19 storm. As restaurants close and people turn even more to retail, animal alternatives have been experiencing a boom in sales — that’s good news for The Collaborative.

The bad news is it has plenty of competition to contend with. The plant-based yogurt space has really been heating up over the past year. Startups like Yofix, Kite Hill, and Lavva, who makes yogurt from pili nuts, are all jostling to come out with a yogurt tasty enough to convert dairy lovers. Even Big Food corporations, like Chobani and Yoplait, are getting in on it.

With so many new entrants crowding the plant-based yogurt section of your grocery shelf, the differentiator will come down to one thing: taste. Our own Jenn Marston (and self-described dairy lover) sampled some of The Collaborative’s coconut yogurt a few years ago and thought it did a pretty good job of imitating the taste and texture of regular yogurt. With its new funding, The Collaborative will be able to launch new products — in new areas — to try and get even more dairy skeptics on board.

Lavva Uses Pili Nut to Make Legit Delicious Plant-Based Yogurt

As a lactose-intolerant person who loves her morning yogurt & granola, I’ve tried my fair share of vegan yogurts. Usually I’m disappointed. Most plant-based yogurts are bitter or have an off-putting grainy texture; some just taste like a straight-up cup of either soy or coconut.

But at last I think I’ve found one plant-based yogurt to rule them all. Lavva, a product of New York state-based EVR Foods, is everything I’m looking for in yogurt, minus the dairy. It comes in a very appealing, brightly-colored packaging (no, that doesn’t affect the taste, but still — nice), and it’s made of just a few, pronounceable ingredients: coconut water and cream, plantains, cassava, vanilla extract, lime juice, fruit, live vegan cultures, and pili nut.

According to the packaging, it’s the pili nut that gives Lavva its distinctive creaminess and rich texture reminiscent of full-fat yogurt. Flavor-wise, Lavva has a light sweetness and, most surprisingly, a true tanginess that I have yet to find in any other plant-based yogurt brand.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

Of the five flavors I tried, the Original was my favorite. It essentially tastes like a very mild coconut (not surprising, considering that coconut is the first ingredient listed on the label), but also has a nice tart kick. I could definitely see adding this to a morning smoothie, using it as a base for granola and fruit, or even swirling it on top of a savory vegetarian soup. I also liked the tropical flavors — Mango and Coconut — which gelled well with the coconut undertones.

Not all the flavors were home runs, though. The strawberry was slightly too acidic for my taste, and the vanilla — despite using real extract and vanilla bean — was lackluster.

A 150g single-serving container of Lavva contains 140 calories with only 6g of sugars. It also has 11 grams of fat (7g saturated), which is fairly high. However, it fits with recent trends in fat-forward, low-carb diets like keto and paleo. The one nutritional downside of Lavva is that each cup only has 2g of protein, which might give pause to those who turn to yogurt as a protein-packed breakfast option.

With the recent spike in demand for plant-based foods — especially plant-based dairy — it’s no surprise the vegan yogurt space is having a bit of a moment. Ripple, purveyor of pea protein beverages, came out with a yogurt which almost scarred me for all plant-based yogurts (though Ripple’s PR team reached out saying they’re reformulating their yogurt recipe). Israeli company Yofix, winner of PepsiCo’s European Nutrition Greenhouse Programme 2018, makes a yogurt out of a blend of oats, seeds, and legumes. U.K.-based Coconut Collaborative recently rolled out their coconut-based yogurt Stateside.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

Big dairy players are getting involved, too. Silk and SoDelicious, two of the biggest names in plant-based dairy (and both owned by Danone) have their own vegan yogurt lines. And just within the past month Chobani, the leading yogurt producer in the U.S., launched a new plant-based product which is set to hit grocery shelves nationwide mid-February.

After launching in 2018, Lavva’s yogurts are now available in roughly 1,000 stores around the U.S., including Whole Foods, Fresh Market, and Safeway (in some states). A cup of Lavva will set you back around $2.49, which is slightly more expensive than other plant-based yogurts on the market (Chobani’s “yogurt” cups cost $1.99 each and Silk is around $1.50).

