Lemon Perfect just closed a $31 million Series A round, and its list of investors includes one very prominent figure: Beyoncé. The company will use the funds to compete in the beverage market, scale up, and increase sales. Yanni Hufnagel, Founder & CEO of Lemon Perfect, joins Closing Bell to discuss the company's product lineup, how Beyoncé got involved with the company, revenue outlook, and more.

Closing Bell

Lemon Perfect's Freshly Squeezed Funding Round Includes Beyoncé as Backer

our next guest is making lemonade with making lemons with lemonade and if that sounds backwards it'll make sense very soon. Just stick with me here, beverage company, Lemon Perfect, raising $31 million in a series a round with the help of one major star and investor, you may have heard of her. Beyonce. Lemon Perfect is competing in the popular health beverage market and is planning to scale rapidly with the help of fresh funding joining us now, Yani Hoofnagle founder and ceo of Lemon Perfect johnny, welcome to the show. Tell us more about Lemon Perfect, what's the recipe and why? The focus on lemons here? Well, thank you so much for having me. First off exciting day for us yesterday to announce our series a financing a $31 million dollar rounds with participation from just a wonderful group of consumer products funds and and certainly as has been well documented an investment from Beyonce as well. Can we talk more about Beyonce? I'm gonna get back to everything else, but how did you get her as an investor? You know, I can't get into the exact details around how the Beyonce relationship came to be. What I, what I can say is that she is an authentic fan of the brand and that this relationship happened very organically at the outset. Fair enough. Alright, tell us more about the series around what will you use the new funds for and congratulations by the way. Well, thank you so much, you know, beverages, an incredibly competitive landscape and so for us uh you know, we talk about the need for, for capital all the time around all of our stakeholders and you know, for for, for for us this round will allow us to continue to scale the business and invest uh significantly in our retail programming and field sales execution, which is really where we've been focused to this point. Um, you know, making noise in, in the enhanced water categories or at least has proven to be incredibly challenging for almost every other brand that's tried. Uh you don't have many brands that scale the mountain if you will, but we think that we found a really great sweet spot at the intersection of great, great flavor. That's also good for you in a way that no other brand in the category is done and you know this so well and you answer this question a bit, but there's so much competition in the market, especially as consumers focus on health. What makes lemon perfect stand out more specifically. Yeah, they really are our flavor profile married with our nutritional deck right at the core. Lemon perfect is a super refreshing, great tasting and hydrating flavored lemon water with zero sugar and no artificial sweeteners or flavors. So it's very unique, right? And on top of that were bottled in 100% recycled plastic, which is unique to the category. And I think that's allowed us to to find some some early product market fit that in several retailers across the country now has us as the most productive brand by space in the entire category. So where can consumers find your product johnny? Uh, well, we're scaling the brand nationwide at several retailers were also available on amazon and on our own dot com. Lemon Perfect dot com. You quadrupled revenue, quadrupled revenue last year. That's very impressive. What's your financial outlook for this year? Uh, we're looking to more than double revenue here in, in fiscal year 22. And again, you know, with, with, with each passing day, we bring new customers into the brand and, you know, frankly what we're seeing is, is when a customer or consumer tries the brand, they come back, they come back in a really big way. So our challenge right now is it's just getting bottles in in potential customers hands and, and, you know, and, and, and building building the, the share of stomach story if you will. But uh, we really like where the businesses, We've certainly got a lot of work to do. Um, and um, you know, we look forward to the challenges that lie ahead. Any plans for expansion, You know, look, we think about innovation all the time. Uh, it's hard enough marketing one product. So we think that we have a billion dollar opportunity with just the product that we have, we'll look at different vessel sizes, we'll look at alternative vessels, potentially even aluminum, a multi pack strategy, a variety pack strategy. But what we're really focused on just continuing to build the core business and um and increase the share of stomach story in the category. So many companies are turning to recycled materials for packaging and I want to talk about just that, what do you guys do for packaging? Yeah, we're bottled in 100% recycled plastic um you know, and and for us, um you know, we want to be at the forefront of of um you know, the participation in in call it the world of of just being a really good partner in sustainability, right? And um you know, we have to pay attention to uh increasing supply chain pressures and uh you know, the macro headwinds that that we're seeing in the resin market broadly, um but we're very committed to telling a an authentic sustainability story and and we'll continue to um to put our head down and figure out how we can deliver the most sustainable packaging to the marketplace. Again, Lemon Perfect is bottled in a way that that um you know, to preserve the nutritional deck and the flavor profile does not allow for, for major alternative packages, um um cans for instance, but um you know, we're going to continue to think about how we can be on the cutting edge of just all sustainability initiatives. Well, we hope you come back to discuss further johnny Hoofnagle, Founder and Ceo of Lemon Perfect. And again, congratulations on the funding round