At a time in which dairy companies feel under pressure to introduce plant-based lines to, supposedly, keep up with a consumer trend, Cosmic Bliss is heading in the opposite direction, adding a full-dairy line to the company’s original vegan ice-cream brand.
The move is the brainchild of Jason Karp, one of the co-founders of the Hu brand of chocolate bars, cookies and crackers – acquired by Mondelez in 2021 – which has been one of the most successful entrepreneurial start-ups of the last decade. Its success was powered by a focus on great taste as well as vegan, gluten-free, organic and paleo credentials.
Karp has set out to build a new business, HumanCo. Its brands include Snow Days, a line of frozen pizza bites, and the recently acquired Against the Grain, a brand of gluten/grain-free pizzas. It has also invested in Monty’s NYC, a line of cashew-based cream-cheese analogs.
In 2020 HumanCo acquired the Coconut Bliss brand, which it renamed Cosmic Bliss. Cosmic Bliss is now launching a full-dairy line to the company’s original vegan ice-cream offerings.
“It’s an important discussion,” Karp told New Nutrition Business. “As a company, we try to provide healthier and more sustainable options for all diets, whether they’re vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian or omnivore. Our philosophical principle is to try to help people eat better regardless of what their values are.”
“Our goal is to build the next-generation, mission-driven holding company that creates brands and products that help people lead healthier lives,” Karp said. To that end, last year HumanCo raised a bridge financing round of $35 million (€32 million) that brought total funding to $50 million (€45 million). Its backers include celebrities such as Scarlett Johansson, the actress, who was named “creative director” of Snow Days, and former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi. HumanCo also co-sponsored creation of a special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) with CAVU Venture Partners that aims to merge with a US health and wellness business and go public.
Karp has navigated this great success after a new diet helped him more than 20 years ago, when in his early twenties he was “diagnosed with several autoimmune diseases that were deemed incurable,” he recalled. Karp was told that one disorder was a degenerative disease that would turn him blind by the age of 30. So, over the next 18 months, Karp said, “I cured myself primarily through food and lifestyle. That very difficult journey changed my perspective on health and wellness and on the modern illnesses that any Americans have.”
While continuing his career on Wall Street – Jason was the founder and CEO of Tourbillon Capital Partners, an investment fund that managed over $4 billion – he immersed himself in understanding functional medicine and health and more than 10 years ago opened a restaurant in New York called Hu Kitchen, with the slogan, “Get back to human.”
Karp explained, “A lot of the modus operandi in starting Hu Kitchen was around creating food with a standard that hadn’t been achieved before in terms of nutritional quality, how ingredients were sourced, and the notion of getting back closer to nature with ingredients, but doing it in a way that was truly nutritious and could be trusted.”
Hu chocolate bars came out of Hu Kitchen, which then developed cookies and crackers – “all much better for you than what was out there,” Karp said. “But we needed to be more brands that had the same philosophy and ethos as Hu but in other categories, and I felt we had the ability to do that.” Karp retired from the hedge-fund business and co-founded HumanCo, while preparing to exit Hu.
HumanCo’s first brand, Snow Days, is in the pizza-snack space in US freezer cases, dominated by traditional brands that, Karp said, are “filled with a lot of unpleasant ingredients that are unequivocally bad for people.” The leading player, for example, General Mills’ Totinos brand, “has got about 70 ingredients, and many aren’t foods,” including “imitation cheese.”
Snow Days, by contrast, has just 14 ingredients: cassava, grass-fed mozzarella, tomatoes, olive oil, grass-fed butter, free-range eggs, apple-cider vinegar, spices, carrot, spinach, onion, apple, sweet potato and bell pepper. “It’s the first organic, grain- and gluten-free pizza bite,” Karp declared. “They have the nutritionals of a meal.”
Developing Snow Days also gave HumanCo a chance to emphasize another of Karp’s principles: the importance of taste. “Taste is everything, because if people don’t want to eat your products, you’re not going to effect change,” he said.
This rationale was behind Karp’s decision to bring dairy into the Coconut Bliss frozen-dessert line, which is based on coconut milk. A dairy-farming family actually started and owned the plant-based brand for about 15 years, Karp said, “and they had values around improved sustainability and recyclable packaging and 100% organic before we got involved.” But none of that had translated into having a traditional, dairy-based ice cream.
While Coconut Bliss had many fans, Karp said that HumanCo “was hearing from many consumers who still eat dairy products that they’d like better options than what was out there,” mostly products of what Karp called “factory farms.” “We wanted to create a better option for these people also, regardless of dietary preferences, and we didn’t want to be saying there’s only one way to do it. So we rebranded to Cosmic Bliss.”
Cosmic Bliss ice cream now is available in a new, premium dairy line made with 100% organic, sustainably sourced, grass-fed milk. It uses all “real” ingredients – no sugar alcohols or artificial sweeteners such as those included in recently successful light ice creams such as Halo Top. It’s also clean-label, Karp noted, and the brand is working with regenerative and organic farms that observe the gold standard of animal welfare. “We felt it was a way to do dairy much better than what was available.”
Cosmic Bliss has debuted in seven flavors: Twisted Cookie Dought, Peanut Butter Blitz, Hazelnut Fudge Crunch, Strawberry Lemon Shortbread, Banana Caramel Flambe, Vanillla Bean Nirvana and Chocolate Euphoria. It’s a super-premium brand, priced at a suggested $8.99 (€8.19), but that price point is in line with the recently inflated prices of mainstream premium brands such as Ben & Jerry’s.
“It’s an extremely delicious, full-fat ice cream,” Karp said, though with lower sugar than other ultra-premium brands. “We’re not going after the keto diet or any other kind of dietary regimen.”
Karp said social media reactions from “some ethical vegans who take issue with doing anything with animals” was critical of the fact that HumanCo was introducing dairy ice cream into a brand that had become their plant-based favorite. “We just needed to clarify with them that we still value and prize plant-based customers but that we’re also providing options for others,” he said.
The Against the Grain brand fits inside HumanCo’s “guard rails in terms of the way farmers created it, the sourcing of ingredients from farms, brand loyalty, and delicious products,” Karp said. As for other brands, he said, “If we can build something better than what’s out there we’ll do that internally, and if there’s something great like Against the Grain, where we can roll it into our family of brands, we’ll do that too.”
