A former Groupon exec and a Top Chef contestant are selling cookie dough that's made from chickpeas and sweet potatoes
When I first heard about Hungryroot's desserts made from vegetables, I was skeptical.
But when I opened up a container of Hungryroot's almond chickpea cookie dough and took an apprehensive bite, I was floored. It tasted almost identical to a batch of normal cookie dough I'd whip up in my kitchen - and its main ingredients were vegetables.
Founding Hungryroot
In 2012, Ben McKean sold his restaurant technology company, Savored, to Groupon.
Savored let customers get discounts on meals at high-end restaurants by going on off nights, or get a last-minute table on the weekend for a premium.
After the acquisition, McKean says he realized that Savored provided "a great outcome but it lacked the real deep emotional customer response."
There was one particular conversation he had that made him realize the importance of food as an emotional opportunity.
"I was sitting down with this woman, she must have been in her 80s," he told Business Insider earlier this year. "She was running a restaurant in the West Village. She was teary eyed, telling me how Savored had kept her restaurant in business, and how her restaurant was the last passion of her life."
McKean was then committed to finding "a product that has that emotional reaction deep in the essence of the product. I don't think you can get that more than you can in food," he says.
Hungryroot launched earlier this year, shipping meals to people who want prepared meals. Hungryroot uses vegetables you know and probably already eat, but puts them in foods you'd never associate vegetables being used in - things like pasta and risotto. When the company launched, it sold veggie noodle-based meals - things like carrot noodles with sriracha peanut sauce and turnip noodles with walnut pesto.
Since then, Hungryroot has expanded to new food categories. Its dessert offerings include a sweet potato cacao mousse, coconut carrot cake bites, and almond chickpea-based chocolate chip cookie dough, which you can eat raw or cooked. Its sides include cauliflower couscous, quinoa falafel, and root risotto with a thyme apple butter. And McKean says there's more new products on the way.
"Ever since we launched the new products, business has completely taken off. We have to continue to launch new products," McKean says.
There's also another reason why the new products helped Hungryroot. To qualify for free shipping on Hungryroot's site, you need to spend $40. In the past, you'd have to buy four noodle meals to meet that minimum, which can be overwhelming. Now you can buy a variety of foods and round out options for the week far more easily.
Besides ordering from Hungryroot's website, users can also order Hungryroot's offerings via AmazonFresh and FreshDirect.
Along with his cofounders - one of whom competed on Top Chef Masters a couple years ago - McKean wants to provide prepared, healthy, delicious meals to customers. In May, Hungryroot raised $2 million in funding from Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, and KarpReilly to make that happen.
When it launched, Hungryroot shipped its meals only to customers east of the Mississippi. Now, the startup has two production facilities - one in Queens, New York, and another in California - and ships nationwide. In total, Hungryroot has 35 employees working on the production side, and five on the corporate side of the company.
Instead of competing with companies like Blue Apron or Seamless, which respectively tackle the grocery and restaurant delivery markets, McKean says he's more interested in taking on the packaged food segment - the frozen meals you see in your grocery store, for example.
Hunryroot uses a technology called "modified atmosphere packaging" to extend its food's shelf life to 14 days. "We're able to offer a fresh option in a category that's essentially defined by frozen options sold in grocery stores," McKean told us earlier this year.
"Convenience food is the category we're trying to disrupt. The premise is quick and easy to cook, ready to eat, and shelf-stable. It's canned soup, chemically preserved foods," McKean says. "Why is convenience food such crap? If you manufacture on day zero, your customer buys on day 14 on average. You can't do a fresh option. We want to be the first fresh, all-natural convenience food option. It's crazy that that doesn't exist."
McKean is right - there aren't many companies doing what Hungryroot wants to do. The most comparable company to Hungryroot may be Hampton Creek, the Khosla-backed, eggless food product startup that came under fire earlier this year when a Business Insider investigation revealed that the company used shoddy science, or ignored science completely, stretched the truth when labeling samples, and created an uncomfortable and unsafe work environment, partly in an effort to meet production deadlines. Prepared foods are ripe for disruption.
A better cookie dough
When you open a container of Hungryroot's cookie dough, it looks pretty much like any other cookie dough you've bought in a store before, or made yourself.The cookie dough itself is a sweet batter dotted with chocolate chips. Eaten raw out of the container, you could easily confuse it for a less-healthy cookie dough batter.
But its ingredients include all-vegan, largely plant-based ingredients: chickpeas, sweet potato, almond butter, sesame tahini, maple syrup, organic cane sugar, vanilla extract, baking powder, baking soda, sea salt, and vegan chocolate chips.
When cooked, the cookies look like normal chocolate chip cookies. They taste a little gooier and softer, and it's clear that they're not exactly your grandma's chocolate chip cookies, but they are convincing in both taste and appearance.
McKean got his ideas for his desserts from vegan restaurants and vegan recipes online - the chickpea cookie dough recipe came from a vegan recipe he found online. "Everything we're selling exists somewhere. We haven't really invented all this crazy stuff," he told Business Insider.
"We're not trying to be a vegan company. I think what's important about our food is the taste. I could care less if someone goes and after eating our product, the next day they go and eat a steak," McKean says. "I'm not vegetarian, I'm not vegan. I love the fact that my diet has become 60, 70, maybe 80% vegan. Lots of vegan foods aren't enjoyed by non-vegans - yet they're incredibly delicious."