I’m excited about the direction plant-based yogurt seems to be going — getting more creamy, nuanced, and generally closer to the “real thing.” Hopefully soon Lavva will have some competition.

Lecker Labs Raised $400,000, Pushed Yomee Yogurt Maker to 2019

There’s good news/bad news for those awaiting the Yomee connected countertop automatic yogurt maker (we count ourselves among them). The good news? Lecker Labs, the company behind Yomee, closed a $400,000 round of funding last month! The bad news? If you’re one of the more than one thousand people who crowdfunded the project, you won’t get your Yomee until next year. Maybe.

The funding news flew under our radar, and we came across it when checking in on Yomee’s progress on Indiegogo. An update there posted on September 16, 2018 from the company read:

We have finally closed a funding round of $400,000 to get Yomee into manufacturing! Since most of the funds came from our existing investors, so [sic.] please join Yomee team to thank our investors for their continued support. Of course, we also genuinely appreciate all the efforts and patience from all of you amidst manufacturing and shipping delays, we are expressing our greatest gratitude to your everlasting support and understanding!

In October of last year, Lecker Labs Founder Ashok Jaiswal told us he had already raised $350,000 in angel funding (Crunchbase says Lecker has raised $325,000). Jaiswal had also launched a Kickstarter campaign towards the end of 2017 to, as we wrote at the time, raise additional money needed for tooling production parts and as a test to gauge market interest. Yomee actually ran both Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, raising an additional $186,109.

Adding those numbers up, it looks like more than $930,000 in total has been poured into the Yomee. Raising a lot of money, however, does not guarantee a hardware product will ever reach market. And it looks like Yomee has gotten tangled up in the production issues that snag so many crowdfunding projects.

Kickstarter backers could pledge $99 for a Yomee kit with an initial ship date of April 2018. The ship date on Indiegogo was listed as August 2018. In an update dated July 8, 2018, Lecker said it was pushing delivery into next year, writing:

As per our original commitment to you, we were expecting to start shipping in August. However we found some critical issues in testing pre-production units, mainly how cool can we keep the yogurt. Our goal is to achieve cooling to as low as 12-15 deg Celsius (53-59 deg Fahrenheit). We have discovered in testing with production materials that we may not reach these low temperatures under certain ambient conditions. The performance of Yomee right now is ‘good enough’ for an MVP but we expect to do better and ship a product we can be proud of. Another cycle of iteration in refining the design and testing is unfortunately going to delay shipping. Our engineers and factory partners expect this process to be complete by end of the year and shipping in first quarter of 2019. We will be strongly focussed on this for the rest of the year and will send monthly updates on our progress.

We are fans of the concept of Yomee here at The Spoon. The idea of a small countertop machine that makes and chills our own customizeable yogurt is enticing, and hopefully delicious. We even selected Lecker as one of our startup showcase companies at our Smart Kitchen Summit: Europe this past June. But all the hope in the world can’t overcome production and manufacturing issues (See: the Cinder smart grill, HOPii, Smart Plate, iGulu, BrewBot).

Ideally, this new round of funding will power the company through whatever troubles they might be having so it can fulfill its promise to backers and get its product into the world. But we’ll have to wait and see. We reached out to Jaswail for comment and clarification and will update this post as we hear back.

Ripple Yogurt Review: High Expectations Crushed By (Very) Bad Taste

Nobody wanted to like Ripple yogurt more than me. As a recently diagnosed lactose intolerant person who loves ice cream, cheese, and yogurt more than most things, I’ve been having a hard time cutting down on dairy. So this week I decided to give Ripple, a brand about which I’d heard some great things, a go.

I bought their single-serve Greek Yogurt Alternative in strawberry flavor, which packs a whopping 12g of protein in its 150g serving size — roughly the same protein as dairy yogurt. Ripple is made of pea protein, meaning it’s soy and nut-free and safe for those with allergies. It also has added active cultures, meaning it’s gut-friendly like dairy yogurt.

I was optimistic when I dug in. Sadly, that optimism disappeared almost immediately.

