Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now I am supremely honored to be sitting down with Adam Spriggs, who is the founder of the Angel Group and a general partner with Supernatural Ventures. Adam, it's great to see you. Pleasure to be here. I've listened to the program for. Going on almost a decade now, followed your work.
Been to a lot of the company's events and always felt that stuff you do is topnotch. I feel like I'm sitting with the guy Raz of, uh, CPG. Have you ever, ever been accused of that Ray? I've heard that before. Yeah. And it's an honor, uh, yeah, truly an honor because you know, he is the guy Yeah. So to speak.
And I really appreciate your thoughts about Bev Net and what we do here. You know. Equally honored to be sitting down with you. I feel like the Angel Group has helped so many early stage brands get to a point where they have the funding they need to take that next step, get to that next level, and it's not easy, as you know and as all of us know it, to scale A CPG brand and funding is so crucial.
Especially at that angel stage. Mm-hmm. So thank you for what you do. Yeah. Yeah. It's a pleasure. Yeah. It's a joy to do it. And you're also, you've also been a, a co-host for our elevator talk series, which profiles early stage and disruptive brands across food and beverage, and offering some feedback and advice to emerging brands.
Have you stayed in touch with any of the, any of the brands that, uh, you may have, uh, interacted with on the show? Yeah, there's a couple that. I'll still, you know, I'll see at trade shows and we catch up. There's a few that we still trade emails with. So yeah, I think it's a great program and you guys do a tremendous amount for the early stage CPG community as well, so I feel like we just have a lot of shared interests.
Yeah, well we were upstairs just now and downstairs, and you've seen the breadth of new products that come to market because we get new products, new brands coming into Bev Net HQ on a daily basis, and I would say we probably see. I don't know, 10 or 12 new food and beverage brands every single week. And that's just like the tip of the iceberg.
Yeah. And it's difficult. It's really difficult to get awareness for what you're doing. And you know, there's a lot of stuff that can get lost in the clutter. I heard once from another investor that there's kind of a glut of brands that have come to market over the past six years. And one of the interesting things about.
This dynamic is that a lot of these brands in the past would've failed within the first one or two years, and the fact that there are more options for funding, there are more options for just route to market, direct to consumer or otherwise, that these brands are just slowly fading or slowly scaling, but you can't really tell which, yeah, there's a, there's a surplus of brands.
And I think the industry is still catching up to just having the support systems in place to be able to touch more of these brands and, and try to impact their ability to, to sustain themselves, right? So you've got more co-manufacturers coming online that's taken a while to get up and going, but you see that, you know the different incubators, accelerators, you get all the different fractional resources that are coming to market.
And as you mentioned, funding. We're still seeing a big gap is, you know, a lot of the institutional investors, the venture funds have moved further upstream, right? So we need more angel investors involved in this space and you'll never be able to fund all these brands and you wouldn't be able to fund all the brands that are really deserving of bringing in outside money to, to keep 'em going, but definitely making progress.
You know, you've been involved in CPG for years now. I mean, well before the Angel Group. Just talk a bit about your background in the industry. Yeah, so. I started around 2005 post-college. Went to work at a creative agency in Toledo, Ohio. That agency would evolve and become what is today, interact brands. I know many of the people here at this office know Blake Mitchell and his crew there.
I think considered to be probably the the premier branding and design firm in this space. I got to know Blake's father outta college. He brought me in. I worked in business development there. We worked with a lot of regional family owned food manufacturers that were kind of in the Rust Belt area, you know, from Detroit to Toledo to Cleveland to, you know, like Erie, Pennsylvania, and cut my teeth there helping, you know, brands bring new products to market, develop sales sheets, trade show, boost package design.
So that's really what most of my career was wrapped into for the first, you know, 15 years. And then about. It was about seven, eight years ago. I just started to get the itch to do some angel investing. Just a personal interest. And I think part of it was reading, you know, NA and Benet articles about these brands who were getting funded and you know, these founders and these stakeholders, these investors who were taking these incredible journeys, you know.
Brands were scaling, brands were exiting, and I can't lie, it was like a little bit of kind of FOMO I had, you know? Mm-hmm. You know, here's an industry that I know pretty well, but there's a whole kind of scene or side of the industry that I hadn't had much exposure to for most of my career in terms of just.
The investing landscape and how these businesses are financed and, and so I wanted to get involved and as I started to explore what angel investing could look like for me, I felt like I was a little bit in over my head. Right. I could, I think I felt like I could identify brands and products that I think the market would take to.
But I didn't really know how to evaluate those businesses from the lens of like an actual investor, you know? So I wanted to do that and I, I, I felt like the best way to do it was just to start calling on my friends who worked in the industry, who worked in, you know, for a branded, like the director of sales, or VP of operations, or CFOs, you know, for these different companies who also had an interest in angel investing.
But like me maybe didn't have a lot of access to deals, maybe didn't feel quite competent to evaluate them for investment on their own. So I just started asking my friends to look at these deals with me and we would, in the evening out, we would, we'd sample products in the evening hours, we would get on calls with these founders.
And I wouldn't say that they would pitch to us, but we would just get to know them, you know, as industry people. And so we would kind of explore and share deals together, communally, and then we would individually make our investment decisions on whether or not we were gonna invest. And we start writing, you know, 10 K checks, 15 K checks, and that was really the genesis of what would become the angel group.
When you're saying you would invest or write 10, $15,000 checks, would you do it as a group or would each of you invest that amount of money into the brand? Yeah, good question. So each of us would typically write, 'cause the minimum check sizes for. Brands who are raising, especially like pre-seed, C stage capital, it's gonna be usually like 10 20 K.
Mm-hmm. And so individually we would write checks in that range. And collectively when we first started, you know, there's only, you know, like five of my friends in the group. And then we would, you know, have five more friends in the industry. Who would be like, you know, I've got a little bit of money burning a hole in my pocket and this is an, an industry I understand and have some influence in.
You know, and so I think that was kind of appealing for, for our friends in the industry to kind of join forces, look at these deals together. And so we might collectively, you know, bring in 50 K in the early days of the group, or 70 5K for these brands who are, who are raising money. So you've grown quite a bit.
