Founder Fundraising Journey: Frozen One, Alan Chen & Conner Mennig

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1:20Having such a differentiated product in a frozen category really set us apart. I think early on we were pitching ourselves and the differentiation of a product that has so much potential rather than last year's sales or rather than the frozen category itself. And I think that really gave us a head start of why the Angel Group and other investors really believe in this. Because 40 grams of protein in ice cream that is low calorie and healthy and good ingredients for you. Like this is bound to go viral. This is a product that's bound to blow off among every retailer in America. And I think that's really what the hump that we really had to get over.

1:51Yes, it's a difficult category, but it is a very unique, very exciting product within the category among protein being on such a hot wave throughout America right now. So I think we had a lot of the right factors that gave us the momentum to get where we are right now. And I think back all the time is those are the same factors why we started the company. Alan and I were just two consumers who wanted a better option of eating protein, of finding something that's actually tasted good, actually craveable. You look forward to eating it. And that kind of all just built its own momentum, the snowball effect.

2:18that where we are.

2:21Hannah Dittman:Hey, everybody, I'm Hannah Dittman, finance and operations host of the Startup CPG podcast. And today I'm joined by Alan Chen and Connor Menig, co-founders of Frozen One for a founder fundraising journey episode. Frozen One is redefining what better for you ice cream can be with a product that delivers 40 grams of protein per pint, only 400 calories, and most importantly, a true ice cream experience. Frustrated by the lack of indulgent high-protein options that actually tasted good, Alan and Connor set out to create a product that bridges the gap between performance and enjoyment. What started with homemade recipes, a ninja creamy, and a vision to reinvent the category has quickly grown into one of the fastest rising brands in frozen food, landing on shelves nationwide at retailers including Target, Wegmans, Central Market, and much more.

3:12Hannah Dittman:In this Founder Fundraising Journey episode, we dive into the story behind Frozen One, how Alan and Connor went from sales careers to building a breakout consumer brand, and what it took to launch and scale in a challenging category with big opportunity in grocery. We also unpack their fundraising journey from early capital to raising institutional funding and the lessons they learned along the way. Alan and Connor share candid insights on moving quickly, validating demand, balancing growth with execution, and what went right and what was a challenge throughout their journey. We discuss the realities of scaling a physical product business, navigating rapid retail expansion, and what founders should know before embarking on their own fundraising journey.

3:53Hannah Dittman:If you're a founder raising capital, scaling a consumer brand, or simply interested in how emerging brands go from idea to national retail shelves, this episode is packed with practical advice and valuable lessons. Do yourself a big favor, grab a pint of Frozen 1 and a spoon and enjoy the perfect ice cream alongside this exciting episode. Enjoy!

4:18Hannah Dittman:Hey everybody, welcome back to the Startup CPG Podcast. This is Hannah and today we're back for an awesome founder fundraising journey episode with Alan Chen and Connor Menig of Frozen 1. Alan and Connor, welcome to the show. And a great having us. Thank you so much. We are super excited to have you guys here today. I'm a huge fan of your brand. For anyone out there that hasn't tried Frozen 1 yet, this is your call to action to do so. I'm sure you'll be inspired after the episode and hearing about all the great, awesome things that Alan and Connor have been up to in their fundraising journey. Before we dive in to the details on the company, I'd love to just get a brief background from each of you of your career, the journey and the path that ultimately led you to Frozen 1 today.

5:04Yeah, Connor here. We actually both grew up in Wisconsin. We met at UW-Madison. I was in business school, marketing, supply chain, came down to Austin, Texas and was in corporate sales roles for a couple of years. Was unfulfilled by that and that's how we are here. Yeah. And this is Alan. So yeah, me and Connor, we met at UW Madison in 2020. I just kind of became best friends right away. I was pre-med at the time. So I was going down the whole medical track and it was not meant to be. And I look back on it. I'm really thankful for that. But actually, all the chemistry class I learned, ice cream is fundamentally like chemistry.

5:41And so it all ended up not being for nothing. But yeah, me and Connor, we both ended up in Austin at different times in like pretty unfulfilling sales jobs that we just were not happy at all. And I was not Connor's been more like into the gym, like back in college. And I was not like terribly into it. And so when I moved to Austin, the end of 2024, everybody here, it's like a whole health and wellness sort of scene. And I think like there's a greater macro shift towards that direction wholly anyways. Yeah, I started doing the whole gym thing. I started eating a bunch of protein. I was and still am trying to hit like 200 grams of protein a day, which sucks for anybody else out there.