The texture of the yogurt was actually pretty good: it was creamy and thick, not exactly Greek yogurt-level thick but still impressive. But the taste, sadly, was straight-up bad. The strawberry flavor came through lightly — there are pieces of strawberry throughout the yogurt — but it had an overwhelmingly artificial flavor, which led to a bitter, unpleasant aftertaste. The yogurt somehow dried out my mouth and tasted gritty, though its texture was smooth. Someone sitting across from me at my office noticed my disgusted face and asked me if I was okay. I threw it away after a few bites.

A harsh review, I know. I wish it wasn’t. I’m one of the growing number of people purchasing dairy alternatives for health or ethical reasons. I’m all for non-dairy products that don’t use almonds, which are very water-intensive and are pretty protein-poor. Ripple could have fulfilled my dairy-free needs while assuaging my environmental guilt — and pea protein has served us so well with Beyond burgers!

Ripple, which launched in 2016, also makes pea milk in original, vanilla, and chocolate flavors, a product called “half-and-half,” and recently debuted nutrition powders and shakes. I haven’t tried any of their other products, but after my experience with their yogurt, I’m not really rushing to the store.

According to Crunchbase, so far Ripple has raised $108.6 million in funding. That’s some serious dairy-free dough. But while their product seems like it would hit the sweet spot, it left me with a (literal) bitter taste in my mouth. If they can’t get me — a millennial consumer who avoids dairy, is open to plant-based alternatives and enjoys trying new products — to buy their yogurt, who will?

Perhaps I’ll have better luck with coconut yogurt, which my colleague Jenn Marston tried and liked — though I’ll have to find my protein somewhere else. And maybe when lab-made dairy products, like the ones that Perfect Day is developing the technology for, come to market, they’ll be able to eliminate that pesky lactose and still make tangy yogurt and gooey mozzarella and all the things I hold so dear. Until then, it looks like I’m having toast for breakfast.

Update: Ripple Foods’ PR team reached out to me with this to say:

We saw your recent review on The Spoon and wanted to apologize for your not so delicious experience as well as share that the brand is definitely listening and will be working to revamp the yogurt line over the next few months. They want to provide consumers with a quality product and feel the current one needs some tweaks.

COO of Lecker Labs, Makers of Yomee, Talks Crowdfunding Success

Since we announced the 8 finalists in our SKS Europe Startup Showcase last week, we’ve launched a series of Q&A’s to introduce this year’s talented crop of food innovators. Next up is Anindya Roy, COO of Lecker Labs, producer of Yomee.

Lecker Labs got their start at the food tech accelerator program FoodX and before launching a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for Yomee, a countertop appliance which combines milk (and milk alternatives) with branded probiotic pods to create chilled yogurt in 6 hours.

Head to the SKS Europe blog to read our Q&A with Roy and learn more about the inspiration behind Yomee, the startup’s biggest challenges, and the secret to their crowdfunding success.

If you want to meet Anindya and more of the Yomee team in person and see them demo their countertop yogurt maker, register for SKS Europe in Dublin on June 11-12th!

 

The Spoon Video Top 3: Yogurt Tech, Breville’s Coffee Robot & The Cordless Kitchen

It’s our weekly video recap of the top three trending stories from over the past week on The Spoon. Our recap includes these stories:

Make sure to follow us on Facebook to get our weekly video wrapup of the top trending stories first.

Fresh Or Frozen, These Startups Aim To Create A Keurig For Home Yogurt

With everyone nowadays seemingly trying to get their daily fill of probiotics, yogurt has become a go-to for a daily snack, tasty dessert or healthy way to start the day. For most of us, that means buying it at the store or heading out to get a sugar-filled frozen yogurt at the local froyo stand.

And while some are adventurous enough to create at home using one of the many home yogurt makers on the market, none of these devices offer make-at-home yogurt with Keurig like simplicity.

Until now. That’s because two new startups are coming to market with pod-based yogurt systems. And the good news for yogurt eaters? They will have our choice of fresh or frozen.

