A Clean Food Stock That’s Not Beyond Meat
If you’ve not spent time in the United Kingdom, you’d be excused for not knowing about a company called Innocent Smoothies. The three founders famously gave away their smoothies at a music festival with a sign that said “should we quit our jobs to go make smoothies” asking the empty bottles to be thrown in one of two boxes – one labeled “yes,” and one labeled “no.” With the yes box filled up to the brim, all three men quit their jobs the next day, and Innocent Smoothies was founded in the year 1998. When they went to look for funding, every bank, venture capitalist, and business angel in London turned them down. Nevertheless, they persisted.
Fifteen years later, Europe’s largest and most environmentally sustainable juice company, Innocent Smoothies, successfully exited to Coca-Cola for a whopping $600 million. All three founders went on to form a venture capital firm called Jam Jar Investments where their windfalls were plowed back into promising startups fighting the same battle to find angel funding. One of those founders, Richard Reed, is also behind a little-known publicly traded stock called Agronomics (ANIC) which invests in – among other things – clean food companies.
