By Lorrie Baumann

GOOD PLANeT, which makes plant-based cheese for the foodservice and retail markets, has been on a strong growth trajectory since its 2018 founding by David Israel and is now poised to continue that upward trajectory with the hiring of Bart Adlam as a co-Chief Executive Officer, along with Adlam, and its recent completion of a $12 million funding round.

With the addition of Adlam to his executive team, Israel is aiming at a bullseye currently marked with the names of Daiya, Field Roast and Follow Your Heart, category leaders in plant-based cheese, based on their retail sales. Adlam will be focusing on operations while Israel continues to lead the company’s innovation, partnerships, branding and sales efforts.

GOOD PLANeT launched into a rocket-fueled market for plant-based cheese, starting with foodservice sales in late 2018 and entering the retail channel early in 2019. While total U.S. retail food sales grew by 2 percent in 2019, retail sales of plant based foods grew by 11 percent to more than $4.98 billion, according to the Good Food Institute’s “2019 State of the Industry Report” for plant-based meat, eggs and dairy. Retail sales of plant-based cheese grew by just over 50 percent from 2017 through 2019 to reach $189 million in 2019, according to the report, which relied on data collected by SPINS.

Retail dollar sales of the U.S. natural and specialty cheese market as a whole reached $16 billion in 2018, according to market research firm Packaged Facts. Sales increased at a compound annual growth rate of 2.4 percent between 2013 and 2018.

Plant-based cheeses accounted for 1 percent of retail cheese sales in 2019, according to the Good Food Institute, although its report notes that the share of plant-based food in each of the categories considered in the study is significantly higher in the natural channel than in mainstream grocers. This matters because the trends that show up in the natural channel are often bellwethers that consumers in mainstream supermarkets will soon follow. In the natural channel, plant-based cheeses accounted for 17 percent of the dollar share of the cheese category in 2019.
This is the landscape in which Cleveland Avenue, an investment firm specializing in restaurants and in food and beverage brands, led GOOD PLANeT’s $12 million funding round, which closed in July of this year. Its portfolio includes investments in Beyond Meat and Farmer’s Fridge as well as GOOD PLANeT.
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With that new funding in hand to be used for product development, sales and marketing, Israel aims to double GOOD PLANeT’s year over year sales. “We’ve seen some exponential growth since launch in 2018. We see that continuing – that trend – if not increasing,” he said. “We’ve been a scrappy start-up team. It was really time to grow up…. We continue to figure things out and be scrappy, but we wanted to bring in someone who’s been there, done that, and can take us to the next level quickly.”

Adlam joins the company as his latest move in a 30-year career in consumer packaged goods, starting with marketing positions after receiving his Masters in Business Administration degree from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He was previously CEO of Chef’s Cut Jerky for almost two years, ending his tenure there when the company was sold in July to Sonoma Brands for an undisclosed price, and before that, he ran the siggi’s yogurt brand for the six years immediately prior to the company’s sale to Lactalis in 2018. He currently sits on the board of directors of Lavva and Aloha Foods, both plant-based brands, and this is his third stint as CEO of a specialty food company positioned to grow its brand.

Existing foodservice customers are pushing the company to create a plant-based Mexican blend as well as a mozzarella-type cheese, according to Adlam. And, in addition to gains realized through sales of new products, the company is planning to extend its reach into the retail market. “There are a lot of retailers to go after,” he said. “That’s what makes this so exciting.”
Setting a course on that trajectory would be an ambitious undertaking at any time, but Israel and Adlam are doing it in the midst of a pandemic. While they acknowledge some uncertainties, they don’t think that’s just nuts.

Although COVID-19 has certainly landed a punch on GOOD PLANeT’s foodservice business, the company has seen its retail sales go through the roof, Israel said. Plant-based foods were among the fastest-growing food categories in retail food stores as the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns set in. Plant-based cheese’s retail sales grew at a 95 percent clip in March of this year during the peak panic-buying weeks. In the four weeks following the panic-driven grocery shopping, the category still grew by 54 percent, according to a May 26 report by the Plant Based Foods Association, which used data collected by SPINS.

“I’m all in on plant-based,” Adlam said. “I fundamentally believe that plant-based is the future of food. We don’t have all the answers yet about COVID. Regardless of how things go with COVID, we do feel like plant-based is going to march upwards…. Growth is going to come from Americans who want to move away from dairy.”