Daily Newsletter

06 December 2023

Daily Newsletter

06 December 2023

Signal: Ripple Foods raises fresh funding

The latest funding round comes even as the wider plant-based milk category slows and competition hots up.

Elizabeth Cooke

Ripple Foods, a US supplier of dairy alternatives, has raised $49.2m in its latest funding round.

The latest round follows a $57.3m series E in 2021, $55.8m series D in 2020, and $65m series C in 2018. The latest funding round comes even as the wider plant-based milk category slows and competition hots up.

Ripple Foods’ value proposition resides in its proprietary trademarked pea protein, Ripptein, which is used across its portfolio of products, including its pea milk and its protein shakes. The brand claims its patent-pending method to extract this protein from yellow peas removes the unsavoury taste associated with impurities like flavonoids and tannins.

While not commenting on Ripple’s overall performance, a press release in July commented on the “explosive growth” of its kids products, with Ripple Kids Original Milk becoming one of the fastest-growing products across all retail channels in the refrigerated plant-based milk category over the past year.

Bloomberg reported last year that sales of its kids’ offering have more than doubled expectations since launching in 2021, with distribution expanding by more than 10,000 locations in 2022.

Not all of the company’s innovations have been successful, however. Its first attempt at producing Greek-style, dairy-free yogurts, for example, was a commercial flop, encountering scalability issues and falling short of consumers’ texture expectations.

Ripple Foods has yet to comment on its latest funding beyond an SEC filing disclosing the investment. That filing showed the company was offering a mix of equity, debt and options worth $55.4m.

Our signals coverage is powered by GlobalData’s Thematic Engine, which tags millions of data items across six alternative datasets — patents, jobs, deals, company filings, social media mentions and news — to themes, sectors and companies. These signals enhance our predictive capabilities, helping us to identify the most disruptive threats across each of the sectors we cover and the companies best placed to succeed. 

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