Outstanding Foods wants to help consumers bring home the bacon – or at least the plant-based equivalent of it. The four-year-old startup, which just raised $10 million in Series A funding, develops non-meat equivalents of pork rinds, bacon seasoning and other piggy products for the direct-to-consumer (D2C) and retail markets.
Outstanding Foods Co-founders Bill Glaser and Dave Anderson
“The vast majority of our customers are not vegan or vegetarian. They’re just people who are looking for great-tasting products that are nutritious,” company Co-founder and CEO Bill Glaser told PYMNTS in a recent interview.
Launched in 2017, Los Angeles-based Outstanding Foods sells meat alternatives that comply with the company’s motto: “Full of Flavor, Free of Guilt.” In fact, part of the reason Glaser and Co-founder Dave Anderson – the former R&D chief at Beyond Meat and co-founder of egg-alternative company Eat Just – named their company “Outstanding Foods” is to emphasize what they leave out of products.
“We say what is great about our product – great taste, full of flavor – but we also say what [is] out of the product: animal ingredients, artificial ingredients, gluten, GMOs,” Glaser said.
Glaser, a serial entrepreneur, met fellow vegetarian Anderson some 13 years ago when Anderson operated one of Los Angeles’ top plant-based restaurants. Its customers included Bill Gates, Paul McCartney and Ellen DeGeneres, and Glaser said he liked the food so much he’d go “four, five, sometimes six times a week.”
Glaser – who has previously raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups, taken companies public and had two $100 million+ exits – said he’d “had an interest in doing plant-based products for several years, but it took the opportunity to partner with [a chef like] Dave Anderson to be able to pull that off. You definitely wouldn’t want to eat food that I prepared,” he joked.
Bringing the (Plant-Based) Piggies to Market
Anderson helped develop the Beyond Burger and other products at Beyond Meat, but he and Glaser decided the market for beef substitutes already had a full herd of competitors. By contrast, they saw developing plant-based pork-like products as a wide-open field.
However, the pair decided against creating a refrigerated bacon substitute, figuring that forcing mainstream consumers to go to a store’s meat-alternatives aisle was a bad idea.
Instead, Outstanding Foods launched a plant-based, bacon-flavored snack called Pig Out Pigless Bacon Chips. The product tasted like crispy bacon, but was actually made out of mushrooms.
Glaser said the snack sold well, but was hard to manufacture. So, the company replaced it last February with Pig Out Pigless Pork Rinds, a pork-rind substitute made primarily from rice, sunflower oil and pea protein. The snack boasts 75 percent less sodium and 67 percent less saturated fat than real pork rinds.
Outstanding Foods next launched Take Out Meal-in-a-Bag Puffs, a cheese-puff-like snack designed to offer all of the nutrition of a balanced meal. Glaser said Anderson came up with the idea after grabbing bags of chips to kill his appetite on busy days, but realized he was getting lots of fat and calories and little actual nutrition.
“The new product ideas always start out by looking at consumer behavior and where there are problems that we can help solve,” Glaser said. “We are not trying to just do an incrementally better type of products. We’re trying to innovate with everything we do.”
Glaser said the company now aims to add about four new products a year. Last week, Outstanding Foods rolled out its third offering: Pig Out Pigless Bacon Seasonings.
Selling D2C, Retail and Subscriptions
Outstanding Foods’ products are available at Whole Foods, Walmart and thousands of other stores around the country, as well as directly from the company’s website.
The firm also recently began distribution in Canada, China and other foreign markets, and launched biweekly and monthly subscriptions. Glaser said Outstanding Foods is mostly selling direct to consumer right now, but hopes to get to about a 50/50 mix of D2C and retail in 2022.
New Funding and Celebrity Investors
The company’s success to date is attracting investors, with StearnAegis Ventures leading the firm’s recent funding round.
“We are committed to supporting the Outstanding Foods team in its mission to develop a plant-based snack products global brand,” SternAegis Partner Cassel Shapiro said in announcing the funding.
The company has also attracted celebrity investors, from rapper Snoop Dogg to the “Dog Whisperer” Cesar Millan. All told, Glaser said Outstanding Foods has raised some $23 million, although he can’t disclose the company’s latest valuation.
He likewise declined to disclose sales figures, but said the company had “several million” dollars in 2020 revenues. And while Glaser can’t reveal whether Outstanding Foods is profitable, he said it has “a path to being a successful company at a lot of levels.”
Future IPO?
As for the long-term future, the CEO said Outstanding Foods might remain independent, or could eventually merge with a larger food company or hold an initial public offering.
“The public markets have been very interesting and intriguing for us,” Glaser said, noting that Beyond Meat “had the most successful IPO in about 20 years” in 2019. Beyond Meat went public at $25 a share – the top of its expected range – giving the company a $1.5 billion market cap. Shares have soared since then, closing Friday (Jan. 8) at $118.10.
“There’s been a shortage of supply of plant-based public companies and a huge demand of investors seeking them,” Glaser said. “We’ll consider a public offering at the appropriate time if the market climate holds up the way it’s been.”
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