Daily Crunch: Laurel Orley

Daily Crunch: Laurel Orley shares how to get funded in 2024

Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs 

In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2024 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.

Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners; Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.

Episode 9: Daily Crunch: Laurel Orley shares how to get funded in 2024

In this episode, Alex talked to Laurel Orley, Crunch Executive Officer and co-founder of Daily Crunch Snacks, a women-owned certified and mental health mission driven company bringing innovation to a trusty but dusty nut snack category through our patent pending sprouting process, innovative game changing flavors and craveable crunch. Laurel shared about finding investors who align with their mission and believe in their product. She also stressed the importance of having detailed plans and projections to show investors how funds would help scale effectively. 

Key Facts Daily Crunch:

• Goal: To make feeding your body with real + healthy foods easier, and to remind you to take time for your mental health.
• Recently closed Series A with Launch Tennessee as lead investor.

Alex’s Top Findings:

1. Daily Crunch positions itself firmly in the nut category, a multi-billion-dollar market, instead of trying to compete across multiple categories. “You cannot be everything to everyone, or you're nothing to nobody. The nut is a massive multi billion dollar category in the U. S. Right now, our share in the category is 0. 1%. Which means we have a lot of opportunity for growth in this category before even considering going into another category. We do have plans later on down the road to go into other categories, but we really need to stay focused here first.”
2. The team carefully selected investors aligned with the brand's vision and said no to those who didn’t feel like a good fit. "If your gut is telling you that they're the wrong people, they're the wrong people, and you should not let them in." Laurel emphasized.
3. Using a structured, phased fundraising process and regular updates kept potential investors engaged and encouraged participation. "We did a three-wave close... Once we closed wave one, I’d send out an email: ‘Here are the updates, and we just launched in Target.’ All of a sudden, people would say, ‘Oh yeah, shoot, I missed wave one, but count me in for wave two.’"