Kettle & Fire Co-founder Wants To Modernize Food Testing

There is a growing push to hold the food industry to higher traceability and transparency standards. Some of that demand stems from consumers seeking out clean label products, but it is also increasing amid growing awareness for the Trump Administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) campaign.

Regardless of the source, one startup believes it can push the industry toward these objectives while creating a “virtuous cycle” that ties product transparency to increased revenue for brand operators.

“People will only continue to care more and more about what they consume and what they put in and on their bodies,” said Light Labs co-founder Vijay Manohar, describing the two aspects of his company’s philosophy. “And the second is that there’ll only be more and more regulations around testing in the U.S.”

Manohar teamed up with Kettle & Fire co-founder Nick Mares to build Light Labs, a new upstart food testing laboratory that aims to support transparency in the food system by making product testing more efficient and cost effective. They have built both a laboratory as well as proprietary software to scale up operations and rework food testing norms for the modern era.

“[Kettle & Fire] was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per year on testing, yet it was so painful to work with labs,” Manohar told Nosh. “It’s really like an early 2000s experience where you’ve got to call someone, it’s very ambiguous what testing you’re actually ordering, what your results are going to look like, how to interpret it, and then you’re charged consulting fees to interpret the results that you already paid for at hundreds of dollars per hour.”

Light Labs instead centralizes all testing and shares results through a singular portal that allows customers to interpret results without the added cost of consultants. The lab’s own operations are also optimized by software and AI, designed to reduce redundancies and inefficiencies, speeding up lead times and being more cost effective, Manohar said.

“At the end of the day, we just want to enable consumers with the actual data, which is the lab results,” said Kiriti Manne, Light Labs head of go-to-market.

The lab tests both for environmental contaminants as well as verifies nutrition content claims. Manohar believes that if brands begin leaning into this data as “an objective source of truth,” they will be able to build trust with consumers, in turn, making more money, allowing them to then test more products.

The company recently introduced its Product Insights Panel (PIP) feature, which allows brands to embed lab results directly into product pages on their ecommerce sites. According to Manne, brands using the PIP feature have seen an average conversion rate improvement of 12%.

The VC-backed company has been operational for nearly a year and a half and has raised a $12 million seed round, led by Valor and 8VC. Light Labs has already secured “a couple hundred” brand partners, including David Protein, Banza, Serenity Kids and Lesser Evil. According to Manohar, the lab has seen the highest interest from brands in the baby food space as well as supplements, protein products and snack categories.

As for the team, both Mares and Manohar serve as co-founders, with former PSI Labs co-founder Lev Spivak-Birndorf serving as its lab director alongside “senior chemists from some of the top analytical labs in the country,” Manne said. Mares’ brother AJ serves as Light Labs business development and operations lead, while his other brother, and co-founder in Kettle & Fire, Justin Mares, serves as an advisor to the company.

Justin Mares is also a co-founder in alternative healthcare platform Truemed, alongside Calley Means, now a special government employee promoting the MAHA movement under Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Manohar claims there is no business connection between Light Labs, Truemed or MAHA.

“We’ve never really worked with anyone in the MAHA movement, although I think it’s cool to see where things are headed, and putting more of these contaminants under a microscope and seeing how we can get more of them out of our food system,” Manohar said.

He acknowledged that the company views the recent MAHA report, as well as rising government interest in the food system, as a “call for a better understanding of what we’re putting into our body from a regulatory perspective.” Manohar believes these conversations will push brands to embrace transparency and testing over the coming decades.

That’s the future they are building Light Labs for, Manne said. But that could be a challenge, Manne noted, explaining that scaling a physical location and operations, alongside the go-to-market plan and software to manage testing and efficiencies will be complex: “Each of these has to grow, otherwise one leg of the stool might be too long or too short.”

Light Labs is currently working with brands across the size spectrum, finding its “sweet spot” in businesses doing between $100 million in revenue, to the “upper nine figures” range, Manohar said. However, both Manohar and Manne noted they also work with smaller brands and want to enable these upstarts to help lead the charge.

“We want to cut through all of this noise with data, and we think this is the best way to do it,” said Manne. “We want to enable consumers. We want to enable the good brands, the brands that actually have that data to back up what they’re saying, to win in the market.”