We've spent more than a decade helping consumer packaged goods brands get started, and one thing has become increasingly clear: most people think the hard part is coming up with the idea.
The hard part is everything that happens after. We live in a moment where starting a food company has never been easier. A founder can spot a trend on social media, work with a co-packer, create a brand, build a website, and launch a product in a matter of months. The infrastructure that once required years of industry relationships and specialized knowledge is now available to almost anyone willing to put in the work. That's a remarkable development, and in many ways it has democratized entrepreneurship in food.
It has also created an illusion, because while starting a brand has become easier, building the business behind it has not. To be clear about what we mean: the brands that have to earn a place on a retail shelf — and keep it.
Every year, thousands of founders launch food and beverage companies. They are smart, ambitious, and often deeply passionate about the products they are creating. Many follow a similar path: they identify a category that is growing, develop a product that feels differentiated, manufacture inventory, and begin selling. At first, the momentum is exciting. Friends love the product. Early customers respond. A few retailers take a chance. It feels like progress.
Not a product to sell.
A system to manage.
The founder discovers that they are not simply selling a product. They are managing a complex system where every decision affects every other decision.
The reason is not a lack of intelligence or effort. The reason is that food, at least in part, is an experience business disguised as a product business. Success comes from understanding customers, retailers, operations, margins, and execution simultaneously. These lessons are difficult to learn from a book and expensive to learn through trial and error.
That's what makes food investing so unusual. Venture capital was built for businesses where money is the scarce input. Food is the opposite — and not because it needs less capital. It needs more. Inventory, manufacturing, freight, slotting, trade spend. Atoms are expensive and margins are thin. The difference is what the capital buys.
Capital is necessary. But it is nowhere near sufficient. Knowledge, experience, and pattern recognition determine whether capital compounds or evaporates.
By the time most investors have enough conviction to invest, much of the value creation has already occurred. The obvious response is to move earlier. But that creates a different challenge entirely.
You have to see hundreds of founders. You have to watch products succeed and fail. You have to understand why one item moves off the shelf while another sits untouched six inches away. You have to develop pattern recognition that only comes from proximity. And once you have it, it travels: the same signals that tell you which brand in your own building will endure tell you which brand anywhere will.
Founders needed a better path.
We didn't start with the belief that the world needed another venture fund. We started with the belief that founders needed a better path. For years, we watched entrepreneurs lose time, money, and momentum learning lessons that somebody else already knew. We saw talented people spend their first few hundred thousand dollars discovering avoidable mistakes. We saw promising businesses fail not because consumers didn't want the product, but because the founder lacked the support system to navigate the complexity of the industry.
So we built a model around working alongside entrepreneurs from the beginning. The goal is not simply to invest. The goal is to help founders build better businesses.
The venture industry often talks about finding winners. We've come to believe that's only half the question. The other half is how to create more of them — and the two are not in tension. An ecosystem that helps hundreds of founders build is also the best vantage point for recognizing the handful who will endure.
Because the future of food won't be built by investors writing larger checks. It will be built by founders making things people want — and by ecosystems that help those founders succeed. The firms that matter most in the next decade won't be the ones furthest from the work. They'll be the ones closest to it.
It takes expertise, focus, and capital to win.