For UCAN a year of growth including new flavors, expanded facilities, new press

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Overall, sales are up 28% for the first half of 2019, with online sales through www.generationucan.com and Amazon up over 37%. In fact, online sales are up 8 months in a row!

UCAN is involved through sponsorships in several worldwide events including the San Francisco and Dallas Marathons, as well as the 20K National Championships held in New Haven. UCAN also supports our local communities, participating and sponsoring events including the Fairfield Half-Marathon, the Cheshire Half-Marathon and many other local events and charitable causes.

A key part of UCAN’s growth strategy has been to endorse and support teams and athletes. UCAN provides their one-of-a-kind performance products to over 100 professional and college teams and supports world class athletes including Meb Keflezighi, the only person to win the Boston and New York Marathons, as well as medal at the Olympics. In addition, UCAN recently sponsored Tim O’Donnell, one of the world’s most successful long-course triathletes, with over 22 wins worldwide.

This summer, the UCAN story was featured on the cover of Seasons of New Haven magazine. Continuing to further the science and understanding of SuperStarch™, one of their recent scientific studies showed a relationship with improved cognitive abilities in soccer players.

UCAN has several new flavors under development as they continue to innovate to meet the needs of the market. And they are also meeting the needs of their growing workforce, recently doubling the size of their corporate headquarters in Woodbridge.

Unbakeables expands in Southwest through UNFI and Whole Foods

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Unbakeables continues to expand by building on their new UNFI relationship and added the remaining Whole Foods stores in the Northeast region (Fairfield County, NY, Northern NJ) as well as entering into the Southwest region (TX, OK, AK, LA).

They are now available in a total of 66 stores, 42 in New England  (29 new) and 25 in the Southwest. Initial sales have been growing as they define their base down in the Southwest region and introduce flavors and their brand to a net new audience.

Unbakeables is also continuing to change their new design and packaging, including introduction of a single serving package meant for both samples and for sales at food service and office cafeterias. They are also continuing to follow up with people they met at the UNFI table top show, NOSH Live, as well as the Summer Fancy Food Show, so more growth should be ahead soon!

ZestyZ launches new popcorn products featuring Za’atar seasonings

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While members of Food’NBev Connect got a sneak taste at our last community event, the public is going to finally get in on that action.

Get ready to get Zesty as you munch on the newest snack to hit the market. ZestyZ has moved into production on a new line of Mediterranean popcorn snacks.

ZestyZ will be adding this new offering to go with their line of condiments. Three new popcorn flavors launched in August after final quality and production testing – Mediterranean popcorn with Savory, Spicy, and Feta & Za’atar seasonings. Bags have hit the shelves and are available on the ZestyZ site, as well as through Amazon.

Muscle Up sees USA Weightlifting sponsorship lifting sales

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Muscle Up sees USA Weightlifting sponsorship lifting sales. Since becoming USA Weightlifting’s official bar, Muscle Up has seen sales up over 30% year-over-year, with online sales growing over 4o%.

Muscle Up attended the USA Youth National Championships in Anaheim in July and had a great response.  As a result of that event they are now the Official Protein Bar of East Coast Gold – the largest, most accomplished weightlifting club in the country, with 20 affiliate gyms from CT to Dallas TX.

The brand also had recent success at the USAW American Open Series in Albuquerque NM, with potential to add another large club and several more individual gyms.  In early September, they will also attend the American Open Series III in Daytona where Muscle Up will not only be vendors, but founders Lori and Tony will also compete in their first national event.

Finally, as a USA Weightlifting sponsor, Muscle Up will be donating 5% of all sales tagged with the TEAM USA code to the Tokyo Strong fund to help raise funds to support the team going to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

What’s Gary Thinking About Now?

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Food’NBev Connect is now going into its 3rd quarter of existence, and as a start-up initiative, I have to say it’s been a truly rewarding experience.  We have found 15 growing companies that have embraced our virtual format, we have brought together almost two dozen advisors and fostered great brand-advisor relationships that have added value and we have gained some important recognition from around the region and nationally.

Our involvement and attendance at NoshLive and BevNetLive in NYC in May further validated that we have a number of nationally (even internationally) competitive brands that are infusing innovation into the market and that distributors and larger manufacturers and retailers want to work with.  All this, topped with an expanding top line growth for virtually all of our companies in excess of 35% bodes well for our future path and continued operation.  I am humbled to have the opportunity to work with the entire community every day.

This doesn’t mean that we have figured it all out…we have introduced some solid classroom and workshop training, and with Bryan Mattimore’s efforts will host our 3rd workshop in September.  But more focused subject matter training with linked advising is needed, particularly in the areas of packaging (design, materials and sustainability), digital community building and on-line distribution (how to build your own community while also mastering various on-line distribution and fulfillment options, and competing in an Amazon world).  We need to add advisors in these areas and link with more strategic partners who can help us all get stronger.

In addition, financing remains a challenge for our seed and post-seed financed companies. They need more access to funders who are willing to come in earlier and help companies traverse the path from a few hundred thousand in run rate sales to the $ 2 – $ 4 million level. It’s a risky part of the investment spectrum, but the reward opportunity of helping companies up to these next levels will show that selectively, we can make a number of new impact growth firms with higher exit values. And helping create that stream of 2 – 4 brands per year will provide needed funding to our on-going operations.

Sustainable growth

This is the area that I am most focused on at this point of our summer. The state, through a renewed second year grant from CTNext, is helping us sustain minimal operations for our second year, but it just isn’t enough. We have three sources of income to help run the accelerator – state funding, sponsor contributions and membership fees. Together, like many of our brands, this created a seed investment to get us started, but we are now challenged to find more money to help us grow and improve our impact. We need more established players in the food and beverage space to get involved and help fund our operations, and we need investors to band together to form a focused fund for investment in these earlier rounds to make it easier and attractive to build, grow and stay in CT.

Together, this will sustain us and allow expansion in three areas:

  1. Let us support more growth brands – we are at capacity at this point…without expanding my time and personal investment, we have peaked at 15 – 16 brands, yet we know that we can easily expand to 20 – 25 if we had some more staff working with me that could help expand curriculum and work directly forging advisor involvement against identified need, as I continue outreach and market new brands, investors and strategics.
  2. We need a new base of operations – a clubhouse of sorts, where can have hosted meetings, bring together our brands more frequently and gain recognition beyond being housed here at The Business Council.
  3. Once we have dedicated space, we can also look to open a small incubator program for brands just starting and create our own “farm team” and can co-locate these start-up teams together with us so we can provide the intensive on-going daily assistance they need to come to market faster. We will also need to start thinking about providing a test kitchen space to help our brands improve formulations and get initial production started to support consumer validation and production planning assessments.

There is much to do as we think about moving into our second year and this is no time to rest. We believe we can create a $ 1.5 – $ 2 billion economic cluster opportunity here for Connecticut, as has happened in Boulder and Austin, by sustaining a focus on food and beverage fresh market brands and everyone should be excited by that proposition in a state that hasn’t had strong new sector growth.

I can’t thank our early primary sponsors enough – Robinson Cole, Bank of America, Martin DeCruze. But we will need more fire power if we are to realize our full potential and I am excited to begin reaching out with a plan to drive this growth in the Fall.

In the meantime, hit the beach and spend some time with the family . . . lots to do once things kick off in early September . . . all the best and call me if you have ideas how to help!