Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are highlighting nine startups from nine categories across the innovation space. We chose these firms based on their ability to fundamentally change the game in their respective fields, grow quickly and durably and develop useful products to solve compelling problems. Here's the honoree in the sustainability category.
Planet FWD was not content with simply being a sustainable consumer goods company. It wanted to help other brands be more environmentally friendly.
The San Francisco startup, which began with a flagship line of sustainably produced crackers under the Moonshot Snacks brand, has gone on to develop software to help other businesses assess and, hopefully, reduce the carbon footprint of their supply chains and operations.
Julia Collins founded the company in 2019 after building a business development career in the restaurant industry.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Collins spent nearly two decades on the East Coast. At Harvard, she studied biomedical engineering and government. Eventually, she moved back to the Bay Area to attend Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, but it was her time living in New York City that sparked an interest in the food industry.
She spent some time working for Danny Meyers’ Union Square Hospitality Group during Shake Shack’s early days and then moved onto other restaurant projects, including Harlem’s Cecil Steakhouse, which Esquire magazine named best new restaurant in 2014, during her tenure there.
Collins wasn’t satisfied, though, and decided to pursue a bigger mission.
“I really wanted to move back to the Bay Area to participate in the incredible growth that I saw happening in the food tech scene to think about how we could use technology to create scalable solutions to reimagine our food systems,” Collins said.
In 2015, she co-founded Zume, a roboticized pizza making delivery service based in Mountain View. The company was valued at $2.25 billion in 2018 after it raised $375 million in a round led by Soft Bank, making her the first Black female founder of a billion-dollar startup. A couple of years later, Zume served its last pie in 2020, saying it was cutting hundreds of jobs and pivoting to sustainable food packaging.
The year before, though, Collins founded another company, Planet FWD, and launched a line of sustainably produced crackers under the Moonshot Snacks brand. Moonshot is sold online and in 3,200 stores nationally. Collins is thinking about expanding into new product lines like pretzels, chips and cookies.
She started the company after becoming a mom.
“I was rethinking my relationship to food and really wanting to do my part to stand up for the planet for my new baby. I thought that the best thing I could do was create a planet friendly snack brand, which we did,” Collins said, “but it was really, really difficult in many ways… We wanted to understand our carbon footprint. That was really hard. We wanted to understand our company level footprint. That was really hard. We wanted to figure out how to reduce our footprint. Hard. How to source really high-quality carbon offsets. Hard. How to become carbon neutral? Again, hard.”
So she created the software that she wished she had, and now makes it available to other companies. The company has raised nearly $17 million since 2019 and has 50 customers on the software side of the business. Collins wants to increase its staff by more than 60% this year to 40 people.
Planet FWD taps into various sources of data to continuously monitor and assess the carbon impact of a business’ operations and supply chain. It can generate automated reports in days, cutting down on months of manual consulting work, Collins said.
“What we do with the software is help those companies on a path towards decarbonization. Really helping these companies understand their carbon footprint and other environmental aspects like water usage and land usage,” Collins said. “We help these companies to reduce their impact or improve their impact, and we also help them get on a path to net zero or carbon neutral.”
Planet FWD
- Location: San Francisco
- Industries: Consumer packaged goods, climate change and sustainability
- Founder: Julia Collins
- Founded: 2019
- Funding: $17M
- Major investors: BBG Ventures, Cleo Capital and Precursor Ventures
- Why they were chosen: While Planet FWD started with a line of consumer packaged goods, the company’s mission moves beyond asking individual consumers to shoulder the burden of mitigating climate change and shifts the brunt of the responsibility to brands and industry.