The Angel group that is, it was five or so folks, and now you have how many people involved in the network? It's about 275. So 275 people in this, this formalized network. And everybody has this passion to invest in food and beverage startups. And we operate much today like we did originally, which is we, we will meet, you know, founders of early stage CPGs, we'll sample products kind of communally.
Mm-hmm. But we have people all over the country. But we make it easy for people to find the products, you know, these brands that we're looking to kind of present to the group. And then we collect all the investor materials, make it really easy to access those. We oftentimes record our initial calls with founders so that our members can.
Get a little bit of background before they're coming into these Zoom presentations where the founders are actually presenting to our members. And then we make it really easy to just streamline the whole investment process where when somebody decides that they'd like to invest, uh, it's really easy to to fund their commitments.
And in terms of the size of the companies you're investing in, it's typically at least, I would assume, those that are pre-seed to a couple million in, but you also make investments in larger companies, is that right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a new development. So we've really built our name and, and sticking our head out there and investing at the earliest stages of these CPG brands.
Right. So if we've made, I think it was about 35 investments to date, 90% of them have been when these brands were sub a million in revenue. That includes Poppi batons, oodles bubble, skincare, most of the brands we've invested in. But what we found is, and we call those our signature deals. Mm-hmm. That's what we kind of built our name on.
And then what we found is that, um, this was just recently, this was the beginning of 2025, where our members had an appetite to diversify and look at some more mature growth stage CPG. So these could be brands who are doing 10 million plus in revenue. Uh, and that really kicked off with like garage beer.
We had worked our, our butt off to find our way into a a, an allocation. And that brand, which was not marketed really anywhere else. And just for context, I think some founders who don't drink alcohol or are not really paying attention to the, uh, the Kelsey's, they might not know what garage beer is, but it is.
Perhaps the fastest growing beer brand in America. Yeah, it's, it's gotta be up there. So it's founded by a gentleman named Andy Sauer, or I guess you could say it was, is purchased very early on by Andy. He's in Columbus, Ohio and he kinda re-skin the brand and built it into what it is today and then.
Jason Kelsey and Travis Kelsey came along and came. The NFL became partners. Yeah, the famous NFL players. Both the NFL legends. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, and it's in the, in the, uh, light beer segment. That was appealing to us. You know, it wasn't craft beer, it wasn't something niche. It was something right down the middle.
Of the plate that I think most Americans could look at. Great Trademark Garage Beer. I love the premise of that name and simple, approachable light beer. But yeah, that brand was, you know, growing quickly and a little bit outside of the profile of brands we would typically invest in. So we said, let's bring that to the group and our group showed out in a big way to, to get involved and invest in that company and that really.
Opened our eyes to doing now what we call top shelf deals, which is, you know, finding really, really unique access into these high growth brands that we can bring to our group. Different risk reward profile than the early stage deals, right? You're gonna hold those investments for a shorter period of time.
Those early stage brands, you're gonna hold that like five to 10 years, that investment. And there you're hoping for, you know, maybe 15 x 20 x, 40 x, 50 x type of returns. The top shelf deals, you're gonna hold those investments maybe two, three years, but different upside, you know, potential maybe three x, four x, five x, those company's a little bit more secure, kind of sustainable place.
You must see a ton of deals 'cause especially. As I mentioned, there are so many new brands that come to market and every single day, every single trade show we go to, someone's always like, actually dozens of people are always like, Hey Ray, do you know any investors? And they're specifically looking for angel investors or seed round investors.
And I imagine you're looking at hundreds if not thousands of deals every year, at least presented. Yeah, deals. How many do you look at a year and how many do you actually invest in? Yeah, so my partner, Chris, Rob, and I, alongside Maddie Siente, who's our director of Investments, and then our partner Jared Cohen at Supernatural Ventures, between the four of us and we look at almost all deals together, we'll probably see a thousand, like just in terms of a cursory review.
And then we'll end up, you know, talking to, in a more formal way, like, you know, sampling products, getting on calls with founders with maybe 200, 300 founders a year, just to kind of feel out what they're doing and, and then we'll, we'll formally syndicate for the Angel group. We'll formally syndicate, you know, maybe eight to 10 deals a year.
Last year we did 11. So it's a real pairing down process and, uh, a lot of boxes showing up at the doorstep at the house and sampling a lot of products. But, uh, we really look for brands that are gonna, you know, have just outsized kind of growth potential and, you know, products that really resonate. But no, you said it, it's like we've needed, and I'm happy to see there are other syndicates popping up, you know, that are focused on CPG, that bring angel investors together.
'cause you can imagine if you're a founder. And after your friends and family come in and you got the institutional investors who are, you know, waiting till, you know, you cross the threshold of two 3 million in revenue, you know, you've gotta go collect angels. And so to have some focus groups where people are really passionate about CPG, most of our group is industry people, people who work inside the industry, but we also have casuals people who are in other sectors and who've invested in real estate or the stock market or.
Tech and want some exposure and CPG or want to maybe just see the food system change and they want to, they wanna put their money to work here. So I'm happy to see more and more angels getting organized to help these early stage founders out. Growth potential, certainly important. Scaling potential. Very important.
Are there any other through lines among the, the brands that you've looked at and said, Hey, this could be a winner. Is it packaging? Is it taste? Is it ingredients? Is it some sort of novel formulation? Yeah, it could be any one of those things. My eyes perked up when you said novel. We're looking for something that I remember.
I think it was CJ from Goat Rodeo. Oh, he's been on your programs before? Of course. He said something once I was really interested or I thought was really compounding. He said, we like things that sit at the intersection. Of things that are, I think it was interesting and obvious. Yes, yes. Yeah. That was such a great line.
Yeah. I'm glad you remember that. And obvious makes me think of when somebody sees it in a Costco or Walmart or Target, it's intuitively kind of understood or it's like, this feels like it should have always been here. But interesting is to me, like what makes something novel. You take something like a Goodall, you know, Goodall is familiar.
It's approachable, it's intuitive. You see a fork full of mac and cheese on great branding, great packaging. It's right there. But what's novel about it is, hey, why don't we take something like this and fortify it, you know, with real nutritional ingredients, you know, our nourishing ingredients, and so things like that, or cool novel snack products that just present unique sensory or form factor experiences, things that are memorable.
