Olyra Banks $4M To Grow Breakfast Biscuit Category

Lukas Southard

Greek biscuit maker Olyra Foods closed a $4 million Series A funding round in late February to help the brand grow its marketing team and continue to expand its retail presence in the breakfast category.

The lead investor on the raise was Bimbo Ventures, the investment arm of Mexican multinational food company Grupo Bimbo, which now owns a roughly 30% equity stake. Olyra board members Lesser Evil CEO and president Charles Coristine and Jefferies Maritime Group Investment Banking VP Georgios Keros did not take part in the round, said founder and CEO Yannis Varellas Ouzounopoulos.

The new capital will go towards hiring a director of marketing, building brand awareness and investing in a more robust digital presence, Varellas told NOSH. Although Olyra’s sales have been growing significantly online, there is more opportunity for the brand in ecommerce because it has focused almost exclusively on its retail footprint without investing in digital marketing.

Last year, the brand did $4.2 million in gross sales and hopes to double that amount in 2023.

After studying chemical engineering, Varellas got the idea for Olyra by helping his mother run the family’s grain mill in Thrace, Greece that has been in operation for over five generations.

“The goal was to try and use our knowledge and our resources to create another business unit. And that’s when I saw that belVita had created a huge category in breakfast biscuits,” said Varellas. “I thought, why don’t we create the first actually good-for-you breakfast biscuit.”

Varellas launched Olyra in 2017, leveraging his family’s connections to local farmers and the Greek bakery community. The European-style biscuits are made using ancient grains like barley, oat, spelt and lupine to replicate the snacks eaten in Ancient Greece.

The line debuted with a 3-SKU line of crunchy breakfast biscuits (Hazelnut Carob, Fig Anise and Cinnamon Tahini) before expanding to filled Sandwich Breakfast Biscuits in Double Chocolate, Hazelnut Cocoa and Greek Yogurt Blueberry flavors two years ago. Most recently, the brand launched Filled Breakfast Biscuits in Peanut Butter, Almond Butter and Double Chocolate flavors. Shaped more like a domed cookie, the line is Olyra’s first product to veer from the traditional flat biscuit shape.

Ultimately Varellas hopes to challenge the breakfast biscuit category leader, Mondelez’s belVita, Varellas said, as well as more granola bar type options such as Made Good, Kind and belVita’s own baked bar line. The brand’s main point of differentiation, he said, is its nutritional profile, with its core line sporting 4g fiber, 5g protein and 6g sugar per serving.

Mondelez has successfully expanded belVita biscuits into the U.S., positioning it as a breakfast snack item rather than a cookie.

“It’s a brand that’s performing quite well, and it’s mid-single-digit growth at the moment, doing quite well, particularly in the U.S.,” said Dirk Van de Put, CEO and chairman of the board for Mondelez International, in the company’s 2019 Q3 earnings report. “Our evolution for belVita is to offer it in more different forms going into soft-baked, for instance, going potentially to bars and gradually expand the range of belVita to make it a full breakfast offering not only in the U.S. but around the world and potentially also take the brand into mid-morning snacking, which could also be very interesting.”

Currently, Olyra is distributed in over 5,000 retail locations nationwide spanning both the natural channel like Whole Foods and Sprouts and conventional grocers like Kroger, Publix and Harris Teeter.

The breakfast biscuit category is still relatively small here in the U.S. with niche brands like Chefona Foods and Kanira being the closest competitors to Olyra. Although Olyra’s biscuits are considered a breakfast item, Varellas said that the majority of the brand’s consumers don’t actually eat the product in the morning but consider it a “sustained energy snack.” That versatility has paid off, Varellas said.

“If you look at what’s in the breakfast aisle, the granola bar section. People eat those all day, at lunch, at night. It’s open-ended,” said John Maggiore, a mentor to Varellas and founder of natural food brokerage Maggiore’s Sales & Marketing. “I think they’re taking the right angle staying away from the cookie angle because cookies are considered junk food.”

Meanwhile, Grupo Bimbo has invested in several other better-for-you snack brands, including LiveKuna, Soozy’s Grain Free and Rule Breaker Snacks, seeking to move into adjacent categories from the bakery set and push further into better-for-you offerings. In 2021, the company also acquired snack brand Emmy’s Organics.