Yomee 

If you like fresh yogurt and want to make it at home, you will be interested in the Yomee from Food-X alumni, Lecker Labs. The original concept for a pod-based yogurt maker came to the company CEO Ashok Jaiswal when he and his wife started feeding their young daughter yogurt and were looking for an easy way to make it at home.

“When we found out that she loves yogurt, we wanted to buy good ones for her, but almost all yogurts sold in Hong Kong are expensive,” Jaiswal told the Loop. “They’re also often imported and therefore not fresh, and can contain lots of sugar and other ingredients.

When his wife asked him if he could make a device to make yogurt, he started researching the idea.

“I thought that there must have been so many in the market already, but when I Googled and checked on Amazon, I found that there were no fully automatic yogurt makers in the market.”

Jaiswal teamed up with cofounder Tu-Hien Le and soon raised $325 thousand in seed funding. The two were accepted into Food-X, a well-known food startup accelerator based in New York, and from there they went on to create Yomee.

To make yogurt with the Yomee, you put in milk and a Yomee pod (which will make approximately two servings of yogurt). The Yomee hardware stirs the milk, heats it to 185 degrees Fahrenheit and adds the cultures from the Yomee pod. Six hours later the yogurt, chilled to 55 degrees Fahrenheit.

According to my conversation with Tu-Hien Le at June’s Food IT event in Silicon Valley, the device will be for sale initially via Kickstarter at the end of August starting at $99, which is significantly lower than $800 to $1,200 retail price range that the two founders told the Loop  (ed note: Tu-Hien Le clarified via email that the price quoted to The Loop was in Hong Kong dollars).  According to Hien Le, the company will offer a subscription for its pods for $15 a month.

Yogurt for Dessert? Meet Wim

If you fancy a froyo instead, you’re in luck. The Wim, announced this week, makes single-serve frozen yogurt in about 10 minutes.

The product is the brainchild of Google alum Bart Stein. Stein, who sold his first startup Stamped to Yahoo in 2012, came up with the idea for a frozen yogurt maker while on vacation in the Catskills in 2014.

“There was an appliance for everything from coffee, to waffles, to soda,” Stein told Bloomberg. “We realized there was no appliance for frozen dessert.”

How To Frozen Your Yogurt

Stein went on to secure funding, build a team and over the next two years create a system that includes the Wim appliance and yogurt bowls. The system makes frozen yogurt when the user adds milk into the Wim bowl and presses a button on the Wim appliance. The Wim appliance stirs and chills the mixture of milk and ingredients to negative 10 Celsius (about 14 degrees Fahrenheit) in about 90 seconds.

The Wim bowls, which include a powder that activates when mixed with the milk, cost about $3 a bowl in bulk. Currently, the company offers ten flavors, ranging from strawberry to ‘brownie batter’ to ‘banana bread’. The Wim appliance will set you back $299.

Unlike the Yomee, the Wim is available today.

Bloomberg’s Kate Krader tested out the Wim and liked what she tasted. “So what does it taste like? The dessert is luxuriously creamy and airy, with a tangy bite,” she wrote.

Are We Ready For Keurig For Yogurt?

Will pod-based yogurt take a bite out of store bought or the traditional home yogurt makers on the market?

Maybe. There is an obvious advantage to having long-shelf life dry yogurt pods that you can mix fresh on demand.  For those who want fresh yogurt daily, something like the Yomee may make sense, particularly if the product is in the lower end of the price range.

Of course, the Yomee will need to compete with older, less smart yogurt makers on the market. One such product is the Euro Cuisine, which costs about $30 and makes yogurt using yogurt starters.  But systems like this require more cleaning and the user to put yogurt into jars.

The Wim will face competition from both the local froyo stand and devices like the Cuisinart ICE-21, a popular home frozen yogurt maker that sells for about $50, but takes anywhere from 16 hours to 24 hours to make a batch of froyo.

For both potential users of the Yomee and Wim, the clear advantage is increased convenience and rapid-serve small portions.  If the companies can get the price right while perfecting pod systems to work well, I think will be a subset of consumers who find the convenience of Keurig-like simplicity, speed and clean up the right mix for their yogurt fix.