Smash Foods Closes $18 Million Funding Round Led By L Catterton To Boost Jam And Protein Bites Momentum

Late-Night Jam Band

The husband and wife business partners began their entrepreneurial journey together when they met while working at another booming food startup, Blue Apron, prior to its acquisition by Wonder Group.

“I was working in consulting before that but was so passionate about the food industry,” Peck says. “I did a career shift and went to Blue Apron to be in that world. It was the heyday of meal kits.”

Ford is a former Crossfit coach who also always felt a connection to the food industry–a predestined pull that brought the two together. He sold lobster rolls out of a food truck in Maine while he was in High School then worked in fulfillment for Amazon out of college, exposing him to the operational side of the industry. Peck moved to the US from Australia as a college athlete on the dive team.

“In Australia, they’re all about real sourdough bread, real avocado, chia seeds,” Ford says, reliving the experience every time he visits Anna’s family in Australia. “It’s all real, whole food.”

Their jobs at Blue Apron is how they spent their days, but their evenings, which would turn into early mornings, soon became their safe space as they started diving deep into a pure passion project. She loved making chia seed jams for her own yogurt bowls, and it became one of the most popular recipes on Anna’s blog. They kept wanting to make more and more jam, leading them to Hot Bread Kitchen, the opportunistic commercial kitchen where they would rent out space, testing out more jam recipes, hand-delivering some to local independent markets. “We would do our jobs during the day, go there at 7pm, order tacos from a food truck, and then make jam for eight hours,” Peck recalls.

On top of the catharsis of making their own jams, they also felt a personal need to do so because the ones on store shelves did not align with their health-forward diets. “To be considered ‘jam,’ the sugar content is required to be quite high,” Ford says. “We’re the opposite of all that sugar. We’re 95% fruit….we called it Smash because we’re just smashing fruit and chia and dates.”

Smash Foods is considered a Fruit Spread solely because of the lower sugar content, committed to no added sugar. Instead, Smash Foods uses dates as its sweetener.

It’s part of the brand’s overall philosophy and how it achieves a delightful product that has all the sweetness it needs, without using any sort of binders or fillers: every single ingredient serves a function of health or flavor. “The chia seeds naturally help gel the jam and are super nutritional,” Ford says. “The dates make it a lot less hyper-sweet than a traditional jam.”

With a boost of nutrition from the chia and dates, Smash crafts a line of classics from Strawberry, Concord Grape, Apricot and Raspberry–flavors that are tried and true and fit the needs of every American household, from kids to grandparents, many of which find the legacy jam category too packed with sugar and too distanced from the fruits that are supposed to shine.

Most of Smash’s fruit happens to come from upcycled sources–perfectly delicious fruit that otherwise would be going to waste for a multitude of reasons. “We source the nuts, seeds, dates and fruit on a very global scale,” Ford says. “It’s like making wine–the terroir, harvesting conditions, temperature range–it all plays a role in our fruit sourcing.”

The first location Smash ever showed up on shelves was Mekelburg’s in Brooklyn, which has since closed. Even though they knew how good their fruit spreads were, they were still taken aback that people were actually buying the product repeatedly off shelves, and enjoyed riding the wave as a beloved local brand with loyal customers. After two years of living their double lives at mad jam scientists, they took a leap–deciding together to leave Blue Apron and bet it all on Smash.

Biting Through The Competition

At a yearly showcase organized by Hot Bread Kitchen, two local foragers for Whole Foods Market would change the trajectory of Smash. Chris Manca and John Lawson, showed up, ultimately giving Anna and Steve their first big retail account in a decision that’s largely unheard of–giving them a shot at one single store, the Hudson Yards NYC location which was just opening at the time. “Chris and John were the initiators of giving us a chance and putting our brand on the map,” Peck says.

It’s this moment in the brand’s journey that paints a picture of a scrappy startup transitioning into a national brand, with big things on the horizon.

