Yahoo Finance Tomorrow Farms wants to revamp the pantry
Tomorrow Farms is fueling a sustainable food train with ingredients to turn the pantry and refrigerator staples we know now into foods that are better for us and kinder to animals and the planet.
The company is poised to launch its first product later this month — co-founder and CEO Ben Berman was mum about what that would be — thanks in part to a $8.5 million seed round, led by Lowercarbon Capital, with participation by Maveron, Valor Siren Ventures, Simple Food Ventures, SV Angel and a group of angel investors including Ron Conway, Ryan Tedder and Max Mullen. The new round gives Tomorrow Farms total funding of $10.5 million.
Berman started Tomorrow Farms about a year ago after a career in the food space. At 18, he had a food truck called Mainely Burgers, which grew into three trucks and 16 employees. From there, he launched Good Pizza from his apartment, and during the global pandemic was lowering pizzas out of his windows to people as he raised money for local charities. That business is now part of Philabundance, a hunger relief organization in Philadelphia.
With a lot of investment funds going into the future of food companies, Tomorrow Farms. which was incubated at the SALT Fund in early 2021, has a mission of being the front-end partner for a lot of these deep tech food science companies building new products and brands.
“We saw this wave of food products, the precision fermentation and the cell-cultivated meat technology, but they needed help in commercialization,” Berman told TechCrunch. “We do all of the commercialization, how to get to market, the creative and brand work for them. We are also looking into what resonates with customers and what the next generation of food should look like and finding companies to make those foods.”
As mentioned, Tomorrow Farms is gearing up for its first product launch and worked with an ingredients company to build a product around that company’s formulation.
The new funding went into the product launch and mapping out a second product. This will entail growing the team, building retail relationships and finding new food tech partners. Berman said the company is already working with a few companies developing ingredient inputs with more coming on every day.
“There is so much activity in this space, and that is helping us build the future of our food systems,” he added. “We are opportunistic, with all of that activity, that we will find the right products. We are not trying to build fad products, so we are spending time and capital around the brands we want to launch.”