Food Industry News, Insights, and Education for the CPG Community

Thirteen years ago Sarah Michelle Gellar was attacking supernatural villains as the star of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, with no less enthusiasm, she and her business partners Galit Laibow and Gia Russo are facing a new set of adversaries: Duncan Hines and Betty Crocker. The three entrepreneurs, who are longtime friends, are taking Foodstirs, their baking mix and kit brand, into retail.

After over twenty years in business, Kodiak Cakes has accepted the company’s first official investment from Sunrise Strategic Partners. The brand has seen rapid growth for its line of high-protein “Power Cakes.”

In news this week, Josh Tetrick, CEO and Founder of plant-based food company Hampton Creek, took a full page ad out in several newspapers to speak directly to Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for President. Yesterday he projected a massive version of the letter onto the sides of different buildings in Cleveland.

The BevNET Podcast team quizzed Seth Goldman on a number of other topics, including the ongoing battle over GMO labeling and its impact on the organic movement, as well as the long-term future for Honest within the Coke system.

With pulse, nut, and plant-based product launches on the rise, many of today’s food brands are aiming to appeal to a new type of consumer: the flexitarian. No longer confined to one end of the meat and vegetable consumption spectrum or the other, this new consumer eats a mainly plant-based diet but occasionally adds in meat. It’s vegetarian-light.

If there’s one trend that’s become, shall we say, the heartbeat of new food products in 2016, it’s the pulse. To help further grow the pulse-based products market, several agricultural organizations have banded together to create two new consumer facing pulse seals. The seals, which will appear globally, were officially announced during the past week’s Institute of Food Technologists’ trade show in Chicago.

The combined forces of BevNET and Project NOSH descended on the Fancy Food Show in Manhattan a couple of weeks ago, and while the beverage team has already given its take, let’s face it — there’s a heck of a lot more solids on display in the aisle than liquids.

Serial food and beverage executive, founder, investor and advisor Tom First has departed First Beverage Group, where he was a managing partner, to join Castanea Partners and develop the fund’s food and beverage practice.

After a decade of going it alone, Whole Foods Market is returning to cooperator status, a move that will empower its manufacturer supplier partners to provide more sophisticated insight back to the retailer, and help Whole Foods make more informed decisions accounting for broader market dynamics.

Over the past years, yogurt brands have tried to expand the day-parts where yogurt is consumed and shift the category from being seen as just as a breakfast option to that of a snack. In pursuit of this goal, Chobani, one of the pioneers of greek yogurt, is launching a line of savory, vegetable “Meze Dips”

The deal will nearly double the size of Danone’s North America footprint, increasing it from 12 to 22 percent of the company’s total portfolio and align it with several fast-growing brands focused on healthy and sustainable lifestyles.

It’s a new era in Vermont, and it started on July 1, when Vermont Act 120 went into effect. The Act requires labeling of food produced with genetic engineering (“GE” or “GMO”). But before you start to pack your picnics with disclaimers, a few considerations are worth keeping in mind.

At this year’s Summer Fancy Foods Show there were numerous product trends spotted on the floor. We polled some of the industry’s leading experts to check in about what they saw (and didn’t see) on the show floor.

This week the news cycle was sweetened by the announcement of Mondelez International’s roughly $23 billion bid for the Hershey Company, and the latter’s subsequent rejection of the deal. Earlier this summer Project NOSH had a look into Hershey’s plan for the company’s growth in the snack industry when VP of Global Snacks, Tony Tyrell, presented at Project NOSH Brooklyn.