Our mission aligned partnership in bringing nutritious food to the masses

Dear Everytable Community,

As you read in our last post, we closed on $25M in new funding. But what is really special about this isn’t just the money – although $25M is nice! – it’s who led the deal.

In December of last year, I was sitting in my office looking through incoming mail and opened a letter from the Dohmen Company Foundation. The letter said that they were interested in investing in Everytable. Would we be open to a call? I’ve received plenty of incoming queries about investing in Everytable, but it’s usually from a 25-year-old analyst at a venture fund who is spraying and praying to generate deal flow for his boss. This was different. It came directly from the CFO. And what he told me when we finally got on the phone absolutely blew me away.

The Dohmen Company was founded in 1858, 165 years ago, as an apothecary. The business grew greatly and evolved to operating several companies in healthcare, all in pursuit of helping people live healthier lives. No matter what business model they tried, US health kept going in the wrong direction. They ultimately concluded that it was time for a change – what the nation really needed was to prevent disease in the first place. And the way to do that is through food.

The Dohmen Company Foundation recently launched the Dohmen Impact Investment Fund, a powerful tool to help make healthy eating ubiquitous. The Fund invests capital in social enterprises aligned with its values and vision of life without diet-related disease that will yield both a capital and social return on investment.  As Dohmen looked out across the landscape of companies solving the health crisis by bringing healthy food to the masses at affordable prices, they quickly determined that Everytable was leading the pack and doing it successfully. This led to Dohmen leading the round with a $15M investment and joining our Board.

The investment will support and strengthen Everytable’s scale and impact. What truly thrills me about this partnership is the mission alignment. Both Dohmen and Everytable are organizations that are, at their core, about transforming the food system to make healthy food affordable and accessible for all. That is one of the great joys of running a company like Everytable.  Meeting all these people and organizations along the way who join forces and support each other to achieve this great mission is a testament to our shared future vision of a healthier life for all Americans. I’m not only talking about existing investors like Creadev, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, Desert Bloom, and Acumen America. But also, the CDFIs Reinvestment Fund and Community Vision have funded our social equity franchise fund.

I can’t wait for Everytable to go public, which is the next big milestone on our journey to transform the food system, so we can celebrate with all these great partners on the big lift to get us there, which will of course be only one leg on a journey that I estimate will take 40 years until there is an Everytable in every community in the country.

Sam Polk

founder and CEO, Everytable

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