Our Investment in allplants
Delicious, plant-based food
allplants have no need to set out a stall of moral principles — the global meat- reducing macro trend is taking care of that. They are simply aligned with fast growing new developing consumer priorities, namely the desire for delicious plant-based food made easy.
Their range of 34 frozen dishes is constantly adapting and developing thanks to highly engaged customers and an ability to develop new products in a matter of weeks, not months. Alongside upcycled cotton insulation liners, drives towards zero waste and crowd-pleasing campaigns such as working with customers to plant an equatorial, cash-crop forest to produce clouds and
cool the planet, allplants are creating a community-centric digital brand. Interestingly, whilst over 50% of their meals are now sold to subscribers, this model was not part of the initial proposition — customers drove the company to offer subscription rather than one-off purchases as they simply loved the product so much.
Photo by Edgar Castrejon
Authentic brand, authentic people
Of course, from an investment point of view, Octopus Ventures is as much
focused on the “who” as the “what”. Through our conversations with the team
we saw many insights into how the company think about people and the co-
founder, JP’s obsession with the people in his team. This ranged from a
comprehensive onboarding plan, considered and extensive performance
management plans and a very structured talent pipeline with some incredible
new hires in flight. In a similar vein, social responsibility and an authentic
brand runs all the way through the business and allplants’ B Corp certification
is also part of this.
Great views
Vegan is one of the leading social movements on Instagram and allplants’
video content has to date 6m organic views. This demographic cares about
direct-to-consumer brands that do things in an authentic way and the principles allplants stand by don’t need to be shouted about explicitly — the products do that for them.
As a team, we’ve moved from healthy scepticism to excitement, with six of us now full-on allplants subscribers, and counting.
