The founders of Good Catch are on a mission, and now, after a new $32 million Series B investment raise, it’s a well-funded and expanding mission. Though you've likely heard a lot about meat replacement products sweeping the country's restaurants and supermarkets, plant-based seafood options are next. Here, Chad Sarno, one of the culinary founders and lead spokesperson for Good Catch talks about how you can disrupt the food industry where impact, demand, and good taste meet.

AT A GLANCE

 Company Name: Good Catch Foods

Co-Founders: Chad Sarno and Derek Sarno, brothers and culinary founders; Chris Kerr (New Crop Capital), CEO and lead investor/founder

Business Start Date: Founded, Summer 2016: Started research and development/tastings. February 2019: Launched first product on the market.

Briefly Describe the Business: It's a culinary driven, plant-based seafood company.

For What Products/Services Are You Best Known: Currently, three shelf-stable products in the "tuna" line: Naked in Water; Oil and Herbs, and Mediterranean flavor. More products to come.

Top 4 Business Statistics or Milestones:  June 2018: Nailed down the formula for our base-protein for the tuna product and for "frozen fish" products.

August 2018: Series A closed, with $8.7 million raised.

February 2019: Coming to market, exclusively with Whole Foods (more than 400 Whole Food stores) and Thrive Market. We also got into Safeways and Albertsons.

January 2020: Series B closed, with $32 million raised. We're now in 4,500 stores across the US and launching in the UK soon.

What’s Your “Secret Sauce”? (Why/How have you achieved success?) We offer an impact opportunity, we can supply a consumer demand, and we offer a positive taste experience. We approach our food product from our culinary standpoint. It’s a one—to-one swap for the original product. Our products mimic the taste and texture of fish without the mercury and plastics. In our proprietary six-legume blend, we only use real ingredients and algae extract. Our product is on par with the real thing—high in omegas and protein. Taste is first and foremost. Taste and texture are really valuable.

*****************

DEEPER DIVE

What event, experience, or collection of events/experiences compelled you to pursue this business? My brother Derek and I have been in the culinary worlds our whole careers, and I've been in the plant-based world for more than 20 years. Together we created Wicked Healthy, the "parent" company that my brother and I still own. We consult and provide culinary support to our community or anyone wanting to dig into more plant-based foods. We just launched our plant-based online classes in November 2019.

I've also done consulting work on vegan cuisine for Whole Foods market, as an R&D chef. I also did the public-facing stuff. Soon after, my brother joined as Executive Chef.

Meanwhile, we also developed foods for Tesco in the United Kingdom for their stores. In 2016, Tesco was simultaneously interested in licensing our brand for a food product line. Wicked Kitchen, our vegan prepared-foods line, is a subsidiary of Wicked Healthy and we have an exclusive deal with Tesco to carry it in the UK.

Somewhere in there we also wrote a couple of cookbooks.

I left Whole Foods to develop the plant-based culinary education at the Rouxbe online culinary school. I then left Rouxbe to join Chris Kerr, Chief Investment Officer at New Crop Capital, to create Good Catch.

Derek moved to the UK to further develop Wicked Kitchen, while Chris and I were seeding Good Catch. I did the development for Good Catch, though we’re both co-founders. With New Crop Capital, the main focus is to invest in food products that disrupt animal agriculture.

The missing piece in their investments was seafood. I discussed that with Chris—that the largest, most consumed seafood globally is canned fish, but that it is also one of the most destructive industries. Factory fishing is destroying our oceans.

The plant- based world has blown up, but there’s a gap, a white space in the market. There are chicken, meat, and dairy food replacements; the category that wasn’t being looked at was seafood.

The opportunity here combined impact opportunity [to beneficially impact the environment and disrupt the industry] and the market demand.

People are minimizing eating meat and fish. The flexitarian shopper is looking to diversify his or her food consumption. To some degree we took a guess. A well-educated guess, but still a guess. We did some market research with the growth of the plant-based sector and the large consumption of tuna and started developing from there.

In series A fundraising, we had a lot of activist/activist investors behind us. They’re plant-based, and in it for the impact opportunity.

We’re 100 percent a mission-driven company. We need to meet numbers and sell the product but we’re trying to do a good thing to disrupt the industry that's damaging the environment and our fish species.

The key to success is disruption and if you get the early adopters in the plant-based community, then you have a successful community. Of course, you also have the investment behind it.

Did you have any experience starting or running a similar project/business? Did you do research or training to prepare? I had culinary training, I'm self-taught as a chef. There weren't a lot of options 20  years ago. I was driven, knowing that I’d never done it before yet believing that I could. I worked my ass off to do it right, do it well. There's a fine line between confidence and being driven by ego.

Being in the culinary space…I’ve opened a dozen restaurants and have been teaching culinary my whole life. I got into culinary through vegan food.

It was the same thing with Derek, though he has more of traditional culinary school background. He was opening and cooking in more classic restaurants. He’s been vegan for about five years, and a few years ago he transferred that [traditional training and] knowledge to vegan cooking.

For me, it's been trial and error. I’ve been entrepreneurial since early in my career. I've had a lot of self-drive and surrounded myself with people smarter than me. I learn a lot as I go.

What was the initial development period like and how did you build from there? New Crop Capital [our investment partner] defined the white space and Chris Kerr and I started talking about/working on product replacement for fin fish.

Chris and I have been close friends for many years. I worked with him to help promote products he had invested in when I was at Whole Foods. He and his people defined the space and I joined to help make it happen.

The Good Catch name was collaborative. It took us many trials and errors—about a dozen different names. We engaged focus groups. It was available, so we went with it.

Out of the gate, in early 2016, we did tastings. In early stages, we did a lot of testing.