6:17Connor can vouch for me.

6:18Hannah Dittman:It's a lot of chicken. It is. There was a day in January of 2025 where me and Connor were at the gym together. So this is like 17 months ago now. And we were just like complaining to each other about like protein bars and protein shakes. And like you said, eating pounds of chicken a day. And we were like, there just has to be a better option here. They're like, there has to be something that's actually high in protein. And like a lot of things say protein on it, but they aren't like actually that high in protein. Like there has to be something actually high in protein that you actually want to eat.

6:46That it's not like a chore to scarf this thing down. But it's like I genuinely get excited about eating this thing at night. And like I want to go to the store and go get it. And the idea for like protein ice cream just kind of came to mind. We like I'm sure you've seen like the Ninja Creamy ice cream trend. And so that was very much a thing at the time. And we felt like, you know, skim milk, whey protein. There's just like something there that makes sense. And so we went to our local like HEB, went to our local store to try and find one. And at the time, there was nothing like it. And literally that night, we went and bought a Ninja Creamy ice cream machine and we just completely got to work.

7:16I think a trademark was filed two days later. The media were like, this is our like, we're doing this. There's no way around it. And it's been an amazing journey.

7:24Hannah Dittman:That's so exciting and so true on so many things that you said. Ice cream is chemistry. I remember being in science class in elementary school and getting to shake it in a little bag and go through the laborious process of making it. Protein definitely totally understand the importance of the, I hesitate to even say the word trend, but consumer shift that has happened there. And how fun to get to do not only a fun, interesting, exciting product that people love, but to be doing it alongside a best friend where you're having a lot of fun doing it too. And I'm sure that comes through in the company results.

7:57Hannah Dittman:speaking of frozen one i'd love to dive in a little bit more to your company overview and learn more about the mission brand and what you guys stand for positioning and everything you've got going on over there yeah absolutely so uh just a little bit of a summary about who we are so we are a protein ice cream company which i've kind of alluded to we have our core three flavors which is what we came out with and released in some local austin stores in the middle of last year We've got peanut butter chip. We've got chocolate. We've got apple pie. We have a Target exclusive SKU, which is salted caramel crunch.

8:29Kind of got it on display there, which that just released at Target nationwide at the end of April. But each of our pints have 40 grams of protein. You have a front and center on the front, front and center on the top. 400 calories or less for the entire pint of ice cream. If you guys are familiar with a Ben and Jerry's or like we're talking about like 11, 12, 1300 calories. And so a tiny fraction of that. And yeah, we like we got into local Austin stores like last summer and we just kind of pretty early on realized that there was something bigger happening here our me and connor were like self-distributing to stores with dry ice and they were telling us like this is the best selling ice cream in our store like by far by the way portable freezer in my jeep was not keeping up with the

9:04Hannah Dittman:sales demand last summer that's awesome we kind of built out a broker network because we were like i think there's a much bigger opportunity here and fast forward to today we are in over 2300 doors across the u.s that we've launched into this year including wegmans over on the east coast as well as Earth Fair. In the Midwest, we are in Fresh Thyme, Schnucks, Heinen's, Bush's, Lund's and Byerly's, Kowalski's, Foxtrot. On the West Coast, we are in Nugget Markets. We're in Raley's, we're in Bristol Farms. Here in Texas, we're in Central Market. And then our biggest event to date so far has been we launched into Target nationwide at the end of April, where with our four SKUs, it's been an incredible experience.

9:43And happy to say our buyer let us know at last glance that we were number one in dollars per store per week in the wellness ice cream set, which we are beyond good about at this stage of our company.

9:53Hannah Dittman:Congratulations on all the huge success and the quick to scale success as well. That's so exciting. Clearly a huge customer demand there and a big differentiation. So what has the journey of fundraising been like and capital needs throughout all of this growth and expansion? Obviously, for everyone listening in, there's like two big hills that you're climbing getting into retail. The first is obviously breaking through and getting the invite and the ability to get into retail. And then the second is the reality of what that actually is going to entail from an operational and capital needs standpoint.

