Vegan Veterans

For more than 40 years Follow Your Heart has been quietly selling health-conscious foods. Now VCs are backing fast-growing competitors.

- Larissa ZimBeroff

The founders of Follow Your Heart are now in their 70's. Their first product, in the 1970's, was Vegenaise, an eggless mayo. Since then, the company has survived a bitter partnership dispute and the loss of its biggest client, Trader Joe’s. The company owns a 104,000-square feet, solar-powered headquarters and production facility in California and expects $50 million in revenue this year—but its world has changed.

Suddenly, vegan products are hot, and venture-backed competitors have surfaced. The largest, Hampton Creek, has raised $120 million and claims to have 500 products in its pipeline. Sir Kensington has raised $8.5 million and has its own eggless mayo. The competitors have increased awareness of the product category, but they also have the potential to leave Follow Your Heart in the dust. “Hampton Creek has been effective at promoting their products and they have put a lot of money into that,” says Bob Goldberg, co-founder and CEO of Follow Your Heart. “We wanted to grow in a way that we could handle.”

Goldberg was an Indiana University music major who had moved to California at the prompting of his Army buddies, fellow musicians with whom he’d played trumpet at officers’ clubs. Between West Coast gigs he started hanging out at a Canoga Park natural food store endorsed by Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic-medal-winning swimmer and star of Tarzan movies. Goldberg was soon joined in California by Paul Lewin, a college buddy.