Helping Alt-Protein Startups Survive the Winter: Ahimsa’s Consolidation Approach

It’s no secret that the alternative protein startups are struggling these days. A combination of lower revenue, intense competition, and less available venture capital is leading to a contraction in the sector, with countless alt-meat and dairy companies conducting layoffs, declaring bankruptcy, and even folding altogether. 

Enter Ahimsa Companies, a newly formed investment group acquiring promising but distressed plant-based brands. This isn’t charity, though. Ahimsa's belief is that, with their consolidation strategy and pooled resources, these brands that are built on a strong underlying product can become profitable under the Ahimsa umbrella.

As Ahimsa CEO Matt Tullman says in this conversation, pendulums swing, and many of these companies can be brought to profitability, meaning they could ultimately be sold at a much higher price than their valuation during this period in which plant-based products are in the valley.

So far the company has acquired Wicked Foods, Simulate’s Nuggs, Blackbird Pizza, an Ohio plant-based foods manufacturing plant, and more. 

Matt is a man of many talents, as you’ll hear in this episode. In addition to being CEO of Ahimsa Companies, he founded and sold his own education tech company, and is also the co-founder and CEO of Outlier Health, the parent company of supplement company Complement and of No Meat Athlete. He’s both a missionary for plant-based lifestyles and a mercenary seeking to combine his passion for plant-based foods with profit. 

Discussed in this episode

• Ahimsa Companies is looking for plant-based startups to acquire. Here’s an analysis of their strategy and history.

• Interview with Matt in which he describes Ahimsa’s goal by declaring that “we’ve got to step up and try to help these companies survive.”

• Story about Ahimsa’s acquisition of the Plant Plant in Ohio. 

• Both Paul and Matt are interested in AI’s potential to enable human-nonhuman communication, something Noa Weiss discussed on a past episode.

• Matt recommends reading both The Hard Thing about Hard Things and The Surrender Experiment.

• Matt also recommends Paul Graham’s essay, Do Things That Don’t Scale.

More about Matt Tullman

Matt is the co-founder and Group CEO of the Ahimsa Companies – a private equity firm acquiring and operating best-in-class plant-based food and manufacturing companies. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Outlier Health, the parent company of  Complement and No Meat Athlete, which have served nearly 13 million people just in the past three years. He’s also an investor in health/food/bev startups, and a contributor to Inc. Magazine.  Previously Matt founded a ed-tech firm that was ultimately acquired by Stride Education (NYSE: LRN). Matt is most proud of bootstrapping a business that was named to the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in 2021. He has dedicated his career to growing nutrition-first health companies to help catalyze the movement to a plant-based lifestyle for the mainstream consumer.