A Righteous Offer

This is a bowl of Cauliflower rice - it takes about 3 minutes to prepare fresh. As an alternative to rice rice, its been around for quite sometime. It's very good for you.

You could of course choose the instant, packaged option which is prepared by Cauli Rice, using a patented system, which is now sold in 2800 UK supermarkets. That you would have to agree, after a few teething problems, is a success story. Personally Id choose the fresh version every time but then I enjoy cooking and never eat pre-prepared food. Ignoring the price difference, to me there seems to be an inherent contradiction between a pre-prepared packaged food and something so simple to make fresh.  

Cauli have run out of cash  - again. And they will shortly be back on Crowdcube asking for more - despite the last raise bringing in over £1m against their target of £500k. To date they have raised almost £2m on CC in three tranches - none of them predicting the need for a another raise and all of them using projections which have proved to be pure fantasy. Still as they are keen to stress, who knows what will happen with a new product and a start up. To be fair to them, listings in 2800 stores is a great achievement. 

Interestingly, we went to an angels investors evening recently and listened to an astute, experienced engineer pitch his patent protected widget. He had  had statements of intent from large multinationals and when asked after the pitch why his year 1 and 2 sales figures were so low, he stated that in his experience, promises and intentions have to be aggressively watered down to deliver a realistic sales forecast. Better to under promise and over deliver, he said. It was very refreshing and the way we believe projections should be prepared. Of course it's not a sentiment shared by anyone on Crowdcube.

The same couple who run Cauli, Gem and Jamie Harris, run Righteous, a salad dressing range that we recently wrote about. Righteous has now been delisted by the UK supermarkets - 4 years after its first listing. Righteous promised a lot but delivered little in the end and who knows what the future holds. You have to take a view as to whether Cauli, which was started when Righteous was still a fledgling, will fare any better. 

Gem was quoted in Management Today in February 2015 '''The great thing with Righteous is that it's been four years running so now it's running quite a lot on its own.'' Maybe it needed a little more attention? Still for now she is concentrating on Cauli.

Back to the heading of this post - The Righteous Offer. For once we can say that this is a genuine and wholehearted attempt to put things right for their investors. Gem and Jamie are offering to give Righteous SHs stock in Cauli Rice from their own holding, to replace the Righteous shares they hold. We dont know at what value this offer is being given but assume its at the new CC campaign value. Which does call into question the whole valuation of Cauli......but that's for another day. 

For now we raise hats to this bold and generous attempt to repay shareholders' trust.