There's a lot of products that we try every year. That you put 'em in your fridge, you put 'em in your pantry, or in my family's fridges or pantries, we see these products around a lot and you know, you check in with people, you say, you know, what'd you think of that? And you know, some people just forget that you even gave 'em the product or it's still, there's still a case of it sitting in there.
But for the products that people really find interesting, they text you about or they follow up or they go and they order more. That's a really strong signal. So much of what we look for is, I think just. Our people, when we get these, are we actually wanting to consume them? You know, do we remember it? Do we start looking for it week after week?
From that point on, that's a, that's probably the most provocative, uh, through line for us. I'm gonna ask you as an exercise to put these words into in order of importance. Mm-hmm. So I think I have a feeling of where you're gonna go, especially as an early stage investor. Let's do it anyway. Founder cogs velocity price point.
So I'm gonna go founder one, and I'm gonna go Velocity two. COGS three. Price 0.4. Yeah, I figured it would be that order, but every time I talk to an investor, founder seems to be of the utmost importance. Yeah. Can I trust this person? To scale this brand? Do I trust their vision? Do I trust their ability to execute upon their vision?
I'm a generally trustworthy person. I, I've met enough founders to know, perhaps which ones are gonna struggle in certain aspects of the industry and which ones are going to. Do well. Um, but you never know. Yeah. I mean, it's such a, it's such a flip a coin, you know, when it comes to this industry in terms of who's gonna do well and who you know, might fall by the wayside.
Yeah. I think the attributes we look for most in founders, and maybe it's not even that we look for, it's just when they present themselves, it's, you know, there's just, we start to lean in more. One is just personality. Mm-hmm. Right. Somebody who's looking to make friends, looking to make connections, open themselves up is willing to be vulnerable.
Is willing to admit what they don't know. Just, just pleasant to be around. It's hard to, you could see a business you really like and a founder who actually has a lot of the qualities you look for. Right? In terms of just, you know, maybe knowing the space, having a network built out, having done this before.
But if they're a real asshole or you know, they feel transactional, you know, even though you might believe in this thing and to some degree it's hard to really wanna line up behind them. Versus a founder who is just really committed to the business is somebody that you start to befriend and really like and wanna root for and wanna see succeed.
You know, I'm, I'm happy to get behind those people and, and try to fill in the gaps wherever they, their skillset might be lacking. And that's a unique thing too about the group, right, is we've got 275 people who have a lot of reach and influence in the industry, a lot of capabilities. We don't have to have, you know, a perfectly cut founder to get behind.
I think as long as they're willing to run through a brick wall and learn on the fly and hustle every day, I think we can work with that. A lot of people admire Allison and Steven Ellsworth from Poppi. They have been in the business, well, I guess since they exited last year, there's, I mean, they're still involved with the brand on a sort of promotional level.
Yeah, I think at least Allison is. We met them in 2016 when they were on stage at Bev Net Live and they won our competition, our new beverage showOne competition as the founders of a company called Mother Beverage. And it was a sort of drinking vinegar based brand. Obviously they pivoted to Poppi and better for you soda in 2020 and the rest is history.
But when they were on stage, there was something really impressive about the way they presented and the way that they. Positioned the potential for their brand. I mean, let's be honest, drinking vinegar doesn't really sound like something that's going to scale very well, become a mainstream brand. It's not like the other brands on stage were terrible.
I mean, but they convinced people. They convinced people as to why this is gonna work. And that to me is a huge, and probably the most important job of the entrepreneur is to get people. To buy into whatever it is that you're selling. Yeah. Well it's funny because if I would've seen Mother Beverage in that pack format in the way that, you know, I think the product description was written at that time and the way that they were really positioning the beverage, despite how great Steven and Allison are, I don't think I would've made the leap.
We need to go back and have you watch that. 'cause it really was impressive. I mean, I, again, I'll look back at some of the brands that participated and it wasn't like they were, you know, shrubs. It was, uh, like, uh, schlubs, what's the word, Shub. Schlub. Yeah. Schlub, schlub, shrubs. A shrub numbers type. Exactly.
But I would love to go back and, and watch a lot of the brands, or at least the founders who have won the competition in the past. But that one always stands out to me for some reason. Yeah, well, they're really driven. Interesting story behind that and how we got involved is, uh, it was 2019 or so, so this is post.
Ca Vu coming in. Mm-hmm. And them working closely with Allison and Steven to rename it right to Poppi, to move to the 12 ounce cans and the new packaging, the bright, bold packaging and ca vu. Just for context here, CA Vu is a venture capital firm that was co-founded by Rohan Oza. Rohan Oza, famous for Vitamin Water for buy at that time now Famous for Poppi, but also famous for Shark Tank.
And so when Allison and Steven went on Shark Tank. And presented mother beverage, Rohan invested in the brand and then probably subsequently invested. Or maybe it was just Rohan, who, yeah, I can't remember exact order of events, but that you're right to clarify that. And uh, when we had met them, you know, they did Reskin and they were starting to bubble up on the scene and kind of, they make more headlines, but I mean, it was still, they were only doing about a million in revenue.
So, interesting way that we got into that was one of our members, Spencer Slain, uh, had taken a liking to Poppi. And he had started ordering cases to his home from Amazon and they had just launched on Amazon and were moving an unusual amount of volume on that platform. And to be honest, I hadn't really seen much of Poppi out in the market yet.
Mm-hmm. They were just pushing out into stores. Same with Ali Pop. And, uh, he had loved it and kind of had been nudging me to see if we could find a way in to invest. So he emails Steven Cold and Steven was kind enough to get back to him, I think after Spencer had pestered him enough and basically said we're, yeah, we're raising, but it's really reserved for like celebrities and influencers.
Isn't that weird? It's the complete opposite of what you might expect. Usually it's the entrepreneur who's bugging the investor, not the other way around. Right? Right. But these branches, they start to catch fire and the tables turn a little bit. And so basically we had to audition to Steven and we being.
This small Angel group members and I, and I mean to the point where we had written our bios, Spencer, myself, mark Gallo, who many of your Yeah. You know, and, and many of your listeners. Good man. And I think maybe Mark was our, our ace in the hole because you know, NorCal and, you know, Poppi was scaling and Yeah.
