Elly is a Partner at Almanac Insights, a New York based food and technology venture fund that deals largely with companies making a positive impact on the food and beverage industry. After building her career at Whole Foods as the Global Director for Local Brands Product Innovation and Development, Elly joined Almanac where she acts as both an investor and advisor to food and beverage brands looking to make meaningful change.
Transcript
Elly Truesdell, partner at Almanac Insights. So, Almanac is a $30 million venture fund. We look across the food and beverage landscape and look to invest in consumer brands, in agricultural companies, technology companies that are supporting and, hopefully, transforming the food system in a positive way. My role in my job is to access new, interesting opportunities and find deal flow. It's also supporting our current portfolio with any number of operational, network resource, hands-on benefits. On the other hand, it's also just doing a ton of diligence on the investments we are looking at. I think it's been really interesting, because we certainly have a financial half to our team, and I bring more of a strategic background, purchasing, an overall food trends background to the mix. We look earlier-stage, but we are a bit of generalists. We're a small fund, especially in the scheme of investment funds in New York and in the world. But, we find ourselves looking at seed deals, so very small companies. They can be pre-revenue or having just, just launched. We look at growth-stage companies that are much later and are looking to probably take us on as a strategic investor rather than for our capital. Very often we're taken on as operational partners where we can really dig in, provide our network, and support companies that way. But, for considering a consumer product good for a CPG food brand, which is mainly what I look at, that could be Siggi's Yogurt, that could be KIND Bar, any sort of food products like that, we have a number of criteria, but I would say some really, really big ones are team, experience, level of integrity, trust, track record. We look at product itself and the brand. We look at the addressable market and how big we feel the product and product category is to meet. Then, based on our backgrounds and my own food philosophy or ideology, we really are looking for brands that are providing some sort of meaningful solution, meaningful alternative, or transforming the food system in some way.
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