Endless Food Co: Maximillian Bogenmann shares how to get funded in 2025

Investment Climate Podcast: Fundraising Playbooks From Food Tech CEOs and VCs

In this podcast series, Alex Shandrovsky interviews investors about benchmarks for funding Alt Proteins in 2024 and uncovers the investment playbooks of successful Climate Tech CEOs and Leading VCs.

Podcast Host Alex Shandrovksy is a strategic advisor to numerous global food tech accelerators and companies, including alternative proteins and cellular agriculture leaders. His focus is on investor relations and post-raise scale for agrifood tech companies. This podcast is syndicated through our media partners; Foodtech Weekly and Vegconomist.

Episode 14: Endless Food Co: Maximillian Bogenmann shares how to get funded in 2025

In this episode, Alex talked to Maximillian, CEO & Co-Founder at endless food co., which safeguard the future of chocolate while tapping into the flavor and value potential of overlooked resources. In this conversation, Max shares insights into the journey of launching an alternative chocolate company. He talks about how they built relationships with investors through genuine outreach and advisory support, despite lacking experience in food scaling and B2B sales. Max also touches on leveraging the hospitality network to validate their product and the importance of having advocates and early partners to support their growth. The talk also dives into strategic decisions like B2B vs. B2C models and future partnerships with major retailers like 7-Eleven.

Now, stay tuned as Max takes us through the full story of how Endless Food Co. is shaking up the chocolate world with sustainability at the core.

Key Facts Endless Food Co:

Goal: To future-proof the existing chocolate industry.
Recently raised pre-seed of €1 million led by Nordic FoodTech.

Alex’s Top Findings:

Overcoming Objections through Self-awareness and Support. Address lack of experience by surrounding yourself with trusted advisors and demonstrating the ability to learn and adapt. "I was able to interact with some of these people who offer their expertise. It is a long, slow process of really developing and fostering relationships with people, because I think at the end of the day, what we realize is that if you're really genuine with people and you are seeking help, most people are generally willing to offer you their own experience or advice from their own philosophy." Max noted.
Leveraging Genuine Interactions for Goodwill. Authenticity and kindness can help establish meaningful connections without significant monetary investment. As Emile shared, " I think we were able to get a lot of goodwill out of people because I think we were quite genuine in what we were trying to achieve, what we didn't know. I think that being hospitality professionals we were pretty good at sort of helping people with meals and a nice bottle of wine here and there."
Partnership with 7-eleven. The partnership with 7-Eleven developed slowly, through a B2B approach, rather than a direct consumer-facing product. " I think we've always envisioned being a B2B product. ... we met the procurement manager ... and it took months before anything sort of happened. 7 Eleven has always, or at least in the recent time, been sort of pretty strong with their innovation front ... wanting to sort of push the boundary in certain areas and also be first in certain markets. 7 Eleven came down and said, “we'd really love to make these cookies.” with a one to one swap with THICC, which is our product."