“We were delivering by hand, backing up our Subaru into the loading bay, giving them two cases of jam and an invoice,” Ford adds. “Even at one store, we could get the sales data. Eventually, John said we were ready for more.”

The growth got them thinking about raising capital to support the new distribution, but it proved to be more challenging than they had expected. “We were playing in a sleepy category with zombie-like consumer behavior with people grabbing the familiar checker lid and throwing it in the cart,” Ford says. “It forced us into building a strong business with really good unit economics.”

The brand also earned a $10,000 prize in a New York State innovation competition for sourcing New York-grown concord grapes. The prize also allowed them to enhance the development of their formulas through Cornell’s Food Venture Center.

Smash particularly woke up the category in 2024 when it began to utilize the fruit spreads into another product that also came from Anna’s blog, eventually becoming their Jammy Protein Bites, nut butter balls stuffed with different flavors of the chia fruit spreads, like Sunflower Butter with Strawberry and Chocolate Peanut Butter with Raspberry.

“All the energy bites that were on the market are dense and stodgy. We wanted to capture the magic of what’s in the jar in snack format,” Ford says. “We wanted the PB&J nostalgia with the superfood jam to be a superhero ingredient in the center.”

Smash strengthened its relationship with Whole Foods Market when the Jammy Protein Bites launched nationally there, immediately changing the business. Suddenly, investors were reacting differently.

In 2025, Smash Foods raised its first major fundraise, $5.5 million led by Eclair Partners, who then followed-on in this current round too.

“I found the products delicious,” Partner Laurent Marcel tells me. “I like brands that use real ingredients with better nutritional factors than the competition. Great products created by great people is what brought me to Anna and Steve.”

The phenomenal success in the bites format gave the idea for Smash to go all in, now releasing new Mini Bites–the same but butter and jelly poppables, just half the size, ideal for lunchboxes. Suddenly, Smash Foods has become more of a snack business than just a jam business.

Speaking To Every Generation

Just about a year after the Series A round, Smash is raising this supplemental round to support the exponential growth enabled by the Bites, more than doubling its store count–including all Costco regions, all Target stores, and about half of Walmart locations.

“From the first conversation, Steve and Anna just jumped off the page as the types of people we want to align ourselves with,” Einstein says. “They had some classical training with their Blue Apron background and bring different elements to the table and as a duo–Anna going back to her finance days and Steve being a Six Sigma operations leader.”

With the rise of other categories like cottage cheese, consumers have been using Smash jams in creative ways that have enabled repeat purchases much swifter than typical jams, which usually sit in the fridge for way too long.

“Their velocities are at least as good as the incumbents on shelves despite having a huge distribution and awareness disadvantage, which is an early sign that the product has real legs to it,” Einstein says. “That massively accelerated both the scale of the business and then the size of the overall opportunity of what they could be at as a mature business once they launched into snacking generally.”

Einstein calls the general consumer of Smash Food’s Bites the ‘savvy snacker.’ “It’s generally someone in their 20s or 30s who either has kids or is maybe approaching that stage of life–looking to fill the pantry with products that like they want eat, but also thinking about a partner or child,” he explains “They want something that everyone is going to eat that meets the macro, clean label ingredient bar, but also passes the four year old’s taste test. This consumer is a rapidly growing portion of the population.”

Smash Foods will soon release its eighth jam flavor, Fig, in the coming months.

Smash Foods develops all products in-house. The new funds will enable Smash to build out efficient manufacturing capabilities for the Bites, including the new mini Bites, which require extremely meticulous specifications. “Expect more fun, nostalgic flavors, and multi-sensory textures…We want the eating experience to be really fun,” Ford says. “We have the scaffolding of an amazing brand. Now we can start building personality and start speaking to our customers up the funnel.”

He adds, “entrepreneurship has become a lot about being curious and challenging the status quo, not just accepting the ingredients you can buy, but digging layers deeper.”