With Cash in the Tank, Perfect Fuel Revs Engines

Perfect Fuel, a functional chocolate brand, quietly announced this week that it had closed an initial seed round of funding.

The chocolate company, founded in 2010, produces “energy bites.” In a discussion between founder Nicolas Warren and Project NOSH, Warren detailed some of the exciting news from 2015.

Director of Operations Miles Masci and Warren had previously funded the company by bootstrapping and taking in a small amount of angel funding in 2012. This allowed the duo to create a product, establish a brand and show proof of concept. Based in part on the success in achieving these goals with their initial product, Perfect Fuel took their first round of seed funding in April of this year. While exact details were not available, Warren told NOSH that the two rounds amount to less than a half million dollars in total funding.

This most recent round will be used to launch their products more widely, as well as test out new line extensions.

“That kind of money doesn’t give you a budget for a couple of years, but it definitely gives you a budget to launch products [and] launch them successfully,” Warren said. For Perfect Fuel, this launch includes adding brokers, salespeople and collateral. The pair plan to expand to New York City and plan to be in 22 markets (up from the 16 current markets). Smoothie King has also authorized the line for all of their retail locations.

The funding also allowed Warren and Masci to move past the original flavor of ginseng and launch bars in chia and espresso, products that they have been perfecting the taste, packaging and distribution of for over a year. The flavors launched this spring, with their tradeshow debut at Expo East.

The seed funding will help “get us to a point where we can have a line of products and really prove a new category,” Warren said. This category, he said, is the intersection of convenience foods and healthy options and what he calls “active nutrition,” putting Perfect Fuel’s goal as proving that there can be easy, on-the-go snacks that are also healthy fuel for your body made from “clean” ingredients. “What we’re trying to do” said Warren “is create a healthier version of different moments where people desire specific products.”