Mark was a, so NorCal is a, was a big co-manufacturer in Southern California and they also had an operation in Northern California. Obviously NorCal. But, uh, mark was their head of operations or one of their, one of their key operation guys and extremely knowledgeable about the beverage industry. Yes. So I can imagine that was very attractive to Poppi.
Yeah. Yeah. So I, none of the rest of us would really qualify as, uh, celebrities or influencers, but thankfully we had Mark. But no, we, uh, you know, we got on a call with Steve and Allison. They told us what they were planning to build. We didn't take much convincing. The brand was doing really well and we jumped in and, you know, we witnessed over the next five years kind of what everybody else witnessed.
You know, for our part, we just tried to champion the brand Wherever we went, you could see where they were making real progress. You know, they were pushing in store, their in store presence, they were getting case stack displays. They were moving to Multipacks. And it just, you know, you just just saw the thing start to really take off and then you had, you know, things really hit a tipping point with that first Super Bowl ad.
Yeah. You know, that was the pinch me moment for a lot of us, and I'm sure many of the other early investors in that brand. But yeah, it's, it's amazing to see what happened with that company, especially with it being one of the first deals we did through the group. So it sounds like, going back to the question of what's.
The order of importance of the terms I mentioned in this case it was velocity because they were doing so well and you were like, okay, wow, if this brand is doing this well this year, you know, what's next year look like. We believed in the category. Okay, so CSDs had been flat or declining and. You had some OGs like Jones and like Hanson, like those brands weren't really creating new momentum and new growth.
They were better for you. Were they better for you though? I mean, relatively speaking sure. Took Pepsi fair. Fair enough. Yep. And, uh, there's another one I can't picture. I had the bird on it. Uh, I can't remember the name of that one. But, so there's these, these brands that were out there, but Ali Pop and Poppi were bringing new energy.
They were clearly kind of leading the category to a new direction. So for us it was really. We had belief in the category and then, you know, in terms of how big it could go. And then, you know, there was a lot of noise in the industry at that time around apple cider vinegar. Mm-hmm. But I think more accurately around gut health, there was the bright, bold packaging.
It just felt like the right brand at the right time. A lot of momentum and you know, it was real, like when you looked under the hood, there was actual real velocity there. There was real discovery happening, real trial, real replenishment. And you know, there's a lot of brands that you see out there that have a high profile.
They get a lot of distribution, but when you really start to look into the different corners of where they're selling, it feels like it's more push than pull. Poppi felt like pull the whole time. There was a lot of push too, but it, there was real pull behind the brand. If you had had the opportunity to invest in Lollipop at the time, would you have?
I think we've had to run that by Steven and Allison, so yes, I would have if it would've been kosher to do so, but I'm not sure that would've been, well, I guess then what I'm asking is, and I, I have the utmost respect for both brands in both sets of founders. I wonder, you know, if an angel investor or any investor is presented with two brands mm-hmm.
That are both doing well. That both have similar velocities and excitement surrounding their brands. Which one gets the nudge? Where's the X factor? Yeah. Well, in that case, I would've chosen Poppi if I had to choose between the two because Poppi at the time was the only one that was shelf stable. So now we've got unique merchandising versatility, right?
So we can be in the cooler. And we can be off shelf, right? We can be an ambient. We can get those case stack displays that Lollipop couldn't. Plus, one unique thing that I liked about Poppi was that they weren't trying to mimic or replicate traditional soda flavors, like, like a Sprite or like a Coke, or like a root beer.
Not initially. They really pushed out with fruit flavors first, and I felt that it was a really smart play because you didn't have to have consumers kind of comparing apples to apples. So, yeah, I felt a lot of conviction behind pop and uniquely enough actually, you know, I mentioned top shelf deals earlier.
We actually were able to to, to get into Ali Pop for some of our members a little bit further down the line. But it'd be great if you're an investor and you believe in. Let's say the gummy category, there could be multiple brands that win. If you're angel investing in the earliest stages, high failure rate, maybe three, four brands make it, and the rest of the two or three dozen or so don't, you know, it'd be great to have exposure into multiple brands in the same category.
Same thing with the whole protein craze, you know, and protein ice cream and such. I mean, this is an easy segue because I just got your newsletter. Which was sent out on January 30th, and it lists some, some of your recent investments. And one of them is a brand called Nowadays and it's a, uh, THC cocktail brand, at least this is for the Angel Group.
I dunno if you're personally invested in the brand, but man, I can't tell you how many THC drinks we've seen come into the office over the past year. Hundreds. Yeah, hundreds. And I'm like, what? Who's gonna come out of this? 'cause clearly, you know, most of them. Are gonna fail. I'm guessing there's gonna be literally five Yeah.
That maybe make it to the next year. And the Angel group has invested in nowadays. So what is it about a brand like that that you say, okay, now we're gonna pull the needle outta the haystack and pick the right one here. I mean, how do you, how do you define potential for a brand like that? You know, we came in a little bit later nowadays, relative to when we invest in most brands.
But what stood out there was that I think they had a real handle on just this moving target around regulation. How brands are able to move into, I think, a, a safe zone while we wait for clarity on how this category is going to mature and develop. So I think that's one thing you gotta look for if you're investing in this space, is that you, you trust leadership and their ability to navigate how these products are gonna get to market, how they're gonna legally sell these products to consumers.
But you know, formulation integrity. So product and ingredient integrity is also really important. You need products that are safe and that are consistent and reliable for consumers to use. So I think they checked a lot of those boxes and you know, they had kind of, you know, uh, I think like Poppi and like Ali Pop, they had just kind of shown that they were gonna be kind of a breakaway threat in this category.
So naturally that gives you a lot of conviction. But we also invested in a super early stage brand in this space called Shift Naturals. Very interesting company, uh, in the West Coast very, very early on, but has a unique way of going about formulating their products. They do all low-dose beverages, so they've got, you know, an ability to get into almost every state that allows THC products to be sold.
And so really smart founder, really interesting company to keep your eye on. In the same way that you thought better for use soda could supplant legacy brands. Do you see THC beverages or describing them themselves as cocktails? Do you see them supplanting alcohol based beverages, or do you see these products just bringing new consumers into the fold and just expanding?
