COMPANY

Name: Sunbox

Legal Name: Sunbox Inc

Location: Los Angeles, California

Founded: 2015

Founder(s): Vanessa Ballesteros and Elisa Gomez

Website: https://sunboxmarket.com/

Social Media Following: 134 Likes on Facebook, 325 Followers on Twitter, 5145 Followers on Instagram 

INDUSTRY – Food Tech

Size: $357M in 2018 (Source: MarketWatch)

Projections: $145.64B by 2025, by 2025 (CAGR of 12%) (Source: MarketWatch)

Introduction

Sunbox is a food tech company that offers smart kiosks with organic, vegan, and locally sourced foods, snacks, and beverages to make healthy eating affordable and convenient through technology. 

The Product 

Sunbox provides smart kiosks which come with a curated selection of organic food items and beverages with options that include vegan, gluten-free, paleo, soy-free, nut-free, grain-free, raw, non-GMO and kosher. It offers its kiosks to organizations, hospitals, schools, gyms, as well as residences. Sunbox partners with local beverage and food makers to regularly stock their kiosks with a variety of healthy foods. 

Underlining its focus on being an environmentally conscious company, Sunbox uses recycled wood to build its kiosks and smarter in-built mechanisms ensure lower energy consumption than conventional vending machines. The kiosks have a touch screen that allows customers to view information such as ingredients and nutrition facts about each food item. Once a customer decides what they want, they can add it to their virtual shopping cart and then check out using either a credit card or through the Sunbox mobile app. 

Origin and Founding Team 

Sunbox was founded by Vanessa Ballesteros and Elisa Gomez in 2015. 

Vanessa is an Emmy Award-winning television producer with producing credits for shows such as Hell’s Kitchen, The Amazing Race, and Survivor under her belt. Elisa has spent over a decade as an operations management professional with experience in customer service, relationship building. She has previously worked at Well Fargo for over a decade across multiple roles and later as the business manager at a fashion e-commerce retailer in LA. 

As someone who would spend days traveling for work and keeping odd hours while working on projects, Vanessa was tired of the processed and sugar-rich foods offered in the name of healthy snacks. She approached her friend, Elisa Gomez, who had a similar idea almost at the same time for a convenient way to eat healthy while on the go based on her own experience of juggling a hectic schedule and trying to maintain healthy eating habits. Seeking to make health foods quickly and easily available to people, the two collaborated to create Sunbox. 

Performance and Trends

In May 2018, Sunbox Inc. was chosen to be a part of LA Cleantech Incubator’s maiden cohort of the Founders Business Accelerator program developed with the City of Los Angeles.