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Milk has quite the journey from the farm to your cereal bowl, and with the help of new funding, one (aptly named) company is hoping to make it as smooth as possible.
Milk Moovement, a cloud-based dairy supply-chain software platform, today announced it secured $20 million in Series A funding, led by VMG Catalyst.
- The company closed a $3.1 million seed round in April 2021.
CEO and co-founder Robert Forsythe told Retail Brew the company is working to streamline the “bare bones” dairy-supply chain, where stakeholders across farming, trucking, lab testing, and processing plants each use their own systems (which, in some cases, is “pen and paper”).
“No one can actually really agree on how much milk is in transit at any given time, or what’s the value of that milk, or how many trucks are on the way to one plant because everyone’s using a different software,” Forsythe said.
- With experience in gas and oil supply chain, he teamed up with Milk Moovement’s co-founder and chief product officer, Jon King, previously a technical support analyst for a Canadian dairy co-op, to start the company in 2018.
Moo-ving forward: Milk Moovement offers tools from route tracking and quality monitoring to producer payment. It currently works with 2,500 dairy farms, like United Dairymen of Arizona and California Dairies, and manages 30 billion pounds of raw milk—that’s 15% of the US dairy market—annually, it noted in a release. It’s seen its revenue grow 10x over the past year, Forsythe said, but declined to share specific figures.
- The startup will use new funding to add 20+ new employees to its 55-person team, particularly in engineering, Forsythe noted.
- He added he hopes to hit 5,000 dairy farm users and 50 billion pounds of raw milk managed this year.
Spilled milk: The company also aims to limit food waste and profit loss, he said. Milk has about 72 hours to go from cow to a CPG company’s processing plant, so if there’s change in demand or a back-up at a plant, the supply chain can be flexible, Forsythe noted.
“These CPG companies have the data—they know whether Greek yogurt is going to spike in three months,” he said. “But unfortunately, the supply chain isn’t able, at this point, to meet that changing demand quickly. And that’s what we believe we can do.”—EC