Use of THC? I think it's gonna do both. I think we still have, you know, a lot of people writing on maybe beer or, or maybe more broadly, Bev Elks downfall or, you know, everything's been downgraded right on, on the outlook for, for beer and alcohol sales. And I think it's real, but I think it's gonna take a while before it's, you know, it would be a sector that we wouldn't invest in.
I think we still have generations of folks who. You know, like to consume their beer. Mm-hmm. And you know, one of the reasons why we wanted to get involved with garage beer is we, we believe in that sector. We believe in that brand. But certainly things have changed and I think it's a really exciting development.
I think people have grown tired of the price they pay for going out and having, you know, a night of boozing. I remember when, what was it? The hard kombucha products came out. Mm-hmm. And I was so ready. I was in my mid thirties, you know, maybe late thirties. Kids were on the way. I was so ready to give up the hangover.
But I couldn't get past the taste profile, you know? Yeah. It wasn't worth it. There was still too much of a trade off and you know, I would drink those products, two three of 'em, you know, trying to catch a buzz. The efficacy wasn't always there and for some reason I still felt i'll hangover in the morning.
You know, these THC products I think can really change the game. You drink alcohol anymore? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Modelo Garage beer. Those are my go-tos. I drink a little tequila. Uh, less so with kids. Mm-hmm. But yeah, it used to be a pastime. I would go out on a Friday night, go down to the bar, kind of decompress, have a, a modelo.
And, uh, shot tequila and just kind of wind down that way. So still like, still like my alcohol. Yeah. You know, I think all the downgrading of alcohol or the, the concerns about Gen Z and their consumption of beverage alcohol, I wonder. As kids get older, as they start to get into those moments where they're done with work and they have kids, and Yeah.
You know, just need a moment to, to decompress a little bit. Um, it, it could be that they're, you know, using THC products or smoking weed or doing that, whatever, but I, I feel like the use case and opportunity for Gen Z. It just isn't there as much as you know, it had been for us when we were in college and that was the thing to do.
Now, certainly there were other things that, you know, younger folks can do, but. I just feel like the use case and the the day part use might be a little bit further down the line. Yeah. You know, what goes around comes around that it seems to be cool. I hope it's not the case, but it seems to be cool for kids to pick up a pack of smokes and, and smoke casually on the weekends or at a party.
I've seen that. Oh yeah. Yeah. I've seen like, you know, this kind of, I dunno, celebration of cigarette culture of cigarette brands of. You know, eighties muscle cars and you know, eighties, nineties, everything that A around eighties and nineties seems to be kind of coming back again. Even our vices. And so, yeah, I don't know.
We'll see. But maybe that's just what I'm seeing in Toledo, Ohio cigarettes, huh. Wow. I never thought would see those come back to the United States. Like I remember those days when you'd go into a bar, can you believe that you used to be able to smoke in bars, used to be able to smoke on freaking planes.
Yeah. Yep. My dad was a bartender. For much of my childhood, you know, loud, smoky, late night bar, he would be bartending. It's like a scene out a cocktail. It'd be flipping bottles. Mm-hmm. People ashing cigarettes left and right. And so I grew up in, in that environment and uh, yeah, I think we're in a better place now.
I would say so. Yeah, I would say so. Yeah. We're also in a better place when it comes to options for legacy product categories, whether it be condiments or yogurt, or. French fries and I'm, I'm mentioning three Friday categories that you guys are invested in via some amazing brands. Uh, ao, Jesse and Ben's painter Land Sisters.
I love Painter Land Sisters. What a fantastic brand. When did, when did you guys invest in that company? Pretty early on. So this was 2000, we're, what year are we in? Right? We're in 2026. This is, I think it was as we're reminiscing on days past and years past. Yeah. It's uh, I think it was 2024. It was two expos ago.
We had met Haley and Stephanie by chance, walking in the North Hall, 10 by 10 booth. Humble little booth there where, um, they were slinging yogurt and I'd never. Heard of the company before and outta the corner of my eye I see their brother and I dunno if it was Wranglers or Levi's and a big old belt buckle and I think a flannel shirt manning the booth.
And it just looked a little out of the ordinary to me. And I just moseyed over there, I think right past Haley and Stephanie who were out in the aisles as they always are, kind of, uh, greeting show goers. It just looked like something that reminded me of home a little bit. You know, a a lot of my family kind of involved in, uh.
I guess, uh, rural life. And so it stood out like a sore thumb at Expo West. And Pener and sisters female founded yogurt from kind of middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, fourth generation dairy farm. And tried the product, which is a ski yogurt, a hundred percent full fat, you know, full cream yogurt. Definitely a thicker consistency than you might be used to with yogurt for sure.
Yep. Organic. And they were just, you know, so it was kind of checking all these boxes of what we were looking for, kind of coming behind, I'll call it maybe the, the Maha movement, right? Mm-hmm. It was just kind of getting back to. Simple food and the product really impressed. And then I think what we saw a lot of potential and it was just bringing this kind of female energy and female voice into a category that had really lacked it.
That a lot of women shop and the yogurt set and you know, quietly, they were doing 4 million in sales their first year. And most venture funds would typically be hopping all over that, but they were largely undiscovered. 'cause, you know, they kind of crossed that threshold to where venture funds would typically get involved and they're in a massive category.
I don't know if you can find too many categories that are much larger to, to build into, invest into than yogurt. High unit buy rate, high repeat rate, and yeah, they've grown tremendously. So they were, you know, largely self-funded. They did a, a crowdfunding round and we had met them at the right time. They were at my first call after Expo West on, I think I even emailed on the plane ride back, said, Hey, I want to connect as soon as we all, wow.
Yeah, we all get back from expo and we hopped on a call and. Made fast friends and, uh, you know, raised a pretty good amount of money, almost a a million dollars through our Angel syndicate. And, uh, we've been working with them closely ever since. And yeah, very proud of, of what they've been able to accomplish so far.
How many brands do you meet at Expo that, or how many brands have you met at Expo that you've invested in? I don't know. I'd have to think about it. It's probably four or five, you know. So not a ton. Not a ton. You know, we, we discover a lot of, I think, worthwhile brands to look into and kind of keep our eyes on, and then they might, you know, actually materialize into an investment.
