![]() She’ll need that kind of help to stay relevant in what can be a fickle customer base. Today Daily Harvest offers a mix of recipes: a line of soups introduced to keep sales moving during winter months, breakfast parfaits of oats and chia seeds, and bowls of mixed vegetables and grains. Its hyper-focused menu means Daily Harvest can create a new recipe in about eight weeks, while most publicly traded food companies require a year to do the same. It helps her quickly pivot too, like when a strawberry-vanilla smoothie proved to be a dud and was given new life as a cherry-almond shake that sold 30% more cups in its first week. Most of that capital is still in the bank, despite moving headquarters twice in a few months after the business grew far more quickly than she projected and funding a pricey pop-up in New York’s Soho neighborhood and expensive advertising buys that include primetime spots on CNN, MSNBC and a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times.ĭaily Harvest generates revenue of $125 million selling frozen meals in a cup: “When you think about what you can achieve with having something that isn't going to rot in three days, the opportunities are huge,” said CEO Rachel Drori. ![]() Throughout, she was peppered with questions about her ability to commit to running a business with young children to care for. “She’s built a tremendously successful, capital efficient business.”ĭrori first began looking for funding in 2016, between the births of her two children, raising almost $50 million in three rounds from a mix of celebrity investors like Gwyneth Paltrow, Serena Williams, Shaun White, Bobby Flay and Haylie Duff, as well as VC funds Imaginary Ventures and VMG Partners. “Rachel was one of the first people to recognize that the world was shifting from growth-at-all-costs to growth-with-profitability,” says Reum. That financial discipline could pay off if the economy does go into steep decline. That’s one of the shortest payback periods ever seen by Carter Reum, cofounder of Los Angeles-based venture firm M13, who has invested in a slew of millennial-focused brands in addition to Daily Harvest, including Rothy’s, Bonobos and Birchbox. She focused her marketing efforts on social media channels, eventually building a micro-influencer program a few hundred strong, and soon expanded further out in the Northeast, and then California and the Midwest.ĭaily Harvest says it’s been nearly profitable since day one and should be solidly in the black later this year. Pregnant with her first child, she pledged that she wouldn’t quit her day job until orders from strangers outweighed friends and family’s purchases five-fold. At the start she would mix the frozen produce she bought, seal it in plastic and pay her teenaged nephews $20 a night to deliver them in Manhattan. She started Daily Harvest six years after earning her MBA, while working as a marketing executive for the Gilt Groupe, funding it with $25,000 from her savings. The first products were smoothies. She used a local Trader Joe’s for ingredients and mixed them up on the weekends in a commercial kitchen leased in Queens. “To make money,” Drori responded honestly, diverging from more politically correct answers like “doing good” or “solving needs.” On her first day at Columbia Business School, the dean asked her incoming class to articulate the purpose of business. Independent investors tell Forbes the company could be worth as much as $500 million, giving Drori a net worth of $125 million.īusiness comes naturally to Drori, the youngest of five siblings born to two New York City entrepreneurs. For decades, her dad ran a small wallpaper business in Brooklyn while her mom is the CEO of a chemical distribution company. Once frozen, the ingredients get mixed up and packaged into pre-made recipes that are turned into a meal by adding milk and blending, or tossing into the microwave.ĭaily Harvest has so far raised $50 million in funding, making it a leader in the growing category of home-delivered prepared meals. Daily Harvest partners use on-site freezing technology to preserve the crops within 24 hours of being picked. Many fruit farms pick their crops weeks before they ripen, gassing them in warehouses to complete the process. ![]() Daily Harvest has also upended the way those cups make it to tables.
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