Cooks Venture Bags $10 Million for its Regenerative Agriculture

Cooks Venture will be partnering with Food In Depth (FoodID), which provides a platform that tests for the presence of antibiotics and other adulterants in a comprehensive and near-real-time proprietary process.

FREMONT, CA: Cooks Venture, a NYC-based vertically-integrated food company, secured $10m in Series A round of financing. The round was led by SJF Ventures and Cultivian Sandbox with participation from Larry Schwartz and John Roulac, executive producer of the upcoming documentary on regenerative agriculture, Kiss the Ground. The company had previously raised a $4 million growth equity seed round and secured $12 million in senior secured debt.

Led by founder and CEO Matthew Wadiak, former COO and founder of Blue Apron, Cooks Venture breeds and raises a proprietary slow-growth, heirloom chicken, taking into account the health of the animal and the health of the environment. Headquartered in New York, the company also has operations in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Along with the funding news, Cooks Venture also announced a partnership with Food In Depth (FoodID), an organization founded by Bill Niman that aims to provide transparency and accountability in food by testing for antibiotics and “other adulterants” through a real-time proprietary process. With this FoodID partnership, Cooks Venture claims that it is “now the only company that can independently validate that it never uses antibiotics and provides verified Non-GMO feed to its birds,” according to the press release.

Cooks Venture chickens are available around the country via a number of different online and in-store retail outlets. The company intends to use the funds to grow and commercialize on a national scale as well as strengthen its regenerative crop management program.