WWW.ROCANAVENTURES.COM
Q&A
WITH ROCANA VENTURE PARTNERS
Startup CPG TELL ME ABOUT ROCANA VENTURES AND YOUR INVESTING PHILOSOPHY.
Gurdeep Prewal, Co-Founder We launched the fund with a very mission-driven approach to supporting brands that we felt were going to make a transformational change in the food and beverage world. When we started zeroing in on the better-for-you CPG space, we started to uncover a lot of problems that exist in the food system today. Growing up, I never questioned anything that I was eating. I blindly ate a lot of the big legacy CPG brands, cereals, chocolate bars, soda, and I had no awareness of what was inside of those products. Decades later, I realized that many of those products have created systemic issues with respect to health and environment. So our mission at Rocana Ventures is to support brands and entrepreneurs that are going to create systemic change. We are the enablers; they have the vision, and we invest in them to support their mission. SCPG WHAT CATEGORIES ARE YOU MOST INTERESTED IN? GP The two mega trends that guide our selection process are plant-based and clean label. For us, clean label means natural ingredients, no preservatives and low-to-no sugar. Beyond these main
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categories, we focus on sub-themes like alternative proteins, alternative dairy, functional beverages, and healthy snacking. We also mainly focus on DTC brands. Investing across categories in category disruptors and category creators is really what we aim to do.
WE HAVE TO BE MORE INCLUSIVE TO DEMOCRATIZE HEALTH AND WELLNESS. SCPG DESCRIBE YOUR SELECTION CRITERIA. GP We invest relatively early-stage compared to most VCs. For us, it has to start with absolute conviction in the product and founder. For product, we have to believe that every brand we’re investing in is either going to be a category disruptor or category creator. We don’t look for incremental innovation. For example, we haven’t invested in a bar company because there are a lot of options for bars out there, and
typically the innovation that we see is marginal. We try to zero in on categories where we think there hasn’t been a lot of disruption and there is potential for dramatic change. One example is a brand in our portfolio called Three Wishes cereal. When you look at the cereal aisle, there’s been very little innovation in the past few decades. Three Wishes is really disrupting a sleepy category. Another example is Kettle and Fire, a brand in our portfolio that we feel has really created the category of bone broth, which didn’t exist 10 years ago. Because we take minority positions— we don’t look to acquire or control brands—the character of the founder and ability to work alongside them is an important piece of our selection criteria. We want to see how much conviction they have in their business, what kind of vision they have in building the brand, and how they plan to take this thing from product to brand to platform. It’s a really fine balance between having total conviction in what you’re doing, but also having humility and a collaborative spirit to make those small pivots when necessary. Small pivots in a founder journey may not be what a founder initially envisioned, but they may end up being the most important decisions they can make. At the same time, you can’t make too many changes all the time — you have to be confident in
