Startup Lands Big Funding Round To ‘Undo’ Food

Back to the Roots may have come from humble beginnings, but what started with a grow-your-own mushroom kit has turned into a national brand with products in over 14,000 stores.

Now, the company has raised $10 million from a recent Series A funding round, which was led by Acre Venture Partners and includes funding from S2G Ventures and Red Sea Ventures.

Back to the Roots was an early settler in what is now a booming food and beverage manufacturing scene in Oakland, California and the East Bay. The company now has 17 employees, a large warehouse in Jack London Square and several smaller manufacturing partners.

The funding comes at a time of massive growth for the Oakland company. Founded in 2009, Back to the Roots was built on selling mushroom kits and later an aqua farm. But in the last year, the company has expanded this Ready to Grow line to include three new products: Garden-in-a-Can, Garden-in-a-Jar, which was a partnership with Home Depot (NYSE: HD), and a self-watering tomato planter.

The company also branched out into the food manufacturing space, launching a new Ready to Eat line with all U.S.-grown Organic Stoneground Flakes cereal, Organic Breakfast Toppers and Organic Stoneground Crisps snack packs. A new addition to the cereal line is the new Biodynamic Cinnamon Clusters, which uses ingredients from a style of farming with even more rigorous standards than certified organic. Back to the Roots’ biodynamic cereal is the first of its kind to ever hit U.S. shelves.

“Biodynamic farmers strive to create a diversified, balanced farm ecosystem that generates health and fertility as much as possible from within the farm itself. …Most biodynamic initiatives seek to embody triple bottom line approaches (ecological, social and economic sustainability),” according to the Biodynamic Association.

The company plans to use the new funding to continue expanding its product lines (eventually making all its products biodynamic), expanding distribution, and growing the sales and marketing team to “ramp up the impact” of their products.

“Being in the Bay Area, there’s so much investment in the reinvention and technologization of the food system, like fake meat or soy. We don’t believe food should be patented. It should be transparent,” co-founder Nikhil Arora said. “So it’s very motivating to see significant capital be put into the undoing of food.”

Arora and co-founder Alejandro Velez have also put a big focus on getting their products into schools. So far, the company’s Ready to Grow kits are in 3,200 schools nationwide as part of science curriculums, and their Ready to Eat products are in over 3,000 school meal plans. The company plans to grow that number by the time schools starts in the fall, and this new funding will also support that effort.

“We share Back to the Roots founders’ vision to ‘undo food’ and connect families back to where it comes from,” said Gareth Asten, partner at Acre Venture Partners. “We believe that the future of food relies on transparency, health and sustainability, and Back to the Roots encompasses all three aspects.”

In the last year, the company has seen significant support in its goal to reconnect people to food. The company raised $2 million last summer from prominent business leaders, including Annie’s CEO John Foraker, Clif Bar CEO Kevin Cleary, LivingSocial co-founder Aaron Battalion, former Jamba Juice CEO James White, Tom’s Shoes founder Blake Mycoskie, former Yahoo! International President Brian Steel, head of global hospitality at Airbnb Chip Conley and food writer Michael Pollan.

“Our vision as a new food brand is to target all the ways we interact with food, from growing it to eating it,” Arora said. “It’s exciting to see Oakland and the East Bay become a hub for this kind of similar-minded food innovation.”

Source: San Francisco Business Times, Tessa Love
Photo: Back to the Roots cofounders Alejandro Velez and Nikhil Arora. (SPENCER_BROWN)