But, you know, like I said, we are only gonna invest in maybe eight, nine brands a year. In the early days, we were only investing maybe five or six brands a year. But yeah. You mentioned like, you know, the condiments category, you know another brand that. My partner at the Angel Group, Chris, Rob, and a couple of other our members invested in his bot on, so that transacted.
Yeah. News broke today. $400 million acquisition. Amazing job by Justin Gill and his team. What a fantastic brand. Yeah. Yeah. You know, my partner Chris has obviously been very bullish on the condiment set. We saw you like trough, came in and broke new, uh, you know, bot ons actually broke new ground on where we could go with pricing, premium price, condiments.
Uh, we saw Trough do that for a bit and you know, so AO comes along. In the mayonnaise category, and I think breaks new ground with, you know, not only premium positioning, but that kind of culinary angle that David McCormick and Molly Bass kind of conjured up together using her credibility. Really, really unique product.
You know, in terms of like there's real inclusions. Mm-hmm. You know, real like cut up pickles in the, in the dill pickle mayo that they use. Yep. Real mustard seed. And they're mustard mayo. And then, um, yeah, you look at the frozen potato category with Jesse and Ben's and other brand that we got behind, very early on, large, massive category shopped every week by consumers with very little innovation.
And the category there is largely concentrated within a handful of players that weren't really innovating and comes along at the right time with the whole seed oil movement. And we were kind of taking bets internally about whether or not the avocado. Oil skews. Uh, 'cause they fry their fries in avocado oil.
And then they also have skews that are fried in, um, beef tao. Beef tallow. Yeah. And my wife actually called it Right. I was betting on avocado because at the time, avocado oil is everything. Mm-hmm. But it's actually trending more toward beef tallow. But, you know, Jesse's got his, his finger on the pulse of what the market's looking for.
Now they're, you know, I think the fastest growing brand in the natural channel in the frozen potato aisle. Really, really incredible what they've been able to build there. But that's, you know, look at our second generation of brands is a o Mayo Painter and Sisters Coyotes, tortillas, stone and Skillet.
Bowie, the Aua Fresca brand. Jesse and Ben's. Yeah. You know, they're showing a lot of promise, just like the first generation of brands did. These are all fabulous brands you mentioned. I will say, and I love Jesse and Ben's, I love their positioning. Their packaging is fantastic. The fact that they are using different.
Oils or bases to fry their potatoes, I think is, is really differentiated and interesting. But I would be wary of investing in a commodity category like fried potatoes or frozen potatoes, if you like. If you think about, you know, the private label business, you know the major companies that they were like a McCains or a Noida, all they have to do is create their own version of a Jesse and Bens and what's gonna stop them from doing that?
What made you feel like they were so differentiated? That the big players, the big commodity players couldn't come in and just take their space. Great question. So we took a lot of time doing store visits when we had met Jesse just a couple years ago, and looking at what consumers were being offered in the space, forget natural, but when you would go into a Kroger, a Publix, Safeway.
All the brands were the same, and you look, you flip over the ingredient panel and there was always some sort of, you know, kind of black eye, you know, uh, ingredient in every single one of 'em. It should be very simple ingredients. I think this thing that these large brands struggle to do is anticipate not one.
I think they can see the trends. Coming. Right. I'd be surprised if they didn't know that there's a clean label movement sweeping across every category in grocery, and eventually it makes its way into the mass market, conventional retailers where those consumers looking for it. Mm-hmm. It used to be the left and right coast consumers that were really the consumer bases that were looking for these products, and then eventually it would kind of make its way into the middle of the country.
And I think what we see now is a lot of the consumers in the middle of the country, and maybe even in more, you know, the Kansas cities, the San Antonios, the Clevelands, the Nashville's, the, you know, the Atlanta, Georgia's, these are the markets that I think are now kind of creating trends and getting back to like red meat, getting back to dairy, getting back to meat and potatoes.
Yeah. There was going to be a movement back toward like. Family friendly offerings, family friendly categories like frozen meals, frozen entrees, frozen potatoes. So we saw that the movement away from seed oils is happening. The large brands, I think, struggle to either act and innovate on time, or they're happy to just wait and see what shakes out and either, you know, go in, like you said, with one of their own brands.
And kind of buy up facings and kinda squeeze them off shelf or, you know, litigate them into oblivion. Yeah. As we've seen happen with one of our other investments, the other thing I think they struggle is, is to really put out brands that consumers respond to. And I think that's like a deft touch. It just, it's not easy to, to build, like in a corporate marketing environment, a oodles, a Jesse and Bens.
Those types of brands, I think just need a founder's touch, you know, to kinda to to put out into market. I just sat down with Gabby Lewis, who's one of the co-founders of Magic Spoon, which is a brand that I never thought in a million years would be where it is today, because I never thought anyone would buy a $10 box of cereal.
Geez, I was proven wrong. But Magic Spoon is another one of those brands where. You know, they've succeeded in a commodity category by offering something different, by really focusing on macros, focusing on premium ingredients and flavors. And then recently, you know, it was, I think, what was it, just a few months ago, I was in a Stop and shop, which is a grocery chain up here in Boston, and I had seen.
A terrible knockoff of Magic Spoon, and I saw that it was created by one of the big cereal companies, one of the big food manufacturers. And I'm like, huh. So I guess it's not as easy, to your point, you know, of some of these big players being able to create something on their own. Yes, they can come in with their own product after the fact, but how much of that matter is once that brand is established itself as the.
Preeminent offering within that particular category. Jesse and Bens, I hope it gets there. I really do. I think their product is amazing. Their branding is fantastic. The beef Tao thing is pretty interesting to me. I wonder, I'm also kind of on the fence about whether that can become as mainstream as it as it might be in some pockets as the country, but it is interesting for sure.
Yeah. There's the brand that if he can get to the point where they are, where Jesse is, you know, where he's now crossing over into more conventional retailers. I think that's where you start to really see, you know, what a brand's kind of makeup is. Mm-hmm. In terms of how they navigate that growth, how they play a new game, kind of working with conventional retailers and you know, there's a different playbook that's in store for that.
