Connecticut-based tart cherry juice brand Cheribundi announced today the closing of a $15 million financing round, led by existing investor Emil Capital Partners.
The round will go towards supporting new hires to the Cheribundi’s c-suite and sales team, as well as funding innovation, marketing and distribution expansion.
According to CMO Rob Wiley, Cheribundi will focus on marketing the product as a performance beverage by highlighting the benefits of cherry juice for post-workout recovery. New marketing campaigns will focus on educating consumers around recovery, calling it the “next big conversation in health and wellness,” he said.
Rather than professional athletes, the brand will instead play up its connection to “everyday athletes” through social media and digital ad campaigns.
“We’re building on a lot of positive momentum coming out of our base business within the juice aisle, and then extending the business into the performance set,” Wiley said. “Our go-forward assessment is that we will be living in both places. We do believe that we will have our traditional tart cherry juice with the existing set of SKUs in grocery. But we also will add the incrementality of the performance set with incremental SKUs through new innovation.”
Founded in 2004, Cheribundi produces a line of functional tart cherry juices available in over 50,000 stores nationwide and sells directly to over 300 professional and collegiate sports teams in the U.S. The brand is available online direct-to-consumer and through Amazon, Kroger, Publix and Walmart.com. Wiley noted that since the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns in March, the brand’s ecommerce sales have seen triple-digit growth year-over-year.
In a press release, Emil Capital manager partner and COO Marcel Bens suggested that natural products makers have “lagged” in developing products for the performance set and that the new capital allows Cheribundi to “hone our focus, evolve our positioning and hire best-in-class operators.”
The round comes in a year where Cheribundi has seen significant leadership shakeup, including the exit of CEO Mike Hagan in September. That same month, former BOS Brands managing director James Moss joined the company as its chief revenue officer, with responsibilities including overseeing the brand’s sales.
In January, Cheribundi closed its Geneva, New York production facility and transferred manufacturing to a Michigan-based co-packer, a move Hagan said at the time would reduce costs and “allow Cheribundi to survive.”
Wiley joined the brand in February, while former GoodBelly chief operating officer Michael DeVille took the COO role last year to help facilitate the closing of its production facility. Both team members came to Cheribundi through Emil Capital, which has taken a hands-on approach to the personnel in its portfolio companies. Both Wiley and DeVille also serve in the same roles at other Emil portfolio brands, respectively Sipp, which relaunched earlier this year as a functional seltzer, and Nib Mor Chocolate.
According to Wiley, Emil Capital’s crossover approach to its beverage investments has helped create “seamless transitions” in onboarding the new c-suite members and encouraged a collaborative approach. As a result, Cheribundi will not seek to fill the CEO position in the immediate future, he said.
“In this particular case, we have so much intelligence and experience inside the company that it gives us a lot of confidence that we can alleviate many of the traditional, I think, startup missteps and adapt in a way that allows us to be successful or more successful early on,” Wiley said.
Currently, Cheribundi is also looking to add multiple new hires across its sales, marketing, operations and R&D teams. The company is also developing new products expected to launch next year.
“Those are all areas that we have put in our roadmap as imperative to what we want to do moving forward,” Wiley said. “So there’s no question that the most recent fundraising will be going towards people to some extent.”