IWON Organics Founder Samuel Joins Siddhi Capital, Will License Snack Brand

As he prepares to hand over control of his protein snacks brand to a new licensee, IWON Organics founder and CEO Mark Samuel is taking on a new full time role at food and beverage growth equity firm Siddhi Capital.

Samuel announced the move to Siddhi on LinkedIn this week, where he will work to support the growth of the firm’s portfolio brands.

Siddhi’s investments include brands like Momofuku Goods, Aura Bora, Mid-Day Squares, MUD\WTR and Immi, among others.

“I’ll assist not only with looking at [new] businesses, but I’m also helping with the businesses that they’re a part of now,” Samuel told Nosh. “My know-how and my depth in the industry allows me to help any business at this juncture – I could get into anybody’s business and understand what they do and offer guidance that I believe is going to be impactful for them.”

According to Samuel, he was recruited to Siddhi by the firm’s co-founder and general partner Melissa Facchina, whom he said he has known for at least five years and frequently connected with in the past.

Reached by Nosh, Facchina said that Samuel joins Siddhi as the firm begins dipping its toe “into majority ownership and full control deals,” and that “surrounding ourselves with expert leaders and operators at various stages of building businesses” is an important next step to support the business’s growth.

“Siddhi just closed its first full control deal and with that, I needed a hands-on expert who understood the protein category to its fullest and who I could trust to implement succinct day to day operating decisions,” Facchina wrote in an email. “It certainly doesn’t hurt that Mark has spent years building his personal brand into something that people across the industry want to be connected to and into something they can trust. With Mark at the helm of our next adventure, you can be sure that Siddhi Capital’s growing reputation in the CPG space remains strong!”

As Samuel turns his full time attention to Siddhi, he is working to hand off control of IWON Organics, the healthy snacking brand he founded in 2016.

IWON is currently finalizing a licensing agreement with a to-be-named-later company which will take over all day-to-day operations, however Samuel will still own the assets of the brand and business. The move comes after a long period of stagnant growth for IWON, he said, and the brand has been unable to procure fresh capital or expand significantly with its skeleton crew of Samuel and his operations leader.

Despite spending over a year “weathering the storm” of IWON’s flat growth, Samuel is leaving the brand on a high point – a nationwide expansion into Whole Foods stores this month for the brand’s top four SKUs. The rollout brings the brand’s total footprint to over 4,000 doors nationwide.

“They win if the brand wins,” he said. “If revenue grows, they win; and so does the ownership group. Because the brand is still alive, it didn’t have to wind down or basically go to zero, so we all get to see what this may look like in 12 to 18 months and we’re all hopeful that it will look much better than it does today.”