So a lot of this comes down to, you know, building the capabilities of the team as kind of new opportunities demand and thinking about, you know, how you might right size your product offering, how you might right size your price back architecture, your value proposition in general. So, you know, you gotta give an opportunity for these brands to, to evolve because what you see today might not be exactly what you see in a year or two as they start to push into larger retailers.
So I just wanna see a two pound bag of Jesse and Ben's as opposed to the smaller patch bag. Then I'll be really happy actually. Yeah. I imagine you're talking to the founders of the companies you're invested in. On a relatively regular basis. So let's go back to Jesse and Ben's. How involved are you in advising the brand as it continues to grow and scale?
Do you feel like you like to have a hands-on approach? I know you're not getting involved in a day by day kind of basis, but do you like to be intimately involved in how they're thinking about. Retail strategy or you know, innovation. Yeah. Some of the brands that we get involved in, whether it be through the Angel Group or through Supernatural Ventures, our investment fund.
I think in general we like to be, you know, within arm's reach of these founders at any time like, like most investors would be. But I think what's unique about what we have is, you know, we've got this committed pool of capital through Supernatural Ventures. We have a unique obligation to our LPs and to ourselves and to the founders to, to stay very close to those businesses.
So we're typically at minimum on, you know, monthly calls where we can stay close, understand whatever kind of challenges they might be facing, or opportunities are around the corner, or we, you know, we can tee up unique sponsorship opportunities or promotional opportunities that we might have to bring to our.
Portfolio companies, obviously, you know, we've got a lot of connectivity in the industry, retailers, distributors, where we can be helpful in making connections. For the group and for our members there, our angel investors there. You know, we do biannual calls with our founders that we invest in. So we've started to make those much more scheduled so that we can stay connected to those founders.
They can take advantage of this large network of, of folks that we have in the group who can really be helpful. But yeah, I think a lot of it is just comes down to, you know, founders. Keeping investors up to date, keeping those investor newsletters going out, making sure you're very clear in what you're asking for, what opportunities you're facing.
But I think like anybody else, we'd like to stay close to our founders. Some were a little bit more, you know, like good old Poppi, you know, we were just happy to have the opportunity to invest. They had great teams around them, you know, those brands were going places and we just tried to champion them every step of the way and, you know, try to try to be good stewards and investors.
I'm sure it helps validate. You and the angel group in the eyes of founders who are operating very fast growing businesses when you have exited from a STE from a Poppi, are currently involved in Googles have exited from a bot ons. But I think the vetting process at this point is very much now, you know, brands are very much coming to you as much as, as anything.
Or am I wrong? You know, now that you have Supernatural Ventures, I mean, is it still very much, hey, we're looking at opportunities for brands that are doing well and that we might have a chance to invest in them? Or are most folks coming to you at this point? Yeah, well, we benefit from a lot of inbound. So you know, through the group we've got 275 members.
That's 275 tentacles out into the industry. Mm-hmm. So we kind of all share and deal flow together. And the Angel Group benefits from that. Supernatural Ventures benefits from that. But I think, you know, for the most part, deals are gonna come from our members. Goodall came in from a, a friend Gil Al in the, in the group, Spencer, you know, found Poppi.
So there's always a different source, but I think more and more we're seeing brands that we want to get involved with, whether it be through Instagram, you know, somebody posting something we might see from you guys, uh, reading in an article. What's great though is I think we, we do have, you know, some credibility in this space.
People wanna work with us. I think it's a place where brands, when they do raise with us, or through the fun supernatural, that it establishes some momentum for them. So I think we all see kind of mutual value, and once we find something that we like, I think as long as the terms are right and the timing is right, we can typically make something happen.
Speaking of brands that you brought to the table here. Yeah. We have a couple that you brought with you all the way from Ohio, so thank you so much for that. Yeah. The first brand is a brand called El Nacho, which we're familiar with here at Bev Net. They're a Boston-based brand of premium tortilla chips, which are fantastic.
What interests you about what these guys are doing? I love the category, large established category that most consumers buy in, you know, week to week or month to month. And you look at the packaging and for anybody who's listening, you just look it up online. El Nacho. You know, and it's kind of like that reach out and grab you type of, you know, packaging and bright colors.
You got the ludo type of The Ludo Yeah. Characters. Yeah. Interesting flavors. Right. So we've got the health badge with, you know, made with avocado oil. You've got, you know, unique flavors with a hot honey mango tortilla chip. You got a chili lime. You know, so it kind of goes from just a tortilla chip to a little bit more in that direction of maybe like a better for you Doritos.
But I think with flavors that are a little bit more unique, novel, a little bit more imaginative for a newer generation of consumers, plus they make a great just standard corn tortilla chip that is, you know, I think is as good as it gets out there in the market. So, you know, brand, product, shelf visibility.
Solid operators come from the, the restaurant industry, food service industry, and self manufacturer. There's real craft behind these, these products. I haven't seen their social media. Imagine these things really pop on Instagram. How much does social media impact your evaluation of a brand? I guess you could say when you see something that's kind of popping on social media, it's a real plus, but it's certainly not a necessity.
There's a lot of brands that. You know, scaled and kind of gotten to the finish line, actually got into pretty large exits without having, you know, a material following online. But, uh, certainly helps. I mean, it's a, it's, it could be a real advantage, a real ACE card if a brand's got a following, I think this is a brand that could do that.
Mm-hmm. And, you know, they've got a, a newsletter that's pretty cool, I think is, is they start to develop the brand more and more. It's, it's got that type of potential. Are you on TikTok? I used to be, I just deleted it. It just wasn't healthy. I had a healthy, real, unhealthy relationship with TikTok. It is hard.
I've, I've. Spent maybe five minutes on TikTok. I've never really been a TikTok guy, but Instagram I spend probably too much time on. It's just so addictive when you're scrolling through videos and you just see these quick videos over and over and over, and the algorithm has gotten so good that they just know what's going to be interesting to you.
Yeah, in kind of a scary way. But that's for another, yeah. Podcast. Another I'm with. Yeah. Yeah. Anything where I can just be centered around our fascination with food is good for me. And TikTok was taking me all kinds of different rabbit holes. I didn't, I didn't need to be going down. So I've li my, my social media here as of late.
