Below please hear from LACC member Isabelle Steichen, Co-Founder + CEO at Lupii, about exciting new developments for her company. The LACC is pleased to share information about our members!
Lupii is unleashing the power of the small-but-mighty lupini bean to keep you fueled, fed, and running like a boss
See what The New York Times had to say about Lupii on May 14th...
From Isabelle Steichen:
We recently launched a Republic crowdfunding campaign, a community-led movement which allows Lupii fans and supporters to fuel our next stage of growth, we have already more than tripled our minimum fundraising goal of $25k!
As we are on a mission to increase access to delicious and sustainable plant based foods, we are equally on a mission to make investing in impact driven businesses like ours more accessible. And we aren’t alone: other sustainable plant based businesses like Akua, Sunscoop and LilBucks have successfully raised through platforms like Republic and collectively, we are building a movement for consumers to directly put their money where their mouth is.
Why are we doing this?
At Lupii, we are on a mission to make delicious and equally nutritious plant based foods accessible to the masses. Hand in hand with our desire to increase access to better for your plant based options, that are also better for the planet, we deeply believe in building a community led brand. Naturally, we want to give our customers, early superfans and Lupii fans the opportunity to directly benefit from the growth we are creating together, by investing into the business.
Investing in early stage mission driven companies like Lupii, is usually only accessible to established investors. We want to democratize this process and open up the opportunity to our entire community.
What are we doing with the investment?
Investing in Lupii today will directly fuel the growth that we have created a foundation for over the last 15 months, since launching in January 2002. We were not only able to survive the pandemic but to come out of it thriving: we built a robust D2C business, with strong repeat purchase rates and excellent customer reviews. We also gained retail traction by starting to work with UNFI (largest natural distributor) in Q1 of this year, unlocking 100 independent retailers in NYC and our first chain, Metropolitan Market, in PNW. We will invest funding directly into marketing support for our retail anchor accounts as well as working on our innovation pipeline, with a focus on new flavors and a line extension in 2022.
Campaign progress so far
In the last 3 weeks, customers, community members and Lupii lovers alike have invested as little as $150 to take a stake in Lupii and we are now getting close to hitting $100K (4x our min raise goal). This is truly an amazing opportunity to invest in our startup at such an early stage.
The investment review below shows how much our campaign resonates with our customers so we wanted to share it with you:
I've had nothing but an amazing experience with LUPii since I first tried their products in mid-2020. I wish this company nothing but the best and hope my investment goes a small way toward achieving the company's goals for growth and social impact. - Alesha, Lupii customer