Novak Djokovic’s Sorghum Play: The $5M Bet on Post-Corn Snacking
Novak Djokovic’s Sorghum Play: The $5M Bet on Post-Corn Snacking
Sports - November 22, 2025
A $5M seed round, an ancient grain, and a global athlete-founder aiming to rewrite the popcorn aisle.
Novak Djokovic has spent his career treating his body like a precision system — tuned, tested, and optimized until it produced the most dominant run in modern tennis. Every decision he makes is an