CoLab:
What is It?
Jackie Haney is the Program Manager & Capability Lead for SnackFutures – Mondelēz International’s innovation and venture hub, which launched in 2018 as part of the global snack leader’s growth agenda. Jackie led the development and launch of SnackFutures’s start-up engagement program, CoLab, designed to support early-stage well-being brands and identify potential investment opportunities. CoLab has once again teamed up with Startup CPG to find brands for the next session.
SnackFutures is the Mondelēz International innovation and venture hub, deliberately designed to push the boundaries in snacking by capitalizing on consumer trends and emerging growth opportunities in well-being snacks around the world. The SnackFutures mission is to create well-being snacks that are good for people, kind to the planet and deliciously fun.
CoLab was designed to be a collaborative effort between entrepreneurs and the Mondelēz International ecosystem to drive mutual growth. SnackFutures provides the participating startups with tools, technologies and access to networks and industry expertise, while gaining insights, capabilities, and prospective investment opportunities.
The CoLab cohort will participate in a 12-week program is customized based each startup’s business challenges and priorities with a key emphasis on hands-on interaction, individual attention, mentorship and workshops. The curriculum will be a combination of virtual sessions and in-person activities. In addition to the in-depth experience, participants will also receive a $20,000 grant. WATCH this video to for more details on the program.
Apply Now for 2022
Applications for the CoLab 2023 program are open now through December at www.snackfutures.com, and the program begins in March of 2023. To apply, start-ups must be based in the U.S., generating at least $1,000,000 in revenue, have high growth potential, align with the Mondelēz International innovation priorities and can benefit from working with the company. The third year of our CoLab startup engagement program will focus specifically on deliciously disruptive brands – emerging brands that are creating delicious snacks by doing something disruptive. These future-forward brands will be the movers and shakers in snacking –brands that are grab retailer attention and keep consumers coming back for more!
Hear What Class of 2022 Learned
“CoLab has opened my eyes. We are putting in place foundations for the business that are built to scale, instead of making so many classic start-up mistakes that would later need to be corrected. From accounting, to in-store activations, GoNanas is on a MUCH better track.” – Annie Slabotsky, GoNanas
“The support, encouragement, and business acumen of the CoLab team have helped me navigate both Snackfutures and the greater Mondelez opportunity. As a brand, we have been able to make demonstrable progress in just a few short months since being selected as part of CoLab 2022. The learnings from being a part of Snackfutures, I am convinced, have dramatically shifted the trajectory of Nunbelievable’s business potential.” – Bryan Janeczko, Nunbelievable
“As outsiders to the CPG space prior to founding Oat Haus, CoLab has given us the insider knowledge, access & connections to take our business and careers to the next level. Through the program’s foundational curriculum of curated presentations by subject matter experts, we’ve gotten an overarching understanding of all aspects of starting/scaling any CPG business. On top of the curriculum, we’ve gotten to dive deep with the foremost industry experts within Mondelez to solve our most pressing startup challenges (from manufacturing to brand positioning to strategic planning & more) and been able to leverage insights typically inaccessible to brands of our size.” – Ali Bonar, Eric Katz, and Ari Schraer, Oat Haus
“We didn’t realize how much access [to resources and experts] we would actually get. Anything from supply chain to compliance all the way to packaging, CoLab and Mondelēz International had all those resources, which we never would’ve had before.” – Michael Pan, Pan’s
WATCH more perspectives from the class of 2022!
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