Our Ecosystem-Centered Approach to Impact
Earlier this month, we announced our Series D round with $350 million in new funding led by our longtime partners at Temasek and CPP Investments. While we’re humbled by this number, we also know it’s a drop in the bucket for the impact we stand to have. The sheer size of our ambitions requires capital to make them a reality.
While many think of Perfect Day as just an ice cream brand or dairy company, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’re transforming how your favorite foods and products are made — from the most upstream innovation to the ingredients they’re made with, all the way down to the brands you buy at your local grocery store.
When we realized protein was milk’s magic ingredient, we had no idea just how large of an opportunity we were about to unlock. Milk protein has thousands of uses. The next time you’re at the supermarket, take a peek at the ingredient labels on your favorite products. There’s a good chance whey protein might be listed.
By making this ubiquitous protein with microflora instead of animals, we’re able to bring you the foods you love made in kinder, greener ways. But what good does it do for the world to do this at a small scale in a lab? That’s why we spent six years building our R&D and production capabilities. We’re now able to make animal-free protein in the context of a global supply chain.
We’ve built our business to deliver the potential impact we shared in our life cycle assessment last month by building an end-to-end, sustainable solution that touches every corner of the supply chain. We shared more about our three business units in our announcement and want to dive deeper here on the impact those businesses stand to have.
Innovative ingredients.
Since 2019, we’ve increased our production capacity 10-fold, and we’ll be able to produce thousands of metric tons of animal-free protein in the coming years. This is a huge step in our strategy to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. Production amounts this large could, for instance, supply an entire national coffee shop chain with all of the milk they need for the year, while massively reducing their overall carbon footprint.
You can now find animal-free dairy pints of ice cream from Brave Robot, Graeter’s, or N!ck’s online and in thousands of supermarket shelves across the country. You’ll soon see gelato and baked goods from Villa Dolce at restaurants, college campuses, and resorts across the country — all made more sustainable with Perfect Day. The opportunity here is immense because our protein seamlessly fits into existing food production processes. That also means we’ll have many more exciting partnerships to announce in the coming months.
But this is just one way we’ll drive global impact. We’ve quietly been building much, much more, keeping one foot in the lab and another in the store.
Driving biology at scale.
The climate challenges ahead of us can’t and won’t be solved by one company alone. That’s why we’ve built a technology platform where we can offer sustainable biology solutions at scale through SBF, Inc., our enterprise biology business. We deliver state-of-the-art facilities and expertise through our Utah-based pilot facility along with licensing opportunities to power innovators across food, agriculture, life sciences, and biopharmaceuticals. We see this biotechnology-as-a-service offering as a critical way to maximize the impact we can create.
Staying connected to consumers.
We founded Perfect Day because we knew people were hungry for more sustainable, compassionate options that delivered on taste. And to meet these needs, it’s critical we stay connected to the consumer through our consumer brand entity, the Urgent Company.
Since launching last July, their Brave Robot animal-free dairy ice cream can now be found in over 5,000 grocery stores across the country, including Kroger, Sprouts and Albertson’s. And they also announced their next brand, Modern Kitchen, which will soon offer a range of everyday dairy staples, starting with animal-free cream cheese. Three perfectly spreadable flavors will hit stores later this year, and in the meantime, you can place your pre-order to get a first taste.
Building a team for our future.
We can only make this urgent mission a reality if we have the right team to deliver on our strategy. We also want to introduce a few of the newest folks behind Perfect Day and The Urgent Company. You’ll be hearing more from these folks as we share their voices here and at events in the months to come:
- Alex Brittain, Senior VP of International
Alex brings a wealth of operational experience from PepsiCo, and will lead all international strategy, development, and operations to expand Perfect Day’s global presence and impact. - Allison Fowler, Chief Marketing Officer
Allison has helped top brands, from Perfect Snacks to Kashi and MillerCoors, connect with their customers. While we certainly spend a lot of time in the lab, we will always maintain that direct connection to the customer, and Allison will help us build those consumer-centric brands and relationships. - TM Narayan, Chief of Business Operations
TM comes to us from HCL Technologies, and he will strengthen all of our rapidly growing business functions, including People & Culture, IT, and Facilities. - Chuck Thorn, VP of Finance
Chuck has deep experience from Cargill, and he will help us focus on the financial side to compete with, and someday beat, animal-based products on cost. - August Vega, Brand President, Brave Robot
August founded disruptive company MALK Organics, which she scaled to a national plant-based milk brand. She will be integral to The Urgent Company’s continued connection to the many types of conscious consumers Brave Robot is reaching.
These new faces filling out our core team will help us accelerate our ambitious growth plans across the supply chain. And trust us, the best is yet to come. Stay tuned…
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