Food tech · Plant-based dairy and eggs
Spero Foods
A Bay Area startup that turned sunflower and pumpkin seeds into cream cheese and egg substitutes, reached more than 1,000 US stores, and was sold for cash to a Nasdaq-listed buyer in 2023. Its own website now redirects to an unrelated gambling page.
A cream cheese landing at Whole Foods
In March 2020, Forbes ran a story with a headline built for a grocery aisle: an ex-Facebook engineer was launching sunflower seed cheese in Whole Foods the next day. The company was Spero Foods, and the founder was Phäedra Randolph, a self-taught software engineer who had spent years reverse engineering dairy and eggs out of seeds instead of nuts or soy.
“Food is a currency of longevity. Our food needs to be nutritious for us, and for the health of our planet, too,” Randolph told Forbes.
The pitch was repeated in nearly every interview she gave over the next several years: almonds and cashews are expensive, water intensive, and hard to scale, while sunflower and pumpkin seeds are cheap, fast growing, and allergen friendly. Spero's answer was a short ingredient list, an egg alternative called Scramblit made from pumpkin seeds, water, turmeric, garlic powder, and black salt, and a line of cream cheeses built from organic sunflower seeds.
The problem it set out to solve
“When I first started looking at what was on the market, I saw that a lot of the products had no real nutritional benefit; they had hardly any protein or naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, plus they didn’t taste good and they were expensive, so I decided to try and reverse engineer dairy and egg products from cheaper and more nutrient-dense ingredients such as seeds,” Randolph told FoodNavigator-USA in May 2019.
That was the gap Spero tried to fill in a crowded plant-based aisle already led by Eat Just's Just Egg, which by 2024 had sold the equivalent of 500 million chicken eggs and captured 99 percent of the US vegan egg market, according to Green Queen.
Founder
Randolph has described adopting a plant-based diet as a teenager to deal with chronic migraines and IBS, then working as a data analyst and later a software engineer at Facebook before turning that same self-taught approach to food science. She studied engineering and pre-medicine at Cornell. Press coverage through 2020 and 2021 credited her with Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition, and she is the only named related person listed as an executive officer on the company's SEC filing.
From seed round to sale
Spero went through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch and spent 2019 telling trade outlets it was raising a seed round to scale up manufacturing. A Form D filed with the SEC on June 16, 2020 shows an offering of $9,126,494 with $8,173,990 already sold to 39 investors, signed by Randolph as CEO. By November 2021, FoodNavigator-USA reported Randolph had raised $20 million total from backers including Bessemer Venture Partners, Valor Siren Ventures, and Alumni Ventures, and that products were in roughly 1,000 stores including Whole Foods and Sprouts.
Distribution kept widening: food service accounts including Black Seed Bagels in New York by late 2021, then Kroger owned banners and Fresh Market locations across five states in October 2022, the same month a Smoked Salmon Cream Cheese won a NEXTY Award at Expo East.
“We're doing something radical that no one has tried yet,” Randolph said of the Kroger launch.
Then, on October 2, 2023, Superlatus, Inc., a subsidiary of the Nasdaq listed company TRxADE Health (ticker MEDS), signed an all cash asset purchase agreement to buy Spero's assets. The deal folded Spero into a CPG roll up under Superlatus's Urgent Company umbrella, alongside brands including Coolhaus and Brave Robot, bought from Perfect Day earlier that year.
What happened to the buyer
The acquisition did not stabilize Spero's ownership for long. A lawsuit filed in US District Court in Florida's Middle District in January 2025 alleges that TRxADE and Superlatus executives sold Superlatus itself to then interim CEO Tim Alford for $1 in March 2024, months after buying Spero, in a move investor Eat Well Investment Group calls an attempt to dodge roughly $10 million it says it was owed. Superlatus was renamed Superlatus Foods and separated from TRxADE. Nosh.com, reporting on the suit, found Superlatus Foods' website by January 2025 listed only Sapientia Technology, a snack maker, as its portfolio asset, with no mention of Spero. TRxADE itself merged with a pharmaceutical company called Scienture in July 2024 and now trades as Scienture Holdings under the ticker SCNX, exiting the food business.
“This sale was a sham, designed to offload the entity that was contractually indebted to Eat Well, thereby evading Superlatus's obligations under the MIPA and hindering Eat Well's ability to recover the amounts owed,” the complaint states, as quoted by Nosh.
What became of Spero's brand, recipes, and patents after that insider sale is not described in any public filing found for this page. What is verifiable is the state of the company's own web presence: as of September 24, 2026, sperofoods.co no longer serves the Spero site at all. It redirects to an unrelated Indonesian language online gambling page. The Shopify storefront returns a "Store unavailable" error, and the shop.sperofoods.co subdomain does not resolve.
