Anita’s Yogurt Closes Doors Due To Rising Costs
After nearly ten years on the market, Brooklyn-based vegan yogurt brand Anita’s has closed its doors. Anita Shepherd, the company’s founder and CEO, shared the news on LinkedIn yesterday, stating the brand officially shut down in August after it was unable to keep up with rising production costs.
“Getting through 2020 [to] now has been especially challenging,” Shepherd said in a post on Instagram. “Most recently, the price of my product was raised almost 25% in the majority of stores that sold it. None of that money went to my brand. Meanwhile, Anita’s faced rapidly rising costs for everything from organic coconut from our overseas producer to garbage bags from the restaurant supply warehouse down the street.”
Developed as an additive-free, vegan yogurt brand, Shepherd launched the business in 2013 while she was about four years into her first entrepreneurial endeavor, Electric Blue Baking Co. Shepherd then shuttered the bakery business to focus full time on yogurt and formally launched Anita’s, later establishing a single origin, direct-source, Fair Trade certified coconut supply chain for the product’s flagship ingredient.
The brand was sold in nearly 300 retail stores at its peak distribution including Whole Foods Market and Fairway Market, plus nationwide shipping via GoldBelly. The yogurt was available in a range of flavors from Mango to Blueberry Chia as well as multiple formats.
“In my ten years of business, I’ve never raised my price to distributors—even after going Fair Trade, even after importing a custom blend of plant-based cultures we invented with an expert probiotics lab— because every year new competitors emerged with cheaper ingredients and cheaper price tags,” the Instagram post read. “It felt like a race to the bottom, but I just wanted to keep some skin in the game. Then the retailer decision came and it was out of my hands.”
Shepherd previously told NOSH the brand faced significant challenges when it tried to scale up, resulting in numerous quality control issues. In 2018, the yogurt maker faced a yeast contamination outbreak at its co-manufacturing facility that compromised the quality of six-weeks worth of product. Shepherd later pulled all products from the shelves in order to refocus its portfolio and create a new growth strategy.
However, Shepherd explained that the impact of the pandemic, inflation and rising costs of goods created an “unsustainable” operating environment for the company. She said she has chosen to close the business in order to focus on her career, family and mental health and according to LinkedIn, is now teaching cooking lessons to elementary school students and working as a freelance vegan food content creator across multiple channels.
“If I learned one thing it is to trust your instinct always against any advice from even the most seasoned expert,” the post reads. “I’m so excited to show you [what] innovations are next… Just like in sci-fi, the good guys never really die.”
Anita Shepherd could not be reached prior to publication.
