LOS ANGELES — At the end of November 2023, the founders of Must Love faced a challenge when Sprouts Farmers Market discontinued the company’s animal-free dairy ice cream products and led them to cease production of the frozen treat altogether.

Co-founders Hannah Hong and Mollie Cha said they saw “the writing on the wall” a couple of years ago as animal-free dairy brands struggled to compete against conventional dairy.

“Not in terms of this specific retailer, but just generally where our brand was in the dairy-free frozen set,” Cha said. “When you compare dairy-free as a category against dairy, there’s still so many ways to go in terms of how large the brands need to get to be competitive against dairy ice cream.”

Hong added: “They (Sprouts) were shifting their category and product make. We’re not Ben & Jerry’s and not So Delicious, you can’t compare us to those.”

In February 2021, the company rebranded its Hakuna Banana and Totes Oats frozen desserts under the Must Love brand to reflect the startup’s expansion beyond its initial banana-based offering.

The company’s original flagship product Hakuna Banana, which launched in retail in 2017, was a base of bananas, coconut milk and dates, to offer consumers a better-for-you plant-based ice cream alternative. A year later Must Love launched Totes Oats, a dairy-free ice cream formulated with oat milk, coconut milk, and dates.

With the company losing its largest retailer, it also lost its scale and ability to make the dairy-free frozen treats at a reasonable price, according to a LinkedIn post from Hong.

“When we first started, we made ice cream ourselves in a tiny batch freezer during testing,” Hong said. “Even then we knew we were charging way too little for the ice cream, we knew there was a price point we wanted to hit and it was more to test. Do people want this product at that price point? If so, we will figure out the scale and we figured out the scale, now we don’t have that.”

Cha added: “Shrinking back down capacity to handle less than a national retailer doesn’t financially make sense. Over the past years we’ve developed good relationships with manufacturers, co-packers and with that great pricing that worked for us at scale. Obviously when you take away a huge portion of your business, you can’t expect your manufacturer to honor those prices for much less volume.”

Looking for ways to innovate and grow, the founders had to find another way to keep Must Love alive. In 2023, Hong and Cha landed on graham crackers formulated from wheat flour and sweetened with dates.

 “It’s still targeting the same consumer that loved our ice cream,” Cha said.

The graham crackers will be sold on the company’s website, Amazon and soon in certain retailers.

“We’re talking to very select retailers,” Hong said. “That’s a lesson we learned from the ice cream business. We felt so much pressure to say yes to everybody and to chase every door possible.”

The co-founders are looking to stay solely focused on the graham crackers for now but are seeking different iterations in the future.

“As we look at Must Love as a brand, we really want it to be this pantry staple brand,” Cha said.

Hong added: “But not this year, we’re pretty tired. It’s kind of funny because it feels like we’re going back to year one in a lot of ways. But building the cookie shelf-stable business, that is completely new to us. We’re really excited about learning a new category and new dynamics.”

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