Democratizing Food

Prior to investing via West Loop Ventures I made a bunch of angel investments.  One of the companies I invested in was Simple Mills.  I like to joke that I am the worst consumer products investor in the world because my track record proves it.  I invested in Simple Mills for a few of reasons.

1. Virtually every person I respected said that Katlin Smith was a tremendous person and when you met her, watched her present, you got a very good sense that she was.
2. I knew about the gluten free trend, had tried some of the products and tried Simple Mills and found their products to be delicious.
3. Chicago is a good place to invest in a food company.
4. She won the New Venture Challenge at Chicago Booth.

If you know about early stage investing and look at the above as multiple choice, only the first reason makes any sense at all.

Katlin was on a mission with Simple Mills.  She wanted to get high quality food with natural ingredients into people’s hands that needed them.  Like a lot of great entrepreneurs, Katlin developed the product to satisfy a need for herself.

Simple Mills has 28 SKU’s in 12,000 stores sold across America.  Kroger, Target, Costco, Whole Foods and other big retailers carry Simple Mills.  When I invested, she had the #1 selling muffin mix on Amazon.  If you haven’t tried their products you owe it to yourself to taste them.

She is very careful about what she puts into any product they produce.  She has been like this since Day 1.

She just did a podcast on how she wants to democratize the food industry.  Here is an iTunes link.  It’s 44 minutes but worth your time.  There is a lot of advertising in the beginning so you can skip the first couple of minutes.