Simple Mills Gets Investment

When I was at the angel group I started I invested in a company called Simple Mills.  I love to cook so it was up my interest alley.  At the time, it was the best selling muffin mix on Amazon and in a few specialty niche grocery stores.  I was very gun shy about doing consumer products.  I had lost money in B2C a few times before.   We ordered the muffin mix and made them.  They tasted wonderful.  Still do!  They have rolled out the best-tasting gluten-free crackers on the market along with a lot of other products since then.

Simple Mills makes clean food. It’s gluten-free.  It’s not full of sugar like other gluten-free products and it tastes great.  I have compared their stuff to similar products and the other products have a “tinny” taste to them.  The competition also has no texture.  Spread something on a cracker and it breaks because it is so brittle.  It’s a terrible experience to see you guests breaking crackers with crumbs all over the floor.  The only one that likes that is the dog.

It wasn’t my cursory analysis that caused me to pull the trigger and write a check.  Mark Tebbe told me I had to invest in Katlin.  You could sense there was something special about her when she presented.  If you met her you’d have invested too.  When it came to the market, you knew it was huge. There was uncertainty as to how Simple Mills would grow and differentiate itself.  Sort of like the uncertainty surrounding every early-stage investments.  There are a lot of unknowns and known unknowns. Investing is taking a risk.

Yesterday, the company announced they received a minority investment from Vestar Capital Partners.  They are based in NYC, Denver, and Boston.  An aside that is interesting to me, Denver is a hotbed of organic food companies.

We are coming into the “cooking season”.  Halloween, Thanksgiving, and lots of religious holidays.  Yom Kippur is this week.  Holidays often revolve around meals with friends and family, traditional food.  Sign up for Simple Mills and check out their recipes.  I hope you give them a try.