Page 21 - Food&Drink Nov-Dec 2020

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“LET’S make plant-based food sexy” is the foundation for Grounded Foods’ branding to target the non-vegan audience with their plant-based cheeses made from cauliflower and hemp, and so far, it’s working.
“If you call it plant-based instead of vegan, it’s almost like a switch in consumer psychology that they go, ‘Oh, now I’m interested, this is something novel and uses unexplored ingredients – now I just want to try it because it sounds different’,” Veronica Fil, behavioural economist and Grounded co-founder, told Food & Drink Business.
In July, Grounded secured US$1.74 million in investment from venture capital fund Stray Dog Capital, and in November, will begin production to reach a national audience – in the US.
Melburnian husband and wife duo, Shaun Quade – award- winning restaurateur and Australian Chef of the Year in 2017 – and Fil, moved to California a week before international borders closed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their aim was to enter the “much bigger” plant-based market in the US with their range of cheeses that champion sustainability, maximise local supply chains, and happen to be vegan as well. “We are not vegan ourselves. We didn’t do this as a passion project for vegan cheese,” says Fil. “We did this because we see that the dairy industry is unsustainable – farmers aren’t paid a fair value for the resources they provide, there’s environmental degradation from the entire industry at large – there’s a huge food security issue here and that’s what we want to address.”
PLAYING WITH FOOD
A lot of Quade’s career has been based on “playing with people’s perception of flavour and unusual products,” says Fil. There was originally a restaurant concept the pair wanted to take over to West Hollywood, but the demand
from investors for the cheese, which featured on the menu, far surpassed their interest.
“Every time we pitched the restaurant concept to investors in Los Angeles, they would hone in on the cheese,” Fil says. “It got to the point where one investor offered us $2 million just to buy the recipe for the cheese, which made me go, ‘Ok, that’s a pretty big signal. We should pay attention to that’.”
It took Grounded around six months to find a co-packer that was close to them in Los Angeles, and suited to their needs: cost-efficient for a start-up, free from major allergens, and did not handle any nuts or nut-related products. Fil says they wanted to do everything locally, including the packing of the products and sourcing
local ingredients.
“One of the reasons we ended
up in California was because ninety per cent of cauliflower in the US is grown in California, and our product is based on imperfect cauliflower – one of our two core ingredients. We get
industry in California. Fil says the hemp seed adds an interesting advantage in environmental resilience, cost and flavour.
“It brings this beautiful quality of creaminess and milkiness to the cheeses while reintroducing the protein and calcium that you lose by not having dairy,” she says.
“Some of the other plant-based cheeses out there have a problem with the nutritional profile of their products because it’s devoid of any nutritional benefit other than coconut oil and starch, which can be artificially fortified by adding protein or vitamins back into it. We don’t need to do that – everything is coming from naturally occurring ingredients from the ground, hence, Grounded.”
G’DAY USA
Before their US departure, Fil and Quade were part of the inaugural Mars Food Australia Seeds of Change Accelerator program in 2019. It offered guidance from mentors and a
“ We didn’t do this as a passion project for vegan cheese. We did this because we see that the dairy industry is unsustainable... there’s a huge food security issue here and that’s what we want to address. ”
the flavour for our product from a fermentation process using the whole cauliflower, including the leaves. There’s a huge advantage in us being able to use imperfect produce and the parts that would normally go to waste, in comparison to other plant-based products, especially in cheese, which are being made from cashews or almonds, and have a range of both ethical and environmental considerations.”
The second core ingredient to Grounded cheeses is hemp seed. During the R&D phase, Quade decided to experiment with the ingredient, given the size of the hemp and CBD (cannabinoid)
new platform for Grounded, Fil says, but it was during the program that she attended agrifood industry forum Global Table where she met New York venture capitalist Andrew Ive who specialised in plant-based proteins, and helped bring Grounded to the US.
“In California alone, the addressable market is bigger than Australia and New Zealand combined, and it was whenIwasatatradeshowafew years ago, I saw that vegan cheese was bubbling with a lot of traction overseas and was definitely a gap I knew we could fill,” says Fil.
ABOVE: Veronica Fil and Shaun Quade secured US$1.74 million in investment to produce their plant-based cheese range and launch nationally in the US this year.
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