sustainable food

How ButcherBox bootstrapped to $600M in revenue • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 6, 2022Posted in ButcherBox, Commerce, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, food delivery, grass fed, Startups, sustainable foodNo Comments

Some of the best companies only come about because they found a problem worth solving. For Mike Salguero, CEO and co-founder at ButcherBox, the problem and opportunity in the extraordinarily broken space of meat production and distribution simply could not be ignored. Armed with an idea for how to do things differently, the company ran a Kickstarter campaign back in 2015, which drew the attention of its first thousand customers. From there, the company has continued to grow. At the recent Creative Technologist conference organized by venture capital fund Baukunst, Salguero shared that the company has seen $600 million worth of revenue without taking a penny of external investment and talked about some of the lessons he learned along the way. A rocky start ButcherBox isn’t Salguero’s first rodeo. His first company was CustomMade.com, which raised $30 million in venture capital from First Round Capital, Google and Atlas Ventures in a series of funding rounds. But in spite of all the money it raised, the company wasn’t successful. “My experience was really bad. We lost everyone’s money, which I felt a lot of shame about,” Salguero recalls. “At the very end, I had diluted myself so much, I owned just 5.5% of the company. The business failed, and we ended up going bankrupt, losing everyone’s money.” After that, Salguero decided to walk a very different path with his next company, which he started after being confronted with a very personal problem. His wife has a thyroid condition, and in the process of doing an elimination diet to figure out what foods she might be intolerant to, they learned about grass-fed beef. However, this kind of meat was hard to find in the supermarkets in Boston. “While CustomMade was falling apart, I started calling farmers and asking them if I could buy a half-share of meat,” Salguero laughs. That’s a lot of meat, and he describes it as “basically two trash bags full of beef.” “I was meeting meat farmers in parking lots, buying a couple of trash bags full of meat — I’m sure that didn’t seem sketchy at all,” he said. “But it was too much meat for my freezer, so I ended up selling the excess meat to friends or people I was working for.” Some of his buyers repeatedly told him that it would be much better if the meat was delivered to their houses, and thus, the basic idea for ButcherBox was born. Meat in the mail “I got obsessed with the idea and started researching how you ship meat in the mail. I had no idea how to do it. But I’m a big believer in finding people who have done something before and then asking them for help. It skips a lot of the hard work,” Salguero explains. “I found the former head of operations of Omaha Steaks, which at the time was the big behemoth of meat in the mail. And he just said ‘Oh, yeah, my non-compete just ended. I’ll be glad to help you.’ He put all the pieces together at the beginning.” Then everything started happening all at once. Salguero was fired from CustomMade and even though he had aspirations of taking a 100 days off, going on a silent meditation retreat and recharging, he threw himself into building ButcherBox less than a week later. He hired an intern and launched a Kickstarter campaign in September of 2015, a decision made out of a desperation to never raise money again. Fundraising wouldn’t be necessary, he thought, as he wanted to do this as a hobby rather than as a big business. “I’m only going to put in $10,000 into this thing,” Salguero recalls deciding, adding that he vowed to keep things light and easy. “I gave equity to the Omaha Steaks guy, and I gave equity to the branding studio, which in retrospect was a mistake, because I had way too low of a valuation.” Mike Salguero, CEO at ButcherBox speaks at the Baukunst Creative Technologists conference. Image Credits: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia All aboard the rocket ship “We agree with vegetarians.” Mike Salguero, CEO, ButcherBox The company had a goal of $25,000 for the crowdfunding campaign, but it ended up raising eight times that amount in preorders. It soon converted a lot of the preorder customers into subscribers, and the rest is history. The company went from revenue of $275,000 in 2015 to $5 million in 2016, then $31 million in 2017 and kept growing. When COVID-19 hit, the meat-packing industry didn’t fare well, but ButcherBox’s revenue just kept growing as people started subscribing to home delivery services like there was no tomorrow. In 2019, the company had revenues of $225 million, but the pandemic tailwinds nearly doubled its top line to $440 million. In 2021, the company recorded $550 million, and this year, Salguero is optimistic his company will go past the $600 million mark. “This whole time, I’ve just been on a rocket ship,” Salguero says. Beyond the numbers, the company has continued to stay true to its original mission of trying to make a difference. ButcherBox became a certified B corp in January 2021, joining the ranks of other heart-forward companies such as Allbirds, Ben & Jerry’s, King Arthur Flour and Patagonia, and further fortifying its aspirations as a company that takes a stand. Growing without external investment Figuring out how you build and grow a company without external investment is an exercise in scrappiness, but Salguero’s team had a few tricks up its sleeve, starting with the Kickstarter campaign and a number of communities who cared deeply about how and what they eat. The company figured out how to growth-hack its way to success by tapping bloggers and nutritionists. “You said eat grass-fed beef,” the company would tell them and created an affiliate model to help incentivize them to promote its products. “We don’t have any money, so we can’t pay you up front, but we will pay you for every box that person

