MeliBio’s Post

🍯🌱 MELIBIO BAGS PRE-SERIES A INVESTMENT TO EXPAND BEE-FREE MELLODY HONEY As it makes inroads on its precision-fermented honey, San Francisco-based MeliBio has obtained fresh capital to scale up the distribution of its plant-based sweetener, Mellody®. The “strategic investment” from Future Food Fund by Oisix ra daichi, a food tech investor from Japan, is part of MeliBio’s pre-Series A financing round. It means the company has raised around $10M in total funding since it was established in 2020, co-founder and CEO Darko Mandich tells Green Queen. MeliBio was initially planning a Series A round this year – as revealed by Green Queen – which was expected to bring in a further $10M. But the challenges of the food tech market, where investment dropped by 61% last year, made it difficult to do so. “We shifted to [the] pre-Series A round, and will reopen Series A next year,” says Mandich. The startup initially launched Mellody through foodservice partners, before debuting the product in the D2C channel via a partnership with famed New York eatery Eleven Madison Park’s online store. Since then, the product has been introduced across the US (alongside a new hot honey variety), available at independent retailers and a growing list of restaurants – recent partnerships include Palmetto Superfoods and Joyride Pizza in California and MOTO Pizza in Seattle. Moreover, MeliBio has also expanded its distribution through KeHE Distributors, UNFI, Greco and Sons, Inc., and Ace Natural. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/eR6zPSeA #GreenQueen #foodtech #futurefoods #foodsystems #sustainability #vegan