Nest Collective: Building the Next-Generation CPG Company
Apr 24, 2009 9:34 AM
With a first focus on the healthy kids’ market, founders work to assemble innovative brands that follow a multi-bottom-line objective
After leaving CLIF Bar several years ago, Sheryl O’Loughlin, who served as CLIF’s CEO for three years, and Neil Grimmer, the company’s former vice president of strategy and innovation, decided to band together to create a business that would revolutionize the consumer food business. But rather than launch a single company or product, the pair visualized building an incubator of sorts that would bring together and nurture a collection of strong, innovative food brands and enable them to fulfill larger health and sustainability objectives.
Around that same time, Jed Smith, founder of Drugstore.com and now a managing partner at the early-stage venture capital firm Catamount Ventures, was fielding tens, if not hundreds, of investment requests from small companies operating in the healthy, natural & organic, and sustainable products markets. “All of the requests were interesting—they were all for high-growth companies created by very charismatic and evangelical entrepreneurs—but most were not big enough to produce the kind of returns we are looking for at Catamount,” Smith told Nutrition Business Journal. “We are really looking for 10X companies and billion-dollar returns. These were $20 million to $50 million companies.”
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