10:29Hannah Dittman:So how did you guys get started? What was the story of how you put all this together from a financing standpoint? And what has that been like? Yeah, absolutely. There's been like three rounds, I guess like not not even like formal rounds but I think there's been like three fundraising milestones that have been super super important to our journey the first one and I think like probably most founders and they'll resonate with this there's the first round which was kind of last May last June which was we had nothing but like a story and a product we had absolutely no financials we had absolutely no retail commits this was like a point in the company where we You just needed somebody to like take a bet on us.

11:11It was largely on, at that point, they were largely betting on category and they were betting on us. And so that's like that initial round of capital that just like got you off the ground. And that for us was a local investor in Austin that Connor actually met at like a house party, which was pretty cool. Like a prominent trader in Austin. And we ended up raising our first 250K from him. And that was honestly like that got us off the ground. We could not be here without that initial check, that first person to believe in us. the first person that also kind of sets the terms so we raised that on a safe and i kind of set the terms for everybody else who would subsequently end up joining that round but like can't talk about how critical that initial round was for us and then after that the next kind of big milestone was when we landed target and so that was in like the middle of january and target let us know hey we have a reset in three months we want you in 1500 doors we'll take it to market exclusive skew So like you can pull this off, right?

12:04Hannah Dittman:Wow. You're like, right. Of course we can. Let's go do it tomorrow. Like immediately kicked off into fundraise mode. And we were like, we need to go get money immediately. And our saving grace ended up being, we met a group that I'm sure you're familiar with, the angel group. Principals are Chris Robin, Adam Spriggs and Jared Cohen. And we had multiple folks introduce us from different angles. Cause we, I think that's that early stage of capital before the, And again, like we ended last year at 29K in revenue. We like, we did not have a real revenue story to tell at the end of last year. We had a velocity story to tell in seven stores.

12:39But I think that this again was really like you needed to find people that most institutional firms are really not looking at people of that size. And so we needed those guys to take that bet on us. And we got introduced to them. We had our first call and it was Synergy right away. They were looking at the category. They had talked to a few other players in the category and they said their none were exactly the right fit or the right size. And we came in and after our first call with them, I remember we got an email back two hours later. And they're like, guys, let's have another talk tomorrow.

13:07We like to move fast on things. And that was the most excited we'd ever been. I think we'd kind of remember that those two weeks, we probably had 15 VC calls. Every person who we possibly could ever introduce to somebody talked to firms. And we got so many people just saying it's too early. Not a good fit. It's just too early. And we found those guys who were willing to move early on things. And so I think that's really important. You have to find the people that are willing to move early. And then we ended up closing an oversubscribed$2 million round with them, which was incredible. It allowed us to get our feet under us.

13:35It allowed us to perform and deliver to Target and we not be here without them. And then we are in the midst of actually closing another round right now, which we can go into. But we've had so many good nonces and so many fortuitous introductions along the way. And I think finding the right people who are willing to move at your stage of the business, I think is the most important thing.

13:55Hannah Dittman:Definitely. And that's surprising even, too, with a big retailer PO and like quite a lot of distribution on the horizon to still have some hesitancy from institutional VCs, I think just shines a little bit of a light of where the market's been at. Because I think in prior lives, that may have been a little bit of an easier road. And it's awesome that people were able to lean in, see the vision, see where you guys are going and see the opportunity and hopefully will be huge success for them and help right size things a little bit down the road for everyone else. And awesome that it enabled you guys to get where you needed to go.

14:31Hannah Dittman:What do you think some of the biggest challenges specifically in your category, frozen and frozen wellness desserts, I think especially can be a little challenging sometimes to navigate because the supply chain complexities are a little bit harder. And obviously, there's a lot of operational chaos that's going on and things freight and things can be a little bit more expensive. How do you feel like that category played into capital needs or fundraisings or lessons learned at all? Yeah, good question. Yeah, frozen is intuitively just very difficult. Everything from warehousing, shipping, even producing, making ice cream, it's not a simple product at all to manufacture.

15:10So all that is obviously very complicated. And early on, we have a lot of investors that are just like, we don't invest in frozen. Let's just like, we don't do frozen, which is just such a difficult thing to even have a conversation about. But what we realized is having such a differentiated product in a frozen category really set us apart. I think early on we were pitching ourselves and the differentiation of a product that has so much potential rather than last year's sales or rather than the frozen category itself. And I think that really gave us a head start of why the Angel Group and other investors really believed in us because 40 grams of protein in ice cream that is low calorie and healthy and good ingredients for you.

