Perfect Day Funds, Co-Founds New Ice Cream Brand

Moving from supplying brands to also helping create them, vegan “dairy” ingredient supplier Perfect Day announced an agreement in which it is investing in new brand The Urgent Company.

Exact terms of Perfect Day’s multi-million dollar investment into the brand were not disclosed but Perfect Day founders Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi said they expect The Urgent Company will raise a subsequent round of funding from outside investors within the next year, operating on the “rolling close” model that Perfect Day has utilized in its own fundraising. Pandya added that Perfect Day’s latest $160 million tranche of its series C funding had no connection to The Urgent Company’s own financing.

Pandya and Gandhi will be co-founders of The Urgent Company, whose first brand will be Brave Robot, a line of ice cream made with animal-free whey protein. The Urgent Company already has eight employees, including general manager and co-founder Paul Kollesoff. Retailing for $5.99, Brave Robot’s eight ice cream flavors of Vanilla, Chocolate, Vanilla ‘N Cookies, Buttery Pecan, PB ‘N Fudge, Blueberry Pie, Hazelnut Chocolate Chunk and Raspberry White Truffle will launch nationwide in August.

Perfect Day, which was founded in 2014, initially planned to launch its own line of branded milk, which it also intended to sell as an ingredient, before deciding to pivot to only B2B ingredient sales in 2018. The company’s dairy proteins are made from microflora that is fermented, and recently received FDA GRAS status.

Brave Robot marks Perfect Day’s third exploration of the ice cream set, having launched a limited line direct-to-consumer under its own brand in 2019 and partnered with Bay Area scoop shop Smitten in May of this year. The company plans to announce partnerships with other national ice cream brands later this year, Pandya said, but it believes Brave Robot, which also utilizes sustainable packaging techniques, will be disruptive. Brave Robot will be a “Ben and Jerry’s for the twenty first century,” Pandya said.

“Our vision has always been bigger than just one part of the value chain,” he added. “It’s one thing to have a new kind of ingredient and but if you’re putting this into traditional distribution networks and packaging and talk to consumers in the same old ways, I just don’t think things are going to change fast enough.”

Ice cream is a hot category, according to research firm IRI: at the end of May, the category was up 37.8% in sales over the past year, operating as one of the largest drivers of food and beverage sales. It’s that booming interest that drove The Urgent Company to focus on the frozen treat as its first product line, according to Kollesoff. The difference, he added, is that the category has plant-based products on one end of the spectrum and indulgent, dairy-based items on the other end, but “stuck in the middle” are consumers who want more sustainable options but don’t want to compromise on flavor or texture.

So Brave Robot’s own offerings will lean towards the indulgent side of the spectrum, with plenty of inclusions, according to Urgent Company VP of marketing Jon Spear.

Because Perfect Day’s plant-based dairy proteins so closely mimic those derived from animals, the products will have to contain an allergen statement for those shoppers who are allergic to dairy products. However, it will also be lactose-free, vegan and Kosher Parve. Though the company could have argued that it met FDA’s standard of identity for ice cream, it decided to go with the safer descriptor of “frozen dairy dessert.”

So how do you explain how a product can trigger dairy allergies while not actually containing any animal dairy? It will undoubtedly be a difficult task, Spear said.

The current plan is to leave some of that heavy lifting up to Perfect Day, with Brave Robot’s label including a call out about the partnership.

“Front of pack it will say made with ‘animal free dairy’ and what we’re going to do is telling the consumer that if they want to know more, they can find out from Perfect Day how the technology works,” Kollesoff said. “We don’t want to overburden consumers with science and technology.”

Though Perfect Day has played a significant role in the company’s creation, future products from The Urgent Company are not required to use only Perfect Day technologies, with Kossllesoff calling the ingredients “the starting point.”

The goal will be to try new technologies, new product categories, and to iterate quickly — always listening to the consumer, Spear said. While there may be mistakes along the way, that’s simply a tradeoff for achieving speed, he added, noting the company went from idea to inception in just a few months.

“We look at it as a journey and it’s going to take time before it’s all optimized, but it’s a step in the right direction,” Spear said. “We respect dairy but we respect the plant-based companies too. We just believe there’s a better way to have a more immediate impact on the planet. Part of the name is that we’re running out of time to have an impact on the climate and that’s kind of our North Star.”