Shah Heads to SnackFutures to Head up Investment
Mondelez’s incubator and investment arm SnackFutures has recently undergone a staffing change, with former PepsiCo investment executive Tapan Shah joining the group last month to head up investing for the snack-focused conglomerate.
Founded in 2019, SnackFutures is tasked with incubating internally developed brands (such as veggie snack brand Dirt Kitchen), managing CoLab (Mondelez’s accelerator program for emerging brands) and investing in promising new snack-focused companies. Shah will head up the latter as Director of Venture Capital.
Shah succeeds Mel Gaceta, who left the role in January. Though SnackFutures is based out of Chicago, Shah will continue to reside in Connecticut, which is close to Mondelez’s Hanover, New Jersey office, he said. After beginning his career at The Campbell Soup Company, Shah went on to be a director at AF Ventures (then AccelFoods) and, most recently, was a principal at The PepsiCo Ventures Group.
To-date, SnackFutures has invested in three companies: Israeli food tech brand Torr, functional food brand Uplift and better-for-you chocolate brand Hu, which the company acquired in May. While most of those brands were at an early stage when Mondelez invested, Shah said the group may start to consider slightly more established brands as well.
His overall mandate, he added, will be to help the company go deeper into the broader snacking category. Given Mondelez’s own portfolio of brands, he’ll also keep an eye on chocolate and confectionery, he said. Though snacking has become a bit of a catch-all term, spotted on everything from nutrition shakes to string cheese, Shah said when thinking of it from Mondelez’s point of view, he’ll look for brands where the company can be an asset, offering its own knowledge base.
“My fiduciary duty is to Mondelez and to the capital that I represent for the company — to find really strong, strategic investment opportunities” Shah said. “But then also being a really great investor partner to those founders and those teams that we invest in.”
Shah added that he’s particularly excited by the trend of “premium alternative snacks” that bring new ingredients to consumers in a mainstream format. That familiarity could come from packaging — for example a pillow pack — or form factor, such as cookies, he said. Snacks that also offer shoppers indulgence while still offering a better-for-you bent or better nutritional profile are also intriguing. Still, while there are some guardrails, for the most part Shah said he’s keeping an open mind.
“My approach is to look at what is the company doing that makes it unique? What makes it interesting? And then where do we think the company can go, and is it investable,” he said. “If it’s the right product, the right team, the right market fit, in our world of food and beverage, there’s always a way to make it work.”