15:46Like, this is bound to go viral. This is a product that's bound to blow off among every retailer in America. And I think that's really what the hump that we really had to get over. Yes, it's a difficult category, but it is a very unique, very exciting product within the category among protein being on such a hot wave throughout America right now. So I think we had a lot of the right factors that gave us the momentum to get where we are right now. And I think back all the time is those are the same factors why we started the company. Al and I were just two consumers who wanted a better option of eating protein, of finding something that's actually tasted good, actually craveable.

16:16You look forward to eating it. And that kind of all just built its own momentum, the snowball effect, where we are.

16:21Hannah Dittman:Definitely. And how have you guys divided between the two of you, either the fundraising process or operations? What's the division of labor been like? And do you have any advice for anyone else that has a multi-person founding team that might be able to learn something from your all experience? It's interesting, right? We came in with enough CPG experience. We started January of 2025. So Alan and I just intuitively had to figure out what are both of our skill sets. Obviously, discipline and we're the most driven people ever of starting this and getting this far. But figuring out who's best at what and how do we separate.

16:54I've been more so on the operation side of things and finance side of things this far in the company. And then Alan's been more so on the ice cream actual production. He was more of the brains of actually making it from one, the Ninja Creamy machine now at massive scale and everything with being a day-to-day, the ingredients and what we need to change to the product and commercializing new flavors. So that's kind of how we differentiate things. I would say marketing and sales are more on Alan's side of the company as well. Fundraising is very much like we are both present at every single investor meeting.

17:23It's I think any sort of like shared founder situation, I think the investor side, both people need to be present. Wells knew whether it's Costco, Walmart, Wegmans, Target, we're going to those meetings. We're talking to the buyers. We're telling our story as well as we can talk about hiring everything. But I think there's no better sales rep than the people who actually started it.

17:41Hannah Dittman:Were there any parallels that you guys saw between your conversations with Target and the other buyers that you've got excited and got on board with your brand and the investors that you were speaking to? Or did you find the conversations to be anchored on very different things and topics? It's actually an interesting question to handle a parallel between those two. There's like, obviously there's a ton of overlap. I think you go in there, the story we tell the both, we always tell the same story. We talk about the product the same. I think the differentiation comes like when you talk about the category as a whole.

18:11I think when you're talking to investors, you're thinking a little bit bigger picture and you're thinking more like tromps and that sort of thing and you think about outcomes whereas for your retailers you're very much going in there like how do i add to your specific set how am i different than everything else in your set how am i going to bring a commercial customers to your set obviously you probably don't go to the financial side with the retailers too but that like story that you baseline that for your company and you get the reps in it 100 helps with both of those connor like we've been talking about this all the time when we started this company we were nowhere close to the speakers that we are right now and not that either of us are like the most brilliant orators ever but like i think that the ability to tell the story again and again and the reps and the that muscle that you build and the ability to answer questions on the fly which is like it would have mortified me three years ago asked questions on a podcast like this i would have freaked out but uh i think that building that muscle again and again that helps you in both the retail meetings and the investor meetings because you are bound to get a million questions that you don't expect and you can't really plan for and building that muscle of like critical thinking knowing your business cold having told this story a million times important on both sides.

19:15So tailoring that time to whether it's being an investor or a buyer at a grocery store, there's such a different story to tell what the value is for them and want for them. So it's exciting.

19:26Hannah Dittman:Yeah, I feel like being a founder, you sharpen the pencil at every angle because you're doing every single thing that can be done when you're getting better at so many different things. That's awesome that you've even noticed your own personal growth along this journey. Obviously, I feel like founders have a huge passion for the mission of what they're doing, their products, the customers they're serving, and their reason for being in the world. But I do think also a lot of successful founders, they have a pull towards personal development and improving themselves. And that's a big draw for why they want to be an entrepreneur as well.

20:00Hannah Dittman:And clearly that comes through with you all. So reflecting back on the fundraising journey so far and the current process that you're in now, what are some of the lessons you learned or kind of the biggest challenges that you've overcome throughout the process that you think others could learn from or might be helpful for them to understand before they go into something like that? I think the number one thing that I come back to on this and like the best advice that we could give, this is not new to anybody, but I just like really holding down on this. It is all relational. Everything is relational.