Investment fund Exit 156 Capital has been set up to help boost CSB and SJU alum-owned businesses like Clo-Clo Vegan Foods
Their middle daughter Chloe was 6 months old when Wendy Kampa Hinnenkamp ’97 and her husband, Augie, discovered Chloe had severe food allergies.
It was a diagnosis that, by necessity, fundamentally altered their approach to daily diet and menu choices.
“The first few years of her life we went through elimination diets trying to figure everything out,” Wendy recalls. “We’d spend hours going to grocery stores, looking at labels and ingredients to be safe about what we could buy. We made a lot of food from scratch at home because there weren’t a ton of options for those in our situation on the market.”
But Wendy and Augie decided to change all that, embarking on a process that eventually led to Clo-Clo Vegan Foods, their line of plant-based pizzas and flatbreads that are currently available at select locations in chains like Target, Cub, Coborn’s, Lunds and Byerlys, Sprouts Farmers Market and others, as well is in co-ops including Wedge Lynden Hills and Wedge Lyndale in Minneapolis.
“We first launched in March of 2020, right before the pandemic,” Augie said. “But before that, it took three or four years of renditions and trials. We went through over 1,000 renditions of cheese alone. This was years of research and development.”
“We created this because we wanted to help other people who were dealing with severe food allergies, or had dietary restrictions of any kind,” Wendy added. “But also for people looking for a healthier diet and lifestyle.
“We wanted to create more options like this that actually taste amazing.”
The company has grown steadily, enough so that it is looking to expand its warehousing, supply chain and retail operations capacity. To do that, Wendy and Augie tapped into the power of the Johnnie Bennie alumni network.
Specifically Exit 156 Capital, an investment fund (unaffiliated with CSB and SJU) named after the Collegeville exit on Interstate 94 and formed by SJU graduates Josh Robinson ’06, Mike Nathan ’97 and Brian Kueppers ’89. The trio began raising capital from SJU and CSB graduates last summer with the goal of reaching $10 million that could be invested primarily in Johnnie- and Bennie-owned companies.
When investment returns eventually come in, the plan is to donate 5 percent back to the two schools.
“When Silicon Valley Bank imploded (in March 2023), capital for investments across all industries really dried up,” said Robinson, Exit 156 Capital’s managing partner who graduated from SJU with a finance degree, went on to get advance degrees and certifications from the University of South Dakota and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has held senior executive roles in both finance and information technology organizations.
“Term sheets got pulled back and companies with great stories to tell couldn’t get anyone to invest. These are companies that need more than they could just get from family members, but also don’t need $10 million, which is the point where traditional funds start to pay attention. There was a void there that needed filling. I was familiar with a fund started by MIT graduates that raised money from alums and invested in MIT-affiliated companies, and we started wondering if anyone had done that with CSB and SJU. Our assumption was that someone must have, but as we started to build our fund, we saw no one actually had.”
Less than a year into the process, Robinson said the fund has already raised $6.5 million of its $10 million goal and has begun making its first wave of investments. Clo-Clo is among that group of companies.
“We cold-called Josh last summer,” Augie said. “Something came across one of my streams – LinkedIn or someplace like that. I saw the CSB and SJU connection and thought we should check it out.”
“I feel like Johnnies and Bennies always have such a strong connection,” Wendy added. “Everyone wants to help one another out, whether you know each other or not. There’s just a strong bond there. Exit 156 seemed like such a good fit, especially with the health piece too. Between that and the Johnnie-Bennie connection, we felt like we aligned pretty well.”
Robinson said helping companies like Clo-Clo expand their foothold is exactly what Exit 156 is meant to do.
“It checked all the boxes of what we were looking for,” Robinson said. “When you look at everything they went through with their daughter, and the way they’re trying to help others facing that situation, they’re making the world around them better.
“That’s such a big part of the values that are instilled in you at Saint John’s and Saint Ben’s, and we want to help companies like that expand and grow.”