“How many of you all like cheese, with a show of hands?” startup founder Matthew Mullens asked on stage Thursday night, eliciting cheers.
“But does cheese like you back?” asked Neharika Korati, creative director.
That’s how the Empasta team kicked off its pitch, the first of the night, at Thursday’s University at Buffalo Henry A. Panasci Jr. Technology Entrepreneurship Competition. The business — which produces a plant-based, cheese-like sauce by using whole food ingredients to deliver a product inclusive to most diets — later that night was named winner of the 2024 contest.
The startup got $25,000 in seed funding, plus in-kind awards valued at over $40,000 for website development and creative agency services from ThreeSixty; business counseling from Atlas Alignment Growth Partners; intellectual property legal services from Stake; engineering design and prototyping services from Innosek; accounting services from Lumsden & McCormick LLP; legal services from Colligan Law LLP; and co-working space courtesy of the UB Office of Business and Entrepreneur Partnerships.
“The fact that we were able to have a product to show the judges, not only show but have them try it, I think gave us the competitive edge,” said Mullens, who started Empasta in 2019. “They were able to taste the tastiness that we were pitching to them.”
The vegan cheese market is valued at about $2.4 billion and is estimated to grow to around $7 billion by 2030, according to the startup’s pitch presentation.
Meanwhile, only about one out of every five U.S. consumers has tried plant-based cheese, and of those who have tried it, less than half of them liked it.
“There’s a lot of potential upsides as consumers look for plant-based food,” Mullens said from the stage.
Empasta’s vegan cheese sauce base is made from potatoes and carrots. The product is dairy free, nut free, soy free and gluten free and comes in three flavors: spicy, regular and smoked.
The business has had over 260 unique customers totaling more than 500 jars of sauce sold and has generated around $10,000 in revenue.
Future product expansions could include items like chips, hard cheeses, more flavor options and plant-based milk.
Both Mullens and Korati are first-year MBA candidates at UB.
With the Panasci prize money, they will move production from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Buffalo, utilizing the Massachusetts Avenue Project, a nonprofit urban farm on Buffalo’s West Side, to produce their product.
The team also aims to use the funds for hiring a part-time production chef to fill orders, boost marketing and digital ads and attend more trade shows and industry conferences to get its product in front of potential customers.
“(Empasta) really just spurred out of the passion for a sustainable future,” Mullens said.
