The Naked Market Targets Breakfast For First Beverage Launch

San Francisco-based CPG company The Naked Market is ramping up for an aggressive new brand launch scheduled over the next 12 months with the debut of its first beverage product, a nutrition shake to be released under the Project Breakfast banner.

In late 2019, The Naked Market — an e-commerce-centric food and beverage platform “for millennials, by millennials” — introduced açaí and granola cups, followed by snack items like Flock chicken skin chips and AvoCrazy avocado puffs. The launch of Project Breakfast — in the initial form of a three-SKU line of vegan and keto-friendly meal replacement shakes — marks an expansion of the Naked Market’s range of offerings, but also another step in the company’s category agnostic brand building strategy.

“For us, this was much more about breakfast as a category than it was beverage,” said COO and co-founder Alexander Kost. “Breakfast is the most skipped meal and a key driver of that is the lack of healthy convenient options, and that is the pain point that Project Breakfast is solving.”

Available in Green Tea Matcha, Morning Chocolate and Vanilla Chai flavors, Project Breakfast includes almonds, coconut milk, and MCT oil. Each 11 oz. can contains 80 mg of caffeine, 2 grams of sugar, 3 to 4 grams of net carbs and 14 to 15 grams of protein. As with Naked Market’s other products, the drink is shelf-stable and available for purchase through the brand’s website for $31.90 per 8-pack.

Using plant-based and keto-friendly as the guiding principle, Project Breakfast has ambitions to go beyond beverage and establish itself as a cross-category breakfast CPG platform brand. Along with “more focused product offerings” similar to Flock’s chicken chips, the Naked Market is planning to launch other platforms as part of its rollout of six brands (including Project Breakfast) over the next 12 months.

The launch of Project Breakfast comes on the heels of the Naked Market closing a $6 million seed round, which included participation from Holtzbrinck Ventures, BEB Capital, Integrated Capital, Sequoia Capital’s Scout Fund, NFQ Capital, Garden Protein founder Yves Potvin, and Liberty Ventures.

“What gets us most excited about this, based on the data we are seeing with our other brands, is appealing to the high-protein, low-net carb community,” he said. “That is a pain point that continues to feel underserved.”