The company sells everything from plant-based protein products to collagen builders and boosters. Although other companies offer vegan supplements, few offer a full line of options that are completely without animal material.
According to Vigeant, about 6% of the population is vegan and his company was one of the first to meet the needs of this growing population. He estimates that 25% to 30% of people who walk into stores like Sprouts, Natural Grocers or natural products stores are interested in the vegan category.
“We have really leaned into being very innovative,” Vigeant said. “Now that’s a really broad term that can mean a lot different things to different people. But if you look at the [vegan] product launches we put out there, we’ve come up with a lot of what I’ll call firsts or onlys.”
Vigeant drew on his previous business experience in the private label arena to inform PlantFusion’s success. In the 1990s, he founded Reliance Private Label Supplements, which he eventually partnered with, then bought back the PlantFusion brand. Prior to the private equity investment, Vigeant and his team grew the company from $1 million to $50 million in sales. He remains an investor in Reliance as it recently changed ownership again.
In this interview with NutraIngredients-USA, Vigeant discusses the lessons learned from these two ventures which have helped launch them into top-performing firms.
NutraIngredients-USA: How do you remain a unique company when there are over 100,000 supplements on the market?
Phil Vigeant: There are really a couple of different ways to do it. One example is that we rolled out a product called Inspire for Women. If you go into Amazon or google protein for women, you will have a ton of stuff come up. It’s not that they’re bad for women, but they don’t have any nutrients or ingredients in them that were specifically designed for women. When it comes to protein, you’ll see a fairly ubiquitous wall of protein at the store whether it’s whey or plant-based. You won’t really see much targeted for you as a woman.
Another example could be our recent product launch in the magnesium category. Magnesium is a massive category, it’s not so unique, but we couldn’t find an organic source but we were able to find a premium ‘whole food’ source, which is what we created from seawater magnesium.
NIU: Was it advantageous to have established a private label company first and then transition into creating PlantFusion?
PV: It was a total double-edged sword. The benefit was that we already had the manufacturing, we had all the packaging—all those things are huge. We had all the ability to make the product: the flavor testing, the samples, a relationship with suppliers, etc., so the development of the product was easier than starting from scratch.
The second part that made it a lot easier is that we already had sales reps on the road calling the natural products stores. They were selling private label but like in any sales, there was a relationship that we were able to leverage immediately when that rep walked into the stores.
We also had the advantage of a tremendous amount of industry knowledge around where trends are going, and that was hugely advantageous. The thing we didn’t have, and I didn’t have, was any experience of growing a brand which has its own set of skills and expertise. Very candidly, I was very blind to it and had to learn a lot and took a lot of hard lessons in that process.
NIU: Are you comfortable talking about what some of those mistakes were?
PV: When you’re selling private label, you’re relying on companies to promote their own label. It’s a much simpler transaction, but when you’re selling a brand, it’s one thing to get on the [retail] shelf. It’s another thing to know what you need to do to help that retailer to get the product off the shelf and into the consumer’s hands. So there has been a lot of learning for me in understanding best practices to do that.
NIU: What are some of the financial benchmarks companies should be aware of?
PV: As we grew Reliance, we had what some entrepreneurs call inflection points. I would say there’s an inflection point for a lot of businesses in the manufacturing side. In that $15 to $20 million range, we realize that you can’t continue to scale without a little bit more infrastructure in the business systems, processes, procedures, what I’ll call broadly enterprise practices that are necessary for scale because as an entrepreneur or as an owner you cannot have your hands in as many different things. You need to start really pushing decision making down at a larger scale.
Another challenge or inflection point is at the $35 to $40 million level. In some situations, the talent you have have difficulty in adjusting to the changes needed to make to continue growth. They just may not be ready for that next step. Very often the situation can be the lack of or the wrong internal processes that you gave them, so you have to make hard decisions about whether the great challenges are people or processes. There are definitely hurdles at that level.
NIU: What financial advice would you give to somebody who wants to enter the nutraceutical space? What are some basic tenants?
PV: One of the main things is try to establish proof of concept, whether it’s for a person’s product, their brand positioning, whatever it may be. Stay super focused in a very niche group. If you’re going to go online, go online in a very targeted way. So essentially provide proof of concept first before you try to scale the business in a large way, because there’s a lot of pain just in doing that. It sounds so simple, but it’s not.
Too often, there’s a rush to raise capital and spend it and then owners and founders dilute their equity. If you only own 5% or 10% of something because you’ve diluted it then it isn’t worth a lot. I advise people to live beneath their means, tap into resources from friends and family, and seek out incubator programs to preserve capital because I think someone would rather invest in a business that you own the majority of.
