Fellowship Spotlight: Branch Venture Partners

“Food as an industry is changing rapidly and radically,” says Lauren Abda, co-founder and general partner (GP) of Branch Venture Partners, a fund at the intersection of food, technology, and sustainability. “Many aspects of the food industry are not sustainable, but today’s technology presents a tremendous opportunity for it to be more efficient and streamlined.” Branch Venture Partners is seizing the opportunity to invest in companies that are poised to participate in and lead that revolution.

About Branch Venture Partners

Branch Venture Partners is a $50M early-stage venture capital fund infusing capital into food industry innovation that’s catalyzing immense change. With their fund, Abda and co-founder and co-GP Marcia Hooper are investing in areas such as sustainable packaging, food as medicine, and novel ingredients (including alternative proteins). “While we invest solely in US-based companies,” Abda shares, “we hear from companies based all around the world that are expanding to the United States and looking for collaborations with U.S.-based corporations.”

Abda cites various pressures the food industry is experiencing, ranging from shifting dietary preferences and tastes to concerns about reducing negative environmental impacts of food production like greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation. Hooper explains, “It’s pressures like these that create the need for innovation and new business creation. We’re very interested in backing passionate founders who have a vision for industry change and can build opportunities that help evolve our food system.” 

Leveraging an Expansive Global Network

Working from the strong foundation of their combined 40 years of industry and investment experience, Abda and Hooper have built a formidable network in food systems in the 13 years they’ve been investing together. Their sister company, Branchfood, founded by Abda in 2013, is a community of over 19,000 stakeholders working across the globe to transform the food industry. “The network doesn’t only create a proprietary deal flow,” Hooper emphasizes, “but also helps us understand key leverage points to know where to invest.” The pair’s work is focused on determining which deals best fit the venture capital model and invest accordingly.

“When we’re trying to understand and validate whether or not an investment opportunity is worthwhile,” Abda points out, “we have this large network to call on to help us understand the potential for the innovation as well as which experts can advise us.” The depth and breadth of the Branchfood network allows Branch Venture Partners to select the best investment opportunities and positions them to add value post-investment.

“Our ability to accelerate the progress of the companies we invest in is unmatched,” Abda adds. “Once a company becomes part of our network, we’re able to connect them to so many different types of industry stakeholders who can help them utilize the resources they’re raising in a much more efficient way.” These people include mentors, advisors, corporate strategics, customers, and later-stage investors who would typically take lots of time and effort to identify and engage. 

Deep and Broad Industry Knowledge

Late-stage investors are an especially potent leverage group. Abda and Hooper have spent years nurturing relationships with corporate venture capital groups and people in private equity and otherwise in the position to invest in companies as they grow and scale. “That specific community within our great big network is uniquely valuable,” Abda asserts, “because we spend a lot of our time thinking and talking with investors who have the ability to write larger checks, which supports the value development on behalf of our investments.” This is one place where the expansiveness of Abda and Hooper’s industry experience and knowledge is evident. 

“Investing in food and food-adjacent businesses is highly complex and requires a lot of industry knowledge,” Hooper elevates. “If you think about from farm to fork, a piece of food probably goes through 10 to 12 entities.” She uses the example of a novel protein and all of the questions that have to be answered to get the product from idea to launch: Who’s going to use it? What is it substituting for? How and when does it get added? What’s the best way to take it to market? How will it be branded? “The complexity is one of the reasons people view food as difficult to invest in,” she says, “but because we’ve been doing it for well over a decade, we have that deep understanding and capability to understand those strategic partnerships that will elevate a company to success and where, when, and how to introduce them.”

The Birth of a Powerful Partnership 

Abda and Hooper first met while both were working at Harvard Common Press, a media company in Boston. They were part of a group looking at investment opportunities in foodtech, at the intersection of food and technology start-up companies in areas such as food delivery companies, recipe search engines, and rating sites. After a couple of successful investments, Abda’s interest in being at the forefront of food industry change was piqued. “Understanding how technology was transforming the industry was really inspiring to me,” she says. She left to launch Branchfood, but stayed in touch with Hooper, sharing deals and opportunities along the way. 

As they considered deals, they observed a theme of challenges encountered while fundraising. “People would get excited about products,” Abda explains, “but there was so much more to a food investment that pulled a lot of people back from actually writing checks.” Hooper, who had spent much of her career working in complex industries, knew that there was lots of potential if the market timing, team, and technology were right. 

