Bringing food & beverage brands closer to the source.
Announcing ShelfLife’s $3 million seed round, co-led by Switch Ventures and Kindred Ventures.
Hands-down, one of my favorite past-times is going to the grocery store. I used to scoff at those claiming online grocery shopping was the way of the future. Yet, when the pandemic hit in March of 2020, I found myself refreshing the Whole Foods delivery window, signing up for a coffee bean subscription, and ordering local craft beer for pick-up for the very first time.
In a span of several months, online grocery penetration doubled making up over 10% of the overall grocery market. Packaged food & beverage became the largest e-commerce CPG segment (44%) with sales surpassing $100 billion in the US. Beverages experienced the largest growth — as consumers traded in their favorite cafes and bars for boxed, bottled, and canned goods.
Seemingly overnight, brands launched digital storefronts powered by Shopify, and restaurants re-imagined to-go orders with Toast. It became shockingly evident that there was a piece of the tech stack missing — purchasing raw materials.
With over $150 billion of ingredients and packaging materials being bought and sold offline — food and beverage brands struggled to keep up with the rapid shifts in demand. Brands didn’t have time for trade shows, warehouse visits, and phone calls. They were too busy keeping the lights on to run excel models and manually document inventory levels.
Today, John Cline and I are excited to introduce ShelfLife, a platform connecting brands with the best raw material suppliers. We build software to make it easy for brands to discover, manage and order from suppliers starting with the craft beverage ingredients & packaging market. From purchase orders to payments, ShelfLife’s procurement platform equips brands with the tools to achieve sustainable growth. Since launching our closed Beta in January, we’ve helped craft beverage brands order hundreds of products across dozens of suppliers throughout New England and Southern California.
So why did John and I join forces to tackle such an obscure problem?
The future of food & beverage is online.
Two years ago, I teamed up with fellow Harvard Business School classmates to bring a new spiked seltzer to market called Astrid. We certainly weren’t the only spiked seltzer brand launching in 2019 and the pandemic has only accelerated growth in the ready-to-drink beverage market.
Consumers have been demanding more personalized products for years now. There’s been a resurgence of local retail and artisan products. Shopify came to rival Amazon due to the popularity and volume of “challenger brands”. Launching a brand and securing an audience has never been easier. Consumers want a connection to the products they purchase and the rise of DTC serves as a catalyst.
In response to this trend, more than 50 food and beverage products are launched in a given day. The digital transformation of grocery is just getting started. We want to be there for these brands on day zero. Raw materials — especially as they pertain to food products — should not be an afterthought, but the very foundation of any successful food business.
Craft brands are poised to win.
Discovering suppliers and ordering raw materials is stuck in the dark ages. Today, brand operators waste countless hours each week searching for suppliers, verifying specifications, managing raw material purchases, and organizing documentation. Teams of less than a dozen people manage raw material inventory and production scheduling across a series of chaotic spreadsheets. Time is valuable and margins are tight.
In a relationship-driven industry, the largest and oldest accounts have taken precedent. Emerging brands are often left in the dark when it comes to volume-based price breaks, lead times, and payment terms. I experienced this first-hand when launching Astrid, and we heard the same story from well over 100 craft beverage brands we spoke to.
The supply chain is set up to serve large incumbents in an industry undergoing a massive transformation. Through vertically-specific solutions, ShelfLife is in a unique position to bring together tens of thousands of brands to compete with the likes of PepsiCo and ABinBev in terms of knowledge and purchasing power.
John and I started ShelfLife to reinvent procurement with an online marketplace that connects food and beverage brands with the best suppliers for their business. We believe in a future where innovators and makers are empowered to build profitable and sustainable businesses — and that starts with accessing the right raw materials. We’re all about lifting barriers and providing resources to help everyone create the products they want to see in the world.
We just closed a $3 million seed round, co-led by Switch Ventures and Kindred Ventures, with participation from NextView Ventures, Ben Zises (SuperAngel.vc), Ilia Papas (former CTO of Blue Apron), and Elena Donio (former President of SAP Concur) among others. John and I couldn’t be more excited to continue building ShelfLife alongside a group of investors who are no strangers to the food and beverage industry.
Is your brand in search of ingredients or packaging materials? We can help!
Interested in joining us? We’re hiring!
