Grounded Foods co-founder Veronica Fil shares how the team is championing sustainability with its cauliflower and hemp seed cheese in the US. Doris Prodanovic writes. This article was first published in Food & Drink Business November/December 2020.
“Let’s make plant-based food sexy” is the foundation for Grounded Foods’ branding to target the non-vegan audience with their plant-based cheeses made from cauliflower and hemp, and so far, it’s working.
“If you call it plant-based instead of vegan, it’s almost like a switch in consumer psychology that they go, ‘Oh, now I’m interested, this is something novel and uses unexplored ingredients – now I just want to try it because it sounds different’,” Veronica Fil, behavioural economist and Grounded co-founder, told Food & Drink Business.
In July, Grounded secured US$1.74 million in investment from venture capital fund Stray Dog Capital, and in November, will begin production to reach a national audience – in the US.
Melburnian husband and wife duo, Shaun Quade – award-winning restaurateur and Australian Chef of the Year in 2017 – and Fil, moved to California a week before international borders closed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their aim was to enter the “much bigger” plant-based market in the US with their range of cheeses that champion sustainability, maximise local supply chains, and happen to be vegan as well.
“We are not vegan ourselves. We didn’t do this as a passion project for vegan cheese,” says Fil. “We did this because we see that the dairy industry is unsustainable – farmers aren’t paid a fair value for the resources they provide, there’s environmental degradation from the entire industry at large – there’s a huge food security issue here and that’s what we want toaddress.”
A lot of Quade’s career has been based on “playing with people’s perception of flavour and unusual products,” says Fil. There was originally a restaurant concept the pair wanted to take over to West Hollywood, but the demand from investors for the cheese, which featured on the menu, far surpassed their interest.
Playing with food
“Every time we pitched the restaurant concept to investors in Los Angeles, they would hone in on the cheese,” Fil says. “It got to the point where one investor offered us $2 million just to buy the recipe for the cheese, which made me go, ‘Ok, that’s a pretty big signal. We should pay attention to that’.”
It took Grounded around six months to find a co-packer that was close to them in Los Angeles, and suited to their needs: cost-efficient for a start-up, free from major allergens, and did not handle any nuts or nut-related products. Fil says they wanted to do everything locally, including the packing of the products and sourcing localingredients.
“One of the reasons we ended up in California was because ninety per cent of cauliflower in the US is grown in California, and our product is based on imperfect cauliflower – one of our two core ingredients. We get the flavour for our product from a fermentation process using the whole cauliflower, including the leaves.
"There’s a huge advantage in us being able to use imperfect produce and the parts that would normally go to waste, in comparison to other plant-based products, especially in cheese, which are being made from cashews or almonds, and have a range of both ethical and environmental considerations.”
The second core ingredient to Grounded cheeses is hemp seed. During the R&D phase, Quade decided to experiment with the ingredient, given the size of the hemp and CBD (cannabinoid) industry in California. Fil says the hemp seed adds an interesting advantage in environmental resilience, cost and flavour.
“It brings this beautiful quality of creaminess and milkiness to the cheeses while reintroducing the protein and calcium that you lose by not having dairy,” she says.
“Some of the other plant-based cheeses out there have a problem with the nutritional profile of their products because it’s devoid of any nutritional benefit other than coconut oil and starch, which can be artificially fortified by adding protein or vitamins back into it. We don’t need to do that – everything is coming from naturally occurring ingredients from the ground, hence, Grounded.”
G’day USA
Before their US departure, Fil and Quade were part of the inaugural Mars Food Australia Seeds of Change Accelerator program in 2019. It offered guidance from mentors and a new platform for Grounded, Fil says, but it was during the program that she attended agrifood industry forum Global Table where she met New York venture capitalist Andrew Ive who specialised in plant-based proteins, and helped bring Grounded to the US.
“In California alone, the addressable market is bigger than Australia and New Zealand combined, and it was when I was at a trade show a few years ago, I saw that vegan cheese was bubbling with a lot of traction overseas and was definitely a gap I knew we could fill,” says Fil.
“I thought plant-based demand would be something taking off much sooner over here and then would filter back to Australia over time, maybe a few years later. But I didn’t factor in a global event like COVID-19 though, which has really accelerated that trajectory I was predicting. The Australian market is moving much faster than I originally anticipated, it’s really remarkable and there’s nothing I’ve seen quite like it in my lifetime.”
In October, Food and Innovation Australia Limited (FIAL) highlighted the plant-based and alternative proteins space in its Program 2030: Doubling Australian Food and Agribusiness initiative as one of the key areas in the food and agriculture sector, driving economic growth in the country. It is expected to grow from $3 billion to $5 billion in total value added by 2030.
“It’s an amazing time to be a start-up founder in this space and we’re so lucky to be on the right side of the equation when COVID hit,” Fil says. “Even though investment money was drying up in a lot of areas, what we’re making is part of the solution, which is really exciting.”
Going big but not going home yet
Grounded will launch its first three cheeses in the US market nationally this November. Its hero product will be its Marinated Hemp Seed Goat’s Cheese, “which is marinated in olive oil, thyme, lemon and garlic, and packed with protein and calcium”.
“It made complete sense for us to do that with hemp seed, because Americans haven’t tried anything like it,” says Fil. “They haven’t really seen that style of marinated, Danish feta with a silky texture; it’s more the crumbly, Greek feta over here, so we had to change the name from feta to goat’s cheese.”
The second product “was not one we originally intended” – a Hemp Seed Cream Cheese, made while Quade and Fil were living over in New York, and the third is a Cheese-Free Cheese Sauce, “which is a fresh cauliflower-based sauce, and tastes remarkably similar to the Kraft mac and cheese recipe I ate all the time as a kid. Only our sauce doesn’t have the preservatives, high calorie content or dairy,” Fil says.
With three cheeses soon to hit shelves, the Grounded team have another 32 types of cheese up their sleeves. Coupling the expertise of Quade’s cuisine experimentation with Fil’s trend and market foresight is key to Grounded’s take off in more markets than one.
“We’re always working on new things, we’re essentially an R&D unit, but there’s a long way for us to go with development of cheese alone,” says Fil. “We’ve filed some of our IP applications back in Australia so we do intend coming back to Australia when it makes sense for us, and when we do, it’ll be because we’ll be replicating our business model that we’ve developed here – working with local supply chains, co-packers, and hopefully farmers as well.”