She and Abda decided to form Branch Venture Group as an angel group to meet the challenge they were seeing, both by supporting investors’ understanding of the complexity of the industry and connecting those investors to capital-ready companies. “An angel network allowed us to capitalize on the deal flow that Branchfood was generating,” Hooper says, “and bring together individuals that wanted to invest in these companies at the early stage.” 

Having made their first investment at the end of 2017, they’ve been able to see the performance and growth of several companies and establish a solid track record along the way. “We’ve been able to show people what these food-at-the-frontier companies look like,” Hooper adds, and “why they fit the venture capital model, and why now is the best time to raise our first committed capital fund.”

Experience-Informed Passion

Abda grew up in a family that loved to come together around cooking and eating. When she was 16 years old, her grandmother was diagnosed with leukemia. In response to this difficult news, Abda’s mother traveled to the West Coast to study with a doctor who had success treating disease with plant-based diets. Upon her return home, she promptly changed her family’s diet. At the time, Abda was deciding what she’d go on to study in college, and this experience inspired her curiosity about how food could be used as medicine. She chose to pursue a degree in nutrition and food science and then food policy, which brought her to Boston. “Being in Boston, I became more aware of the power of entrepreneurship and innovation to change industries,” she shares, “and felt that working with entrepreneurs who had grand visions for the food industry was a worthy place to spend my time.” She started her career in the World Trade Organization’s Agriculture and Commodities Division, where she was writing reports on food safety development initiatives, which taught her a great deal about international food trade and further solidified her interest in improving the food industry.

Hooper, on the other hand, was raised by a chemical engineer who developed and sold food homogenizers. “My father was on the food processing side, so I grew up with vats of mayonnaise and ketchup and other things that he was trying to perfect,” which she says gave her an appreciation for what it takes to make food. She went on to study chemistry and then spend her entire career in venture capital, mostly at the early stage. “What I love about early-stage is that it’s where you’re meeting changemakers,” she explains. “People have a reason to see something that isn’t in the market today and make a change, and I find that passion very infectious. Early-stage investing requires a team environment; it is definitely a team sport. Working in an industry where you get to understand and watch the ecosystem support and grow some of these really interesting companies is rewarding, both emotionally and economically.”

Branch Venture Partner’s Work in Action

Hooper shares an example of Branch Venture Partner’s work in action. “We got an email from an entrepreneur who wanted to eliminate Teflon from people’s kitchens,” she says, “which has the benefit of nonstick and allows people to cook and clean up faster. But we now recognize that Teflon is a PFAS.” Having worked for a kitchenware company, this entrepreneur had existing relationships with manufacturers and landed an advantageous economic deal that delayed payment of the cookware he created until after it was sold, which meant he effectively had negative working capital. Hooper and Abda knew that this was a worthwhile investment and acted on it. As people gained more awareness of the dangers of PFAS and the COVID-19 pandemic required more people to cook at home, the company, Caraway, took off, and continues to be successful.

Abda highlights another company, PeelON, that’s developed a sustainable alternative to plastic packaging for the produce industry. “I’m the type of person who has a mini existential crisis every time I go to throw something away because I think so much about how long it lives in the environment,” Abda shares. “I don’t think I’m unique in that way, and from a regulatory perspective, many states and the federal government are getting serious about the waste that’s generated from food.” Abda and Hooper were able to introduce the company to many corporations who have aggressive sustainability goals and interest in PeelON’s products.

Participating in the VC Include Fellowship

“As very community- and relationship-oriented people,” Abda says, “we’ve done an excellent job of building a strong network for the entrepreneurs that we work with, but we’re just starting to develop the network of other investors who we can work with and learn from for ourselves. VCI has been enormously valuable in this sense.” 

She elevates the value she’s gained during the Fellowship from encountering GPs who are transparent and collaborative, which isn’t the norm she experiences in the more typical everyday scenario of pitching. “It helps create a space where people are more honest and forthcoming, which is really unique and different from our day to day.”

Abda has an impressive background in community building, and her network gives her insight into unique deal flow. Her passion and proximate leadership in the space give her an edge that is already starting to show — she raised more than $7M during the 12-week Fellowship program! We’re honored to be able to curate a refreshing space that accelerates our fellows’ learning, and eager to see the ways Branch Venture Group’s deepening network will launch their work to new levels.