Halifax’s Novagevity Earns Big Recognition With National Industry Award
HALIFAX — A Halifax startup earned big recognition this week when it took home an important industry award.
Novagevity is the winner of this year’s Canadian Health Food Association’s (CHFA) Launch Pad contest.
The CHFA is Canada’s largest trade association dedicated to natural health and organic products. Its Launch Pad event is a Dragon’s Den-style pitch competition held each year at its CHFA Connect conference.
Winners get $20,000 in prizes and, more significantly, some very valuable media exposure.
Gregg Curwin is the president and CEO of Novagevity.
The former head of TruLeaf says the win is a significant milestone for his new company, which is still young and trying to unseat some big players in the meal replacement market.
“It’s a big deal, actually. We’re all pretty much over the moon over it. For an early-stage company like ours it’s pretty monumental, honestly,” he told Huddle. “It’s a big deal that will be noticed globally, actually, the winner of this new product award.”
Curwin said emails and calls have been flooding in since CHFA announced Sperry as its winner.
“Just the activity and interest we’ve received in the last 48 hours is really kind of off the chart.”
“It’s just a real good shot in the arm for the team. We worked our butts off the last two years to get this to market. It wasn’t easy; what we created wasn’t easy to create, so we’re thrilled,” he added.
Curwin and his founding partner, Dr. Mary Lynch, started Novagevity in 2019, but began working on the company in earnest last year.
Curwin, who retired as CEO of TrueLeaf in 2018, told Huddle he was pulled back into the startup world last year when Dr. Lynch approached him with a plea: help me give sick people more nutritious meal replacement options.
RELATED: Halifax Startup Wants To Dethrone ‘Boost’ And ‘Ensure’ With Plant-Based Meal Replacements
Curwin, who has watched his own sick family members struggle to meet their nutritional needs, said Lynch’s concern about the dearth of options for sick people swayed him.
“We’ve got to do something Gregg, this is a major problem, I can’t keep giving patients basically liquid sugar,” Curwin recalled Lynch saying.
“She looked at me, kind of with pain on her face, and I thought oh wow. I wasn’t planning on going back into the startup world right away but… that really was the light bulb.”
Sperry is the company’s first product to hit the market.
It’s designed to “create an alternative choice to ‘Boost’ and ‘Ensure’” and was created with the help of scientists at QE2 Health Sciences Centre.
Last June, Curwin told Huddle Novagevity’s goal is not is “just to create a meal replacement,” but to understand meal replacements “a little deeper…as they’re related to human health, and gut health, and inflammation and immunity.”
Over the past year, the company has doubled in size, to 12 team members. Curwin says he’s looking to grow Novagevity to a team of 20 by early 2022 when the company plans to bring a new product to market.
Until then, he looks forward to taking market share from much more well-established companies.
“I love that stuff: I live for that. I’ve gone against these behemoths and big players before and they all usually have points of weakness: they’re usually big, they’re usually slow. So we will have a little bit of fun in the early days,” he said.