- MASTERCLASS
How Angel Food crowdfunded $200K
With Alice Shopland, the founder of Angel Food
Angel Food is New Zealand’s leading vegan cheese manufacturer. Stocked in hundreds of stores across the country, Angel Food make over 130 tonnes of cheese a year and also supply national brands such as Pizza Hut and Lord of the Fries.
In this masterclass we speak to founder and Vegan Business Tribe member Alice Shopland about how she raised $200K NZ in her latest equity crowdfunding round to fund their expansion into the much bigger Australian marketplace.
What you will learn in this masterclass:
- Angel Food became the first to manufacture vegan cheese on a commercial scale in New Zealand.
- Angel Food managed to dominate the country because the relatively small size of the population has meant that bigger vegan cheese brands have not targeted the location.
- Why Alice shose equity crowdfunding as the way to raise 200k instead of traditional finance or finding a single investor.
- Because vegan cheese is still a relative niche, they have a crowd of people who for who they are really solving a problem, and who get excited about the opportunity to own part of the brand.
- Why traditional learning wasn’t an option for Angel Foods and why, even at a couple of million turnover, the company is still not at the stage where they can easily attract an investor.
- How Angel Food’s contract manufacturing business model gives them lower overheads but also lower margins.
- How Alice worked out how much money they needed to raise in this round.
- The full launch in Australia will cost 2 million dollars in total because they need to both increase their inventory but also spend a huge amount on marketing to support those sales – they need to achieve the brand awareness they have built up in New Zealand over several years in just six months in Australia!
- We’re all living with an awareness of rising costs of living. Even if someone isn’t personally struggling financially, they are still being a lot more careful in giving away their money and this really impacted Angel Food’s normal 3-week crowdfunding template.
- Alice saw the crowdfunding campaign like a crash course in marketing. Because she could see direct and instant results (ie people signing up to the campaign) from each piece of marketing she was doing, so knew what worked and what didn’t.
- Why they invested in a professional video production company to create the crowdfunding video.
- Why a fundraising campaign needs to be your full-time job, for at least the week before the campaign and the weeks during it.
- Even if you are not looking to crowdfund, it’s still important to build a crowd – for your product, for feedback – or even for selling shares.
- Alice runs through all the activity Angel Food undertook to get people to the campaign page, from social media and email to PR and getting interviewed.