Well done. Well done. Now, this brand I have never seen before, which is called Wild Monkey Bar, the Candy Bar Reimagined is the tagline. Let's take a look at this. Yeah. Okay. Wow. Okay, so no one needs to hear me say this again, but I'll say it again. I am a Snickers fiend. Love Snickers will eat Snickers probably till the day I die.
And hopefully it doesn't, it's not the reason why I die. Yeah. But this looks really cool and it feels Snickers ish. That's a great compliment because I think the way we're looking at, and this is just a brand that we're, we're kind of, you know, becoming friendly with two co-founders out of, uh, Boulder, Colorado.
Husband and wife team. I think really design wanted to design something that was more like a confection, a real confection like candy bar product. Mm-hmm. That happens to hit like a nutrition bar. So you look at some of the ingredients here. You've got organic cashew butter, organic pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, pecans, organic oats.
So there's a layer of granola in here. So it eats like a candy bar, but you don't have to feel nearly as guilty as, as when you're housing one of those Snickers bars. You know, you nailed it when you said it feels like the, a cross between a candy bar and a protein bar. Mm-hmm. When you look at it, it has that look.
It's, it's a white package with gold lettering, which feels reminiscent of one, like a high end protein bar and also like when you actually. See the candy bar on the front of pack, you're like, okay, this looks really amazing and indulgent. It's also relatively high calorie. It's, uh, well quite high calorie for a candy bar, four 10 calories, and then 11 grams of protein per bar, which is great.
You know, we look for brands where there's a really, really, even in a small sample size, encouraging kind of velocity story. So they're on, they're only sold in the front range of Colorado right now. I lived in Boulder for eight years. It's, it, it's its own bubble. You can walk into a couple stores, coffee shops out there, and if you were to sit there and watch, you know, over the course of a day, not that anybody would do that, they're gonna clock velocities that can range anywhere from 30 units a week to upwards of 200 units a week with these bars.
Yeah. So that told us that there's a consumer for this and that there's real discovery and kind of fanaticism happening around this product. This is, I think, um. A nice contrast to what we've been seeing both in the confection category and in the kind of nutrition bar category, but really intentionally made very, very early on.
The calorie count, I think is, is probably something that you could look to address through unit size, maybe even pack format, right? You could go into something with, you know, like a two pack, or you could go into like mini monkey bites, you know? Mm-hmm. Something a little bit more poppable, a little bit less of a calorie hit.
But I think when you try this, I think you'll agree there's real potential here because it's not only, I think, a delicious product. There's also all these kind of cool sensory aspects too, with the crunch and mm-hmm. The creaminess of the product. So, yeah. Very cool stuff. Well, thanks for bringing these and I can, I can definitely get a sense of.
How your own evaluation plays into products that end up on your desk. And, you know, this happens every single day and it, it feels like it's fun to be an angel investor, I'm sure, but there's, I'm sure there's also times where it's like I can't do everything for everyone and it can't be everywhere for everybody.
Yeah. And this is one of the hardest parts of your job, but for folks who are considering investing in this space and, and putting a few thousand dollars of their own money into a CPG company, or perhaps even joining the Angel Group at some point, what's some advice that you have for them? What would you recommend they do prior to making their first investment?
Yeah, so probably follow a similar journey that I did, which is one, don't go it alone. I was real, I think it was gunshot. I didn't wanna pull the trigger, you know, unless I had other smart people around me. Mm-hmm. And even if you're an experienced investor, it's always great to do it alongside other people who are just familiar with the industry.
I would say that, you know, you wanna be an accredited investor, which means, I think as an individual you make $200,000 a year or more for consecutive years, or your household is generated 300,000 or more for consecutive years, or you have a net worth of a million dollars or more. So you wanna be an accredited investor, and it's not a, and I think part of that is it's not a substitute for, you know, real retirement planning and mm-hmm.
And savings. Mm-hmm. It's high risk when you're investing at the, the earliest innings of these businesses. I think you need to come to grips early on with the realities of angel investing. You know, some of these investments are not gonna materialize. They're gonna go to zero. So if you only invest in one or two companies a year, you might look up in three or four years and see that, you know, some of them or all of them have have closed.
Mm-hmm. They, they haven't made it to an exit, you know? So I think it's important that you diversify, you invest in maybe two, three companies a year and that way you know, when you get some that do actually reach and exit. The outcome can kind of more than dwarf, you know, the, the checks that you wrote into the ones that didn't quite make it.
Yeah. But I think you gotta look at it as like ROI from more than just a couple, you know, from just kind of a binary, you know, outcome. If you enjoy the journey, if you enjoy getting behind founders and companies that are putting their all into a business that you like for one reason or another, you like the founders, you really like the product, you really wanna see this category kind of get overturned with.
Better for you products and you want to champion it to your friends and family. Feel like you're making a difference. You know, if you work in the industry, like many of our members do. You can actually mitigate some of the risk, right? Mm-hmm. You can make valuable introductions. You can lend your perspective or expertise behind the investments you've made.
Unlike putting my, your money in the stock market, right? You know, a company that you can't touch or attack or real estate. So you gotta get in the game and I would suggest doing it, you know, where you can get curated deal flow. Not a plug for the angel group Exactly, but get, you know, curated deal flow. Do it alongside other folks who, who kind of have a little bit of experience and you know, it feels different when you're going in as a group than you are when you're kind of going in alone.
I think that's excellent advice. I think there's a lot of people who want to support early stage brands and want, not just to support them, but to eventually make some money off of concepts that they feel could go a long way, but they don't have the confidence and don't have the experience yet to do so.
And I think just in that. Three minutes that you shared gives people a good foundation for where to start. So that's, so thank you so much for that, Adam. Yeah, Adam, I, I, this is such a honor for me. I mean, I feel like I could be sitting down with you for the rest of the afternoon, but I know you have a lot going on and need to get back to Ohio.
But thank you so much for coming out here. It really means a lot to me in the team, and really excited to share this. Conversation with her audience. Excited to hang out again at Expo West. Yeah, and thanks for hosting my daughter and I and showing us around. Ray. This is something I think we'll, we'll always remember.
