Investment Climate Podcast
In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding alt proteins in 2024 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful climate tech CEOs and leading VCs.
Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies.
Series 2, Episode 7: Jake Berber of Prefer
In this episode, Alex talked to Jake, co-founder and CEO of Prefer, a Singapore-based producer of more affordable and sustainable food & beverages, starting with coffee. The talk focuses on investment outreach and strategies to attract funding or expand business opportunities. The discussion highlights real-world examples of successful outreach efforts and offers insights into overcoming challenges such as market skepticism or limited resources. Additionally, it underscores the need for authenticity, thorough research, and leveraging networks to maximize impact.
Key FactsPrefer:
- Goal: To make delicious and affordable coffee without the beans
- Recently raised $2 million
- Round led by Forge Ventures
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Alex’s Top Findings:
- Staying proactive in providing updates and showcasing demand from B2B clients.
“I was always checking in with positive updates of maybe MOUs or MTAs that we were signing where I could show this demand coming in for the story that we were telling. We are selling B2B to these large FMCGs and ingredient companies. Then I could say, “Look, now we’ve signed an MTA and we’re going into R&D with these guys to make a product” so that keeps the conversation going.” Jake answered on being asked how he made sure the process is actually moving forward rather than getting stuck. - Focuses on sustainability and climate change, not disrupting the coffee industry.
“We wanted to share why we are making bean-free coffee and I think it was really important to be a coffee company that wants to support the industry rather than saying coffee is the bad person. We wanted to say, in this case, climate change is the bad person. Climate change is sort of the villain of the story. So that was really important and actually a big communication change for us. This is a story that they were much more open to. So just that change of communication from making a product because coffee is bad to “Hey, I know the price of coffee is going up, but I think that we can help you out here so you can maintain these customers that love your taste and love your price,” Jake emphasizes. - Showing market validation is important.
Jake mentioned the reason why they needed oat latte before selling concentrate, “To unlock this business model of the ingredient/concentrate for the large FMCGs, they needed to see some market validation that people are actually interested in this. They needed to derisk the market and so we launched this oat latte ready-to-drink just to derisk that market showing them that people are interested. So in the meantime, we need to be doing all we can to grow this brand, to grow this company, to create traction. So this is a way that we can really take things and take matters into our own hands and just create traction.”
Link to Apple Podcast here.
Catch the full podcast series here.
