AccelFoods LogoAccelFoods
When you think of venture capitalists, you don’t tend to think of suburban moms.
Former corporate lawyer Jordan Gaspar describes herself and her partner Lauren Jupiter (who was an investment banker for gigantic food companies in another life) as, “the people who read the nutrition facts, the people who read the ingredients in the two different products sitting next to each other on the shelf.” So when the pair decided to open an investment firm specializing in small packaged food brands, they had their own young children and the country at large in mind.
Jordan Gaspar, Managing Partner at AccelFoodsAccelFoods
They started with a fund of about $4 million, investing in baby food brands and operating almost like a business incubator. But AccelFoods soon outgrew that model. The fund started in 2013, and five years later they now manage three separate funds equaling $85 million. Jupiter and Gaspar have spoken to thousands of companies, and AccelFoods has quickly become one of the biggest VC funds in the food business.
That growth has happened so fast because they’re riding a cultural wave. The grocery store shelves are changing rapidly as consumers demand better quality from industrial food products, and AccelFoods brings those products (frozen kids meals with hidden vegetables, lower-sodium bouillon cubes, and even jicama chips) to the forefront.
It’s clear these women know their market. Many of the companies they fund have found great success. AccelFoods-backed Harmless Harvest buys ads half-a-subway-car at a time. But a good chunk of the products AccelFoods backs are expensive ones, and if the values espoused by these companies don’t find their way to the masses, the future Gaspar, Jupiter and millions of consumers across the country and the world envision might be a pipe dream. Things that are inaccessible to the poor are never revolutionary.
That said, lost causes are often the ones most worth fighting for.
A while back, I watched a movie called Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers. When it was made in the early 1980s, garlic was still considered an “exotic” ingredient by many Americans. But as culinary ideas from Europe started to filter into the American consciousness, lots of people realized those pungent little bulbs were pretty delicious.
The film follows allium aficionados to the Gilroy Garlic Festival. It goes to Chez Panisse for an all-garlic dinner. It delves into the lives of garlic gluttons, cooks who felt a whole new world opened up to them when they started eating this one single ingredient.
I bring this up because words like “clean” or “superfood” don’t mean anything on a label, but the tiniest dietary changes can open up whole new avenues of edible wonderment and health.
Lauren Jupiter, Managing Partner at AccelFoodsAccelFoods
Jupiter’s right when she says that consumers are demanding, “cleaner labels, more transparency, not having ingredient panels that are 60 items long and full of words that you can’t pronounce,” Gaspar’s right too, since between “the Baby Boomer generation that’s aging and looking for natural alternatives to traditional medicine...the millennial mom purchasing on behalf of her family, investing in allergen-friendly foods and better-for-you foods, and...digital natives who are willing to invest more heavily into the food they put in their bodies than even the house that they sleep in,” it’s quite obvious that plenty of people are interested in eating more delicious, more nutritionally dense foods.
AccelFoods needs to be careful about the values of the companies it funds. Obviously, this one VC firm is a tiny part of the giant jigsaw puzzle missing some edge pieces that is America’s food supply, but while Gaspar and Jupiter used lots of buzzwords like “better-for-you,” “protein-formats” and “natural” (a widely misunderstood, badly regulated term) during our interview, the idea at the core of what they’re doing is pretty incredible.
There's lots of money in food.Getty
The food and beverage market is worth over $700 billion right now, and a significant chunk of it is these natural products, products that could eventually lead to a healthier America.
Ideas never die, and food is always changing. So if enough people really do vote with their dollars for food products promising more than platitudes, who knows, maybe the kids of those millennial moms will be just as weirded out by the idea of Cookie Crisp and Lunchables as I am by the prospect of canned peas and Jell-O salads.
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