AgriWebb’s software seeks to boost yields, lower environmental impacts for farmers and ranchers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 10, 2022Posted in agriwebb, AgTech, Climate, Startups, sustainable foodNo Comments

AgriWebb is on a mission to help livestock producers feed the world efficiently, profitably and sustainably by providing its comprehensive, ground-truth database for beef production worldwide. The Australian startup, which builds a livestock management platform for ranchers and farmers, wants to digitize farm records and the meat production process from the cow to the consumer and drive the industry’s animal and environmental welfare transparency. The startup said today it has raised another $6.8 million of funding led by Germin8 Ventures and iSelect Fund. In total, AgriWebb has raised $27 million in Series B and about $29.3 million since its inception in 2014. It did not disclose its valuation when asked. Its app allows users to visualize their operations and give insights on animals and grazing, including the best grass location and which animals gain weight. On top of that, it lets ranchers improve their sustainable land management for better profits and leverage the on-farm data they’re recording to make more intelligent business decisions, according to the company. AgriWebb claims more than 16,000 farmers and ranchers globally are using its cloud-based platform and managing approximately 19 million animals on over 136 million acres of grazing land across the globe, including Australia, the U.S. and the U.K. The global beef market is estimated at $500 billion, but the pure farm management software market in its core geographies is estimated at around $3.5 billion, the company executive chairman Justin Webb told ZebethMedia. AgriWebb’s key markets include Australia — where more than 15% of the national herd is managed using its platform — the U.K. and the U.S. Additionally, AgriWebb has partnerships in Brazil and South Africa, Webb said. Unlike most competitors who act as a point solution focused on one or two areas of farm management, AgriWebb’s platform brings together animal management, grazing management and team communication; task and compliance management; and daily record-keeping in one place, Webb explained. “Its grazing insights enable ranchers to maximize productivity, eliminate waste, and validate grazing and animal management decisions in a way that other record-keeping systems can’t touch,” Webb pointed out. Webb founded AgriWebb with John Fargher (chief revenue officer) and Kevin Baum (chief executive officer) in 2014. In Australia, the three founders discovered that farmers were not only interested in the advantages of technology but were also desperately cobbling their own solutions with scrappy spreadsheets and notebooks. “Livestock producers deserve better technology to help them maximize their business and consumers need more reliable provenance for the animal and environmental welfare of their food,” Webb said. “AgriWebb has always been about serving the farmers, and this round of funding doesn’t change our mission; it simply magnifies it.” The latest funding will be used for the international expansion of AgriWebb to ranchers and farmers in the U.S., the U.K., and Latin America, both directly and via partnerships. AgriWebb has secured customers in 28 of the 50 states since its U.S. launch in 2021 and plans to continue rapidly expanding. In addition, the latest funding will enable the company to establish its database. Apart from the funding, AgriWebb recently joined two project proposals to the USDA CSC program, one led by American Farmland Trust and the other by Farm Journal’s Trust in Food initiative, Webb said. Both aim to improve the U.S. beef supply chain’s climate footprint and scale regenerative agriculture practices, Webb continued. One project is focused on improving transparency in the beef supply chain and understanding the GHG impact of different practices; the second aims to scale the adoption of practices through payments for practice changes. “There’s a misconception that agriculture is at odds with climate, but the importance of sustainability and implementing sustainable practices is far from lost on farmers and producers,” Webb said. “In fact, the long-term sustainability and viability of their land are of utmost importance. Talk to any landholder and you’ll understand their long-term goal is to pass on their land in better condition to the next generation. Sustainable and regenerative practices can and do exist in tandem with productive and profitable farms, and we remain steadfast in our endeavor to support producers now and in the future through data that measures, manages and improves the sustainability of the food supply chain from farm to plate.” The company raised its first Series B from investors, including Telus Ventures, Grosvenor Food & AgTech and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation in January 2021. “AgriWebb fits with Germin8’s thesis to invest in the full-stack enterprise software companies within AgTech that bring essential enterprise value to farmers in alignment with practices that are sustainable,” said managing partner at Germin8 Ventures Michael Lavin. “There are very few software offerings capable of accelerating the regenerative agriculture practices our climate stands to benefit from, and even fewer that target livestock production rather than being at odds with it.”