Meet Julia Collins the Founder of Planet FWD

Julia Collins co-founded Zume Pizza Inc. in 2015. Zume pizza is a tech-driven food company dedicated to making healthier food fast and accessible to as many people as possible. Julia is not only passionate about healthy food but also believes in its ability to heal and sustain the human body.

Prior to co-founding Zume, Collins led Harlem Jazz Enterprises’ management team as the vice president and chief operating officer. At Zume, she served as the President before leaving in 2018.

The Mountain View-based pizza hub is staffed by humans and robots, making it the first unicorn company to be ever founded by an African-American woman. Zume is a blend of Collins’ love for fine cuisine and technology.

Collins, who served as President at Zume Pizza left the company in 2018 to start up her new business, Planet FWD. According to her, Planet FWD is a business endeavor through which she hopes to align her “mission on this Earth” to provide people on the planet better outcomes through food. Today, Collins runs Planet FWD, a regenerative food brand and platform, an inspiration that came from her pregnant days.

 “When I learned I was going to become a parent in 2017, my love for food and technology took a more narrow focus as I began to understand the relationship between food systems and climate change,” Collins said in an interview with Harlem Capital. “I began to be hyper-aware and hyper focused on what the climate change conversation meant through the eyes of this little person that I was bringing into this world with my partner.”

In recent funding for the company, Collins closed $2.7 million. The funding round was led by BBG Ventures with participation from other companies like Cowboy Ventures, Cleo Capital, Kapor Capital, Precursor, and others. Collins described the funding round as “deliberate.” 99.5% of the funds were generated from people of color and/or women. She also said that the company’s mission to create a climate friendly-food snack brand and platform was also deliberate.

“The way we do that at Planet FWD is building on top of this idea that reforming our food system can not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also draw-down, sequester, re-balance atmospheric carbon. We do that in two ways. The first is by creating the world’s first climate-friendly snack brand, which will launch in early 2021. The second is by creating a data service linking regenerative farmers to brands and consumers who are hungry for climate-friendly products.”

The goal of regenerative agriculture is to reverse the effects of climate change through the process of capturing carbon in soil and aboveground biomass. That way, biodiversity is increased and soils will be enriched. It also improves watersheds. Regenerative agriculture is a known farming technique among climate-sensitive farmers.