NadaMoo CEO On Future Of Plant-Based Foods: It's Healthier And Tastes 'Better Than The Real Thing'

Plant-based is the long-term sustainable trend in diet, according to Daniel Nicholson, the CEO at NadaMoo, a producer of dairy-free ice cream made with sustainably sourced and certified organic, vegan, gluten-free, and non-GMO ingredients.

“Plant-based is where the future of our consumption practices will need to be in order for us to sustain life on this planet,” he said.

To learn more about how brands are approaching plant-based food product development, Benzinga spoke with Nicholson soon after the company closed a $10 million Series B.

Benzinga: Thanks for taking the time to speak with Benzinga, today. Care to start with an introduction?

Daniel Nicholson: I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Texas, and I’m a born and raised Texan.

After graduating from undergraduate with my degree in mechanical engineering, I moved out to Spain for about a year to work for a wind power utility.

I completed my stint there with the company, moved back to Austin, Texas, and began trying to figure out what my next steps would be career-wise.

A close friend of my family I was having breakfast with and discussing sustainability, and he brought up this local entrepreneur named Amy.

He said she has this incredible non-dairy ice cream brand called NadaMoo, and I’d love to make an introduction. I took him up on his offer, met with the founder back in 2008 and tried the product, got to hear the entire background story, and I fell in love.

I was an ice cream lover and this product had no dairy, was much lower in sugar and calories, and just tasted as good, if not better than the real thing.

Also Read: KFC, Burger King And McDonald's Offering More Vegan Options As Demand Rises

So, you were interested enough to join the company, right? What happened after that introductory conversation, then?

They were looking to raise money and so, very quickly, I was like, let me see what I can do.

Long story short, my family met the founders, got the pitch deck, and decided to invest in the company in 2008.

When that was taken care of, I went back to the founder and said I’m still offering up my services and I don’t want you to feel obligated to hire me, but please let me know if I can help.

I started that Monday and here we are 14 years later, still growing strong.

What’s your day-to-day, and what are some challenges you encounter?

We’re building the team, making sure to put people in the right places. We have a lot of projects constantly in motion, and we’re working on a lot of new product development.

The focus is the use of proceeds of this latest capital round on marketing and product development investments.

To add, we’ve been operating through this very difficult pandemic that created all sorts of labor and supply chain issues in our country and beyond. This has incredible impacts on our cost of goods and freight.

In the food and beverage industry, there’s a lot of challenges, stress, and problem-solving in real-time that needs to take place to make sure we are prepared to survive what’s thrown at us.

Talk to me about how the fundraising process for this space works?

We did our first capital raise in 2017, a Series A round.

Having those conversations are important when you know that you have a growing business, and you’re going to need access to more capital to be able to continue scaling it.

We’ve developed a lot of contacts and when we go to the market to raise capital, we aren’t cold calling. We’re reaching out to the investment community that has been focused on this space for many years.

It’s about whether you have developed a brand or product that the investment community is interested in.

Post-COVID, what are some trends you’re seeing? How do you position the company to grow in light of those trends?

The most challenging thing here is not being able to understand what this pandemic has done to the consumer.

Sure, you can create hypotheses, look at the data, and have an understanding of the present and recent past, but, when you go to looking into the future, nobody knows.

Those are all things that we're trying to dig into, as packaged ice cream sales have been pretty light post-pandemic.

Whether it’s ice cream on a stick, an ice cream sandwich, or some other ice cream novelty format, we have seen this interesting shift of people switching, and we’re looking into that as a brand when we spend the next two or three years innovating and developing.

Our job is to be as prepared as possible for any adaptations.

From this conversation, I’m getting that plant-based is the path forward. If that is correct, talk to me about how you plan to take advantage of money flows into that space and participate in those trends.

We have the tailwinds of mass media behind the plant-based movement simply because that’s where the money is and that’s where the future of our consumption practices will need to be in order for us to sustain life on this planet.

I think it’s definitely something we have working in our favor but, at the same time, it has created a more competitive landscape.

It’s important for us, as a brand, to be a very responsible party in the sustainability movement, and we want to make sure that our consumers know that’s important to us and that we are going to navigate our future growth with the sustainability of the planet in mind and at the forefront of all the work that we do.