What we needed was the right high-moisture extrusion, in plant-based-meat world terms, to get the texture we needed for fish.

We engaged with a food-product equipment company, a product development company, working with legumes to make the base. We kept testing and incorporated more and different beans, because legumes have different properties once you put them through an extrusion process. We started to diversify so it wasn’t just soy and it wasn’t just pea; it’s now made of six different legumes [including chickpeas, favas, soy beans, lentils, navy beans, and peas].

We worked on texture, then nutritional profile simultaneously with the taste. We had people that do eat fish involved in testing and we bought a lot of tuna to define that the controlled product works texturally—even the mouthfeel.

We polled people, did focus groups in late 2016/early 2017—what people like and dislike about tuna. They like the texture, they want a lean protein. They dislike the smell, even people that enjoyed tuna. We needed to solve that issue, so we stayed away from adding fish flavor. We tested algal oil, algae extracts—for "omega" nutrients. This was all happening at the same point/in the early stages.

I have probably tried upwards of 100 dozen versions of the product. In the beginning when there was just two of us, we'd test all the flavors. Now we have a robust R&D team that goes through many processes to determine flavor and texture development.

When was the first glimmer that you were on to something? We were doing tastings early and getting outside feedback—people were blown away by the texture. We nailed every tasting. From investor tastings (a couple of dozen investors)—we got a clear yes to move forward.

When we did tastings for retailers and investors, Whole Foods said they would go national. We knew that there was interest but we had to work on having enough product.

Is the business financially sustainable? Did you have a business plan in place when you started? How has the business developed? We had our initial seed funding in 2016 from New Crop Capital. We were looking at it being a global product so we knew we needed investors from different demographics, to make it an international brand.

In August 2018, we had the series A close at $8.7 million so our total seed investment was around 9.2 million. Our costs to build our own plant and processing equipment was/is very substantial, which is why we needed that first raise to get this path on track, and to get us on shelf quickly. 

We were shown that we would need to open pretty quickly, but going into the food space of high-moisture extrusion, there aren't a lot of manufacturers that want to share line time because they want to protect their intellectual property.

We're currently doing a slow rollout. It’s currently available shelf-stable fresh.

Until recently, we were manufacturing in the UK, so it’s logistically a nightmare. We wanted to be the first to market and wanted that footprint with our brand. In late fall, we moved all of the United States manufacturing to our plant in Ohio—our facility is there. Accessibility to the ingredients will be centralized.

Now we’ll be able to create 10 to 25 times more product. Then we can open the floodgates for our product. (We expect that food service will be 60 percent of our business.) Within a year, we’ll be an international company—manufacturing and distribution.

The new Series B raise of $32 million will help us expand distribution in the U.S. and internationally.

Do you have a mentor or consulting team? (or did you have advisors at the beginning?) If so, who/what type of advice did you seek/receive? Chris Kerr is my main advice-giver. He's our current CEO and handles a dozen different food company investments. I’ve been learning a ton, sitting in the investor briefings. I’m a chef at the end of the day, but learning a lot along the way. It's important—knowing that there's risk and that you're confident you can overcome it.

What is the best business advice someone has given you? Believing in what you’re doing is key. Believing in your product. Passion drives product development; having that core belief. I’m self-taught and I've learned from a lot of people. There has been lot of trial and error and falling down.

One of the biggest influences has been the book The E Myth (original and revised editions). From when I was young, it helped shape my thinking around business, and fueled my motivation to pursue it. So many entrepreneurs think they need to do everything. Supporting yourself with a team that’s way smarter than you, has been very valuable advice.

What has been your company’s best moment so far? The validation of our product with the Series A investment close and now the huge vote of confidence with the Series B raise. Both are clear validation that there is demand for this product. That validated this process for me, and…there are some very exciting things to come.

What has been your company’s worst moment so far? The most frustrating has been the manufacturing process, looking for co-manufacturers; exploring that road kept leading to dead ends. For a good year- and-a-half we were banging our heads against the wall and went in different directions. It required re-evaluation of our strategy. We ultimately decided to create our own manufacturing equipment and plant.

What’s easier than you thought it would be? Investment. Our Series A showing impact investors wanted to get on board. And now we have clear interest from larger entities and food manufacturers for the Series B. Our strategy is to make the largest global impact with this company. We think that will play out with putting value in strategic investors—distribution and manufacturing partners.

What’s harder than you thought it would be? The manufacturing process, some of the research and development process. Constantly eating protein [food products] out of the extruder wasn’t fun.

What has been the funniest/weirdest thing that has happened so far? For months and months with different product options, I tried to give it to my cat, Milo, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Then I got the newest formulation; that was my turning point: When my cat ate it and couldn’t get enough of it. (Of course, don’t share the product with your pet without checking with the vet.) That we got the levels of algae and seaweed and flavor profile right.

Is there a quote, mantra, or something else that motivates you? What motivates me is that I want my kids to be able to enjoy the oceans when their kids are around. The impact opportunity is driven by wanting my kids to see beauty and to act on behalf of all of the animals who can’t communicate.

What do you hope to achieve from this point forward? Disruption of the category. I don’t know what that means right now. Most millennials don’t own a can opener. Tuna sales are declining. There needs to be some disruption from the horrible practices of the factory fishing industry.

I grew up in New England. The companies we’re trying to disrupt use 100-mile-long nets. Purse nets are basically miles long and everything in the center of the net is caught. It’s not all tuna and they're scraping the ocean floor.

There's an environmental impact that I hope our product makes. We want to offer a clear solution of plant-based protein—with a one-to-one swap for the consumer—while disrupting the industry.

We expect they'll be competition. The more in the space the better; we’re all mission driven. It pushes us further. Competition drives innovation. The culinary piece—we’re always innovating.[]