This article is part of a series on Entrepreneurs To Watch in the Food and Beverage Industry. You can read the full series, starting here
When Jeff Richards discovered that he had become lactose-intolerant in his late twenties, he didn’t much care for the available alternatives.
The result: Mooala Bananamilk, the only refrigerated nondairy milk with bananas as a primary ingredient, not a flavoring.
Rolled out in 2016, Mooala is now in about 5,000 stores nationwide, in every state except Alaska. Mooala also markets almond milk and oat milk, but banana milk is its best seller. All products are organic, and all have moderate price points.
Richards was inspired in the same way as many entrepreneurs, especially in food: through personal experience. He cut out dairy from his life for about a year while following a paleo diet. When he tried to go back to dairy foods, he found that they made him sick.
“So that really got me super-interested in the nondairy space,” he says. “My background is in banking, and I’ve dealt a lot in consumer products, and I’ve just always been interested in the category and the market in general.”
When he looked at the nondairy milk market, he found a lot of low-end, commodified almond milk and some upscale stuff, but not much in between.
“The idea was to launch an organic plant-based milk that was not on the low end, but also not super-premium, because you can really quickly make a bottle of almond milk that’s seven dollars,” he says. “So we really targeted that middle price point, that $4.99 price point. No one else was doing that – it was this void in the market.”
Another void was a lack of choice – it was dominated by almond and soy.
“We were thinking, you’ve got almond milk, you’ve got soy milk, all these low-acid plant-based milks. What else is low-acid that’s not an allergen?” Richards asks. “And that’s how we came up with banana milk.”