From Financing Jennifer Garner’s Baby Food Brand To Selling Vive Organic, This Fund Is Leading The Way In Enhancing Consumer Health
The $1.4 trillion food and beverage market in the U.S. that accounts for roughly 5% of the country’s GDP today looked drastically different over a decade ago when Filipp Chebotarev and his sister, Polina Chebotareva-Mudrick, launched their fund Cambridge Companies SPG: processed foods remained prevalent in grocery, while better-for-you trends fortified by the budding consumer demand for clean label and special diets were at their innate stage.
Despite the broad reach of the category, it wasn’t necessarily an investment darling for most venture capitalists at the time due to its traditionally low profit margin, recalled Chebotarev, who himself became overweight as a child after regularly consuming processed meals and later developed health issues in his early 20s.
“I had a vision of what I wanted to do in my life, but my overall lifestyle was not going to get me closer to the vision,” said Chebotarev. “The issue with processed food is our bodies don’t recognize synthetic preservatives, food dyes, artificial sweeteners, and flavors. These additives disrupt our digestive health, hormone production, kill healthy gut bacteria, and slow down our metabolism.”
It wasn’t until 2017 when Cambridge Companies SPG made its first consumer investment — Once A Upon Farm, a baby food company co-founded by Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner, after spending years acquiring distressed real estate. The brand, best known for its line of organic plant-forward meals packaged in cold-pressed pouches, generating less than $1 million in sales back then, has increased a hundredfold since Cambridge Companies SPG led its series A.