26 Sep 2024 Foodbev companies featuring in TIME’s Most Influential Companies List 2024
Whose making waves in the foodbev world, enough to feature on this prestigious list?
The TIME 100 Most Influential Companies list recognises the organisations that are making extraordinary impact around the globe.
Curated by a network of TIME editors and correspondents, the annual list recognises organisations big and small, across multiple sectors. Here are the companies of foodbev interest:
Banza – A legume coup
Banza’s obsession with chickpea protein started in the pasta aisle 10 years ago. (Banza has 50% more protein and three times as much fibre as traditional pasta.) As the company rose to become the fifth biggest pasta brand in the US, ranking only behind old-guard refined grain pasta makers, it widened its focus.
Today Banza’s chickpea-based mac and cheese, rice, frozen pizza, and — as of September — frozen waffles are for sale in over 30,000 stores around the US including Walmart, Whole Foods, and Costco. The company’s national product distribution rose 20% in 2023, as bean- and legume-inspired “alternative pasta” products go mainstream.
Banza has raised roughly $30-million since its inception in 2014 and is now eyeing international markets. “If our pizza tastes like a classic frozen pie, or if we offer the same pasta shapes that traditional pasta brands do, we’re making it easier for people to choose a more nutritious option,” says CEO and co-founder Brian Rudolph.
Athletic Brewing Company – Bottoms up
Non-alcoholic (NA) beer is becoming firmly entrenched in mainstream drinking culture, and Athletic Brewing is a big reason why. But when Bill Shufelt launched the company back in 2017, NA naysayers were everywhere.
“We’ve been hearing ‘That will never work’ since before we launched,” he says.
Undeterred, Shufelt and co-founder John Walker built a product, branding, and marketing plan designed “to create a movement rather than simply put a single SKU on the shelf.”
Athletic’s lineup of IPAs, lagers, and stouts are certainly moving off shelves. With NA beer sales growth far outpacing the overall beer market last year, Athletic has become the top-selling NA beer in the US.
Since 2022, it has nearly doubled its NA market share, passing high-profile products Heineken 0.0 and Bud Zero along the way. The company now brews the top-selling beer at Whole Foods, outpacing alcoholic suds. Not even the sky’s a limit. In 2023, JetBlue chose Athletic to be the first NA beer ever sold in-flight by a US airline.
Stanley – More than just cups
In a few short years, Stanley cups have become this decade’s must-have hydration accessory.
The 40-oz (1 180ml) stainless-steel, double-insulated Quencher, with a handle and straw for easy drinking, comes in dozens of colours to suit any mood or outfit.
But while TikTok influencers and savvy marketing powered the viral phenomenon, inspiring Saturday Night Live jokes about Stanley fanatics, Stanley’s story is more than a century in the making.
The company invented the stainless-steel-bottle category when it was founded in 1913. Fast forward to 2023, and sales reached around $750-million after doubling for three consecutive years.
“Stanley has tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, moving from a functional outdoor brand to a lifestyle brand,” global president Matt Navarro says.
Olipop – Bubbly disruption
All the sugar in soda has a bad rep, and Americans want more beverage choices.
Six years after its founding, Olipop — which makes lower-calorie sodas containing fibre, prebiotics, and just 2 to 5 grams of sugar per can to Coke’s 39 — is leading the market of healthier alternative sodas in more than 20 000 stores across the US.
With 16 flavours including cherry vanilla, banana cream, and “vintage cola” racking up more than $200-million in sales and plenty of social media buzz in 2023, Olipop has pulled in investors like Mindy Kaling and the Jonas Brothers, and even former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi.
In fact, PepsiCo and its competitor, Coca-Cola, have both expressed interest in Olipop, co-founder and CEO Ben Goodwin has said. As sales of traditional sodas keep falling, he’s not interested in being acquired. “Right now, my focus is on blowing business through the roof,” Goodwin told CNBC.
With expansion and a new Barbie collab flavour (peaches & cream), sales are reportedly on track to reach $400-million this year.
Burn Manufacturing – Cleaner cooking
Around 850 million people throughout Africa use wood or charcoal for cooking, damaging their health and the environment.
At a summit in Paris in May, leaders from Togo, Tanzania and Sierra Leone backed a $2-billion pledge to increase clean cooking in their countries and across Africa. The execution, however, won’t be easy.
Burn is making an ambitious bid to fight deforestation and reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses and health-damaging soot with one simple solution: making affordable electric cook stoves.
To date the Kenya-based company has sold over 4.5 million stoves, improving the health of millions of households across Africa.
Last year, Burn launched Africa’s first carbon credit futures based on emissions reductions related to the use of efficient cook stoves. The company, through its Ghana-based e-cooking project, sold 10 000 forward contracts that cost $25 each, along with 50 000 call options that buyers can act on at a fixed price for seven years.
Each carbon credit represents a ton of carbon dioxide or its equivalent, either removed from the atmosphere or prevented from entering it in the first place.
FarmboxRx – Fresh food as medicine
Sometimes the most powerful ideas are the simplest.
Fourteen years ago, Ashley Tyrner was pregnant and living off food stamps in a food desert in Arizona, a half hour drive from the nearest grocery store — and she didn’t have a car.
That experience inspired her to start a fresh food delivery service, on a subscription model, targeting food deserts. But the boxes remained unaffordable for some, so in 2019, Tyrner launched FarmboxRx after working with Medicaid and Medicare (and commercial plans in 2025) to get the groceries covered.
The insurers pay for the boxes and in return, alongside the food, FarmboxRx includes literature tailored to the members’ health needs, such as information about benefits provided by their plans that members might not otherwise be aware of — like transportation to get mammogram screenings.
It’s a win-win: health plans use the boxes as a perk to increase enrollment and earn higher quality ratings, and recipients are able to dig into more nutritious meals come dinner time. In 2023, the company delivered fresh food to nearly 500,000 people across the US.
World Central Kitchen – Feeding hope
World Central Kitchen (WCK), the hunger-fighting nonprofit founded by celebrity chef José Andrés in 2010, faced its most harrowing moment on April 1: seven of its aid workers, including American, Canadian, British, Australian, Polish, and Palestinian team members, were killed by an Israeli Defense Forces strike in Gaza, where the organisation and its partners have served more than 46 million meals since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct 7, 2023.
Amid the threat of famine, WCK worked to open a maritime corridor to the enclave, and partnered with the United Arab Emirates and Spanish NGO Open Arms to deliver several hundred tons of humanitarian aid. Its March boat was the first to reach the Gaza port in nearly two decades, and the organization says it’s responsible for about 60% of all NGO-provided humanitarian aid to the war-torn region.
The April incident sparked international condemnation from President Joe Biden and other world leaders. “I am outraged and heartbroken,” Biden said in a statement. Dignitaries from more than 30 countries attended a memorial service honoring the WCK victims in Washington, DC. on April 25. Four days later, WCK resumed operations in Gaza.
It also continues to operate in another conflict zone, Ukraine, where WCK has served more than 260 million meals since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022. “We see time and time again,” says CEO Erin Gore, “that the best of humanity shows up in the worst of times.”
Read the full list here: Time