Meet Austin Inno's 2021 Fire Awards winners in the CPG category below. See all 50 Fire Awards winners in each category by clicking here.
Austin-based subscription boxed wine startup Boxt is now a year old, and it’s on a roll. The company blends wines from around the world to create wines that fit specific flavor profiles. In October, it secured $9.3 million in venture funding in a round led by Austin’s Next Coast Ventures. The startup is in the process of opening a tasting room in Austin, founder Sarah Puil said. The shop will have live music, as well as a “wine-body-spirit” yoga program where participants can have a workout session followed by a brunch board and a glass of rosé. But the real action is happening via retailers. Boxt, which operates legally as Drink Boxt LLC, is distributing in 38 states currently. Its target customers aren’t the folks who drink traditional boxed wines from the supermarket. Puil said “it’s really that intersection of where Gen X and the millennials meet.” The young company has attracted several key influencers along the way, including actress Eva Longoria.
Austin canned cocktail startup Canteen Spirits and Cantina, which makes a variety of fruity vodka sodas, banked about $31 million in equity and debt funding in 2020 to fuel growth in the coming year. Canteen launched in 2019. It has reached shelves in all 50 states, as well as via alcohol delivery app Drizly, and it says it sold 517,000 cases of its canned cocktails in 2020. Along with the national expansion, CEO Brandon Cason and his team opened a 50,000-square-foot production center in Southwest Austin recently. The company said last year that it started becoming profitable less than a year after launching its products, and Cason projected the company would end 2020 with $15 million in revenue. The latest financial details weren’t disclosed.
HumanCo LLC closed an oversubscribed $35 million bridge funding round in September that included influential and celebrity investors such as tennis star Venus Williams; Brian Sheth, co-founder and former president of Austin-based private equity firm Vista Equity Partners; actress Scarlett Johansson; and Austin-based venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale. It's all dedicated toward a mission of making healthier living more accessible to the masses, said co-founder and CEO Jason Karp. HumanCo is an investment firm and holding company that incubates, backs, acquires and scales health-focused consumer packaged goods businesses and others. Snow Days pizza bites, HumanCo’s first incubated brand, launched in March and more recently HumanCo bought a majority stake in The Grain Gourmet Foods LLC in Vermont. The CEO said he expects HumanCo to go public in a few years.
The plan at the start of the year at Siete Family Foods Inc. was to have expanded its respective meal and snack product lines with 10 new offerings, and grown its staff by up to 33% by the end of this year. That would put it on a notable trajectory for 2022. Cookies, tortilla and potato chips, churro strips and cinnamon crisps are some of the flavorful products being cranked out by this Austin-based company. Its products now are sold in more than 16,600 stores, such as H-E-B, Walmart, Target and Kroger. Co-founder and CEO Miguel Garza said he and his colleagues determine what categories to push into, then his sister, Veronica Garza, Siete’s co-founder, president and chief innovation officer, takes it from there.
This female-founded and led startup that boasts of making discovering tea fun, personalized and affordable markets itself as the only multi-brand, personalized tea subscription box. Each month, the company match tea drinkers across the U.S. with teas from over 150 global brands. In the summer, Sips By landed at No. 79 on the Inc. 5000 list, indicating enormous revenue growth, but financial details aren’t public. Staci Brinkman is the founder and CEO of Sips By, which was started in 2016. Before that, according to LinkedIn, Brinkman spent more than six years as a consultant to startups where she gained experience in strategic development, fundraising, marketing, product management and business development for national startup brands.
