Voyage Foods To Take “Future Proof” Food To Market With New Funding

Food tech platform Voyage Foods closed a $36 million funding round last week that will help bring its full slate of innovations – including peanut-free peanut butter, cacao-free chocolate and coffee-free coffee – to consumers by the end of the year.

The round was co-led by UBS O’Connor and Level One Fund, with additional participation from Horizons Ventures, SOSV’s Indie Bio and Social Impact Capital. The announcement brings the company’s total funding to over $41 million to-date.

What is Voyage?

Founded in late 2020, Voyage Foods aims to create new sustainable, allergen-friendly food alternatives. With a focus on reducing environmental, humanitarian and individual health concerns associated with CPG products, the Voyage team has specialized in taking foods with controversial, unsustainable supply chains or those associated with top allergens, breaking them down into their basic components and recreating them with short, allergy-friendly ingredient labels.

“If you take a raw cocoa seed, which then becomes a cocoa nib and then chocolate, it tastes nothing like chocolate,” Maxwell explained. “Texturally, rheology, mouthfeel – nothing like chocolate. From there, you learn that the flavor and total experience of eating a chocolate bar is actually just due to process.”

Voyage uses existing processes for ingredients with “similar precursors,” like flavor and texture, to replicate something that, for example, “actually tastes like chocolate instead of a roasted grape seed,” according to Maxwell. The company develops all of its products in-house, from conducting scientific research and R&D to ingredient processing and product manufacturing, at its new Oakland, California-based production facility, where it also makes its own natural flavors used to “touch up” finished products.

What’s next?

First, Voyage will use the new capital to execute the commercial launch of its peanut-free peanut butter, marking its first CPG product launch. The spread is made from sunflower seeds, chickpeas, grapeseed, buckwheat and wild rice, and is priced at $3.49 per 16 oz. jar. The product, which was originally set to debut last November, is set to roll out both online and at retail this quarter, according to Maxwell. All of Voyage’s products will be priced just slightly higher than “the cheaper commodity products,” he said, like Jif in this case, which retails for $2.69 per 16 oz. jar.

Maxwell said Voyage is also aiming to establish itself as an ingredient supply company with a B2B contract already in place for its alt-chocolate, set to debut in Q3. Coffee, the last of its initial innovations, will be available to consumers by the end of the year.

Maxwell emphasized that Voyage is establishing itself for long term success by building a food tech platform that crosses categories, encompasses a broad flavor set and includes liquid, solid and semi-solid formats. The team’s ability to thus far tackle a wide range of innovations has garnered support from investors and proven the concept for its “robust technology set,” he said, setting it up to be a change-driver in the food industry.

“We could have raised a lot more money, on a much higher valuation, which would have been fine today, it would have been really exciting today, but might have been counterproductive in a year or two from now,” said Maxwell. “In that manner… we [need to] make sure we’re not spreading ourselves too thin. In our vision statement, one of the goals is, we want to push the industry to do better as a whole right? It doesn’t just help for us to do our part, but really – rising tide lifts all – be an example for other companies to do better themselves.”

What’s the goal?

While Maxwell has previously told NOSH Voyage knows it can’t ‘fix’ the traditional coffee and cacao cultivation process, it believes it can rewire the value chain so that these crops and categories are less vulnerable to environmental factors associated with climate change. One way he believes this impact can be accomplished is by giving consumers a true one-to-one substitute for all types of food.

“In a few years, hopefully, you’re at the shelf and it’s all going to be 100% single origin made in West Oakland, but we will have flavors that express Ecuadorian cacao, Guinean cacao or Cote d’Ivoire cacao,” Maxwell said. “Obviously there’s the different types of cacao, and subtypes of cacao, so hopefully we’ll get to the point of specificity on the research side where we can have our own approximation of Ecuadorian cacao or Geisha coffee.”

Voyage’s long term goal is to build a wide cross-category product platform that can solve the “human and environmental health problems” associated with food production, said Maxwell.

“If we didn’t have the ability to ship refrigerated foods all over the world, the world would look very different. Same thing with water and food sanitation, in some ways, [they have] done more for human lifespan than a lot of medical innovations. In that vein, when we look at what products we want to tackle, we really [look at what will help] solve human and environmental health problems.”