Vancouver’s EnWave is expanding the reach of its Moon Cheese-branded dried cheese snacks by signing a string of royalty agreements and getting a foot in the door at Starbucks.
Starbucks (Nasdaq:SBUX) started stocking Moon Cheese in 3,400 of its U.S. stores on July 7 and will run a trial run until September 7.
“We have not announced plans to bring [Moon Cheese] to Canada at this time,” Starbucks Coffee Canada spokeswoman Carly Suppa told Business in Vancouver in an email.
The crunchy snack comes in three flavours: gouda, cheddar and pepperjack.
Separate EnWave distribution agreements mean that the packaged dried cheese snack is available across Canada, including Vancouver, at grocers such as Thrifty Foods, Urban Fare.
“We’ve been in grocery stores for about eight or nine months and through that time there’s been a lot of growth in the distribution,” EnWave vice-president Brent Charlton told BIV on July 10.
Enwave (TSX-V:ENW) has also been signing royalty agreements that grant companies the right to produce Moon Cheese using EnWave’s proprietary radiant energy vacuum (REV) technology.
The most recent of which was July 10 with Chile’s Lake Blue Spa. The pact gives Lake Blue Spa exclusive rights to produce the dried cheese product in Chile.
Ontario’s GayLea Foods has already signed a license agreement that gives it exclusive dibs to produce the dried cheese product in Canada.
New York State-based Umland LLC signed a license agreement that gives it the right to produce kosher Moon Cheese. And NutriDried LLP, in which EnWave owns a 51% stake, has the license to produce the snack in the U.S.
EnWave increased its revenue more than tenfold in the most recent quarter – to $5,574,931 in the three months ended March 31 compared with $504,605 in the same quarter in 2014.
That helped it slash EnWave’s quarterly loss to $28,237, down from $2,291,628 in the same quarter a year ago.
Charlton said that the revenue surge did not come from REV license agreements, however.
The big bump came instead from EnWave’s 86.5% stake in Germany’s Hans Binder, which makes traditional air-drying machines and not REV air drying machines.
Despite revenue and net income each moving in the right direction, EnWave’s stock plunged to an all-time low close of $0.77 earlier this week. It rose four cents on July 10 to close at $0.81.•
