Funds push for food firm
Riot Foods, the umbrella company which owns CleanPaleo and other food brands, is crowdfunding $1 million for equipment for its second factory.
Founded by Ryan Kamins and television personality Art Green in 2014, it supplies “minimally processed” paleo food items such as cereals and protein powders to 250 supermarkets nationwide.
Money raised through PledgeMe would be used to kit out its new Auckland Airport-based factory, holding more stock and for marketing purposes, Kamins said.
“Effectively what we’re looking to do is set up enough machinery in the factory so we’ll be able to supply the bigger orders,” he said.
“The second factory is also about supporting the current parts of production that we’re not doing ourselves, which we believe we could do a lot better.”
Kamins said the new factory would need three employees, but forecast it would need seven or eight people this time next year.
Its current East Tamaki factory has 17 employees.
Riot Foods posted revenue of $1.4m in the last financial year, up from $860,000 the previous year. It expects revenue growth of 50 per cent to $2.1m in 2018 and sales of $7.4m in 2020.
Riot Foods bought nutbutter business Poppy + Olive in April for an undisclosed amount, and this currently accounts for 10 per cent of its group revenue.
Money raised would also be spent on Riot Foods’ Amazon operations, Kamins said.
“The challenge with Amazon has been keeping up with supply. We do get a lot of people buying, and because we are shipping it so far and because cashflow can be an issue for a small business, we end up missing out on sales and we’ve had to start again when the new shipment comes in. The investment through PledgeMe will allows us to be able to hold more stock on Amazon to continue to grow it a lot faster.”
Riot Foods recently signed a contract with Australian supermarket chain Coles to supply its biltong range, and in New Zealand is supplying product to 10 new supermarkets per month.
Long term, Kamins said the company believed it would like to acquire a couple of New Zealand brands.
“We’ve also been working on a third brand for the portfolio which is at this stage is called brand X, but that money will also allow us to create whole-food products for affordable items with ingredients people can still recognise“.