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 Form D | Offering of $9,126,494, with $8,173,990 sold to 39 investors. Signed by Phäedra Randolph, CEO. | Public record |
| $20 million total raised | Founder's figure, reported by FoodNavigator-USA, Nov 2021. No later Form D shows the additional amount. | Differs from filing |
| Retail distribution | Named accounts: Whole Foods, Sprouts, Central Market, Gelson's, Erewhon, Fresh Thyme, The Fresh Market, and Kroger owned banners. | Independent |
| Trademarks | SCRAMBLIT (Serial 88019290) was abandoned by the USPTO in 2019 for failure to respond. SPERO (Reg 6399799) registered in 2021, but only for salt. | Public record |
| NSF federal awards | None of the NSF SBIR awards on file in this folder belong to Spero Foods. One belongs to a biofuels company, Spero Energy, Inc. | Not a match |
| October 2023 acquisition | Superlatus, Inc., a subsidiary of TRxADE Health (Nasdaq: MEDS), acquired Spero's assets in an all cash deal. Value not disclosed. | Public record |
| Buyer's later distress | A January 2025 lawsuit alleges Superlatus was sold to an insider for $1 in March 2024. Superlatus Foods later listed no Spero brand. | Independent |
| Current web presence | As of September 24, 2026, sperofoods.co redirects to an unrelated gambling site, and the storefront domains are dead. | Independent |
Read plainly: Spero Foods built a real distribution footprint under its founder, backed by one confirmed multi-million dollar raise, and sold its assets for cash to a public company in 2023. Everything after that is murkier. The buyer fractured within eighteen months amid an insider transaction now in litigation, and by late 2026 the brand's own web address had lapsed into unrelated hands, a pattern more consistent with a shelved asset than an active one.
What to watch
- Whether the Eat Well lawsuit against Superlatus produces any accounting of Spero's assets after the 2024 insider sale.
- Whether Spero products still appear on shelves at any retailer named in this page.
- Whether Scienture Holdings or Superlatus Foods files anything with the SEC mentioning Spero.
- Whether the Spero brand, patents, or recipes resurface under any new owner.
In their words
“Food is a currency of longevity. Our food needs to be nutritious for us, and for the health of our planet, too.”
Phäedra Randolph, founder and CEO, Forbes, March 2020 · Independent
“When I first started looking at what was on the market, I saw that a lot of the products had no real nutritional benefit; they had hardly any protein or naturally occurring vitamins and minerals, plus they didn’t taste good and they were expensive, so I decided to try and reverse engineer dairy and egg products from cheaper and more nutrient-dense ingredients such as seeds.”
Phäedra Randolph, FoodNavigator-USA, May 2019 · Independent
“We don't want to create a product that's identical [to animal products] and is bad for you.”
Phäedra Randolph, FoodNavigator-USA, November 2021 · Independent
“We're doing something radical that no one has tried yet.”
Phäedra Randolph, vegconomist, October 2022 · Independent
“We are thrilled to welcome the Spero Food brands to our portfolio of CPG assets.”
Timothy Alford, CEO, Superlatus, GlobeNewswire, October 2023 · Company release
“This sale was a sham, designed to offload the entity that was contractually indebted to Eat Well, thereby evading Superlatus's obligations under the MIPA and hindering Eat Well's ability to recover the amounts owed.”
Eat Well Investment Group, complaint quoted by Nosh.com, January 2025 · Independent
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm D, Spero Foods, Inc., CIK 0001815085
- IndependentThis Ex-Facebook Engineer Is Reinventing Dairy And Launching Superfood Cheeses Made From Sunflowers In Whole Foods
- IndependentSpero Foods seeks capital to ramp up manufacturing for plant-based eggs, cheese
- IndependentPlant-based should be healthy, says Spero founder
- IndependentSpero Launches Sunflower-Based Cheeses at Kroger and Fresh Market Stores
- IndependentSpero Foods profile
- CompanySuperlatus, Newly Merged with TRxADE HEALTH, Acquires the assets of Spero Foods
- IndependentSuperlatus (MEDS) Acquires the Assets of Spero Foods
- IndependentPerfect Day inks Superlatus deal for animal-free consumer brands business
- IndependentUrgent Company Parent Co. Sued By Eat Well Investment Group
- Public recordSCRAMBLIT trademark, Serial 88019290, abandoned
- Public recordSPERO trademark, Serial 88912913, Registration 6399799
- IndependentJust Egg Has Sold the Equivalent of 500 Million Eggs in 5 Years
- IndependentLive check of sperofoods.co and its storefront domains
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
