PETERBOROUGH – A funny and crazy thing happened when Josh Velasquez and Adam Hamilton tried to open a restaurant in Keene. Instead, they became the first 100% plant-based cheese maker in New England.
Clean Simple Foods Inc.’s three cheeses and three spreads under the Nuttin’ Ordinary brand are “lactose-intolerance-friendly, vegan-friendly, planet-friendly and tastebud-friendly,” according to the company. They’re available at Market Basket and Whole Foods stores, as well as many independent grocery stores in upstate New York.
The cheese and spread — the company also makes all-natural ravioli — contain no oil, thickeners or soy, and are the result of four years of self-taught fermentation experiments in the basement of Velasquez’s parents’ home in Harrisville.
Velasquez and Hamilton are in fundraising mode, trying to attract $750,000 worth of investment to better market their product. Both are lactose intolerant — about a third of the U.S. population is lactose intolerant, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health.
The men, who met recently in Peterborough, Keene and Littleton, sat down for interviews as of Dec. 12 at their company’s 8,000-square-foot manufacturing and warehouse space in Vose, raising $180,000 from those efforts Farm Business center.
Velasquez, 41, said he grew up a vegetarian for health reasons. The New York City native moved his family to New Hampshire when he was a child. After graduating from a faith-based high school, Velázquez went to Arizona, but got homesick and returned to the Granite State.
He and Hamilton, 39, of Charlestown, Rhode Island, first met in 2010. Both want to promote a balanced diet and avoid highly processed foods.
“We’re on the same page,” Velázquez said.
“Funk” First Batch
The pair set out to open a plant-based restaurant, but when one of the things they planned to serve at the restaurant — a cashew-based cheese developed by Velázquez — took off in its own right, They shelved the plan.
Velasquez said the first batch of cheeses “had a funky cheesy flavor” and were a bit “rough” but tasty.
Even when partners improve the consistency of the cheese, they sell it locally, including at the Monadnock Food Cooperative, where they give away free samples and take note of customer feedback.
The more they refined their cashew cheese, the more they believed that “what’s missing in the market is quality plant-based cheese,” Velasquez said.
To make this cheese, Velasquez and Hamilton looked for dairy cheeses, which get their flavor, texture, and taste due to the fermentation of lactose in milk.
“Fermentation is hard,” says Velasquez, and to make plant-based cheese, he and Hamilton turned to nuts, which contain a lot of fat that gives cheese a creamy feel, as well as sugars that are needed for fermentation.
Many nuts can be fermented, including almonds and macadamias, but the high price of these varieties is one of the reasons Velasquez and Hamilton chose cashews, which Velasquez admits are “still very expensive”. He declined to say how much he would have to pay to buy the plants from South African growers.
Once the cashews arrive at the Nuttin’ Ordinary factory, they are ground and fermented using a proprietary but unpatented process that Velasquez devised years ago in a laboratory he built in his home, before being packaged and shipped to retailers.
The cheeses and spreads are priced between $6.50 and $7.99 and have a refrigerated shelf life of 130 days.
start-up phase
Hamilton, a former manager of the Peterborough branch of People’s United Bank (now M&T Bank), said that while there were five other companies trying to ferment the nut, Nuttin’ Ordinary was the only one able to ferment cashews on a large scale.
The partners plan to change the name of Nuttin’ Ordinary to something more geographically descriptive.
Sales have risen from 7,000 units in 2014 to 125,000 in 2020, Velasquez said. The startup is not yet profitable.
“We’re being transparent with potential investors,” Hamilton said, adding that the company has accomplished two important things: “We’ve proven there’s a market for our product, and we’ve built our manufacturing.”
Production and sales have slowed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it could have been worse if the company followed the food industry’s conventional wisdom, Hamilton said.
The wisdom, as often promoted on the TV show Shark Tank, is that once small food producers get big, they need to hire contract processors to keep growing.
“If we had OEMs during COVID, we wouldn’t be in business,” Hamilton said, explaining that not only supply chain issues would come into play, but also the simple math of OEMs, which will continue to compete with their biggest counterparts. customers, but dump or put newer, smaller customers at the end of the line.
Plus, Hamilton says, “we’ll give our recipes to contract processors,” and there aren’t many non-disclosure agreements that will prevent the cashew cheese and spread recipes from eventually being made public.
For these reasons, “we had to invest in plant and equipment,” he said.
Profit margins at Nuttin’ Ordinary — the difference between what it costs the company to produce cheese and spreads and what they sell them for — are “sluggish,” Hamilton admits, but “we have the potential to hit 70 percent.”
“We’re ready to grow,” Velasquez said, and are looking for “angels” to supplement the various funds, including their own and their families’ funds as well as loans and grants, that have allowed Nuttin’ Ordinary to reach its goal and that’s now .
The company is counting on providing a market for people who love cheese but can’t eat dairy or prefer a vegetarian diet.
“We’re finding that more and more Americans are looking for alternatives. They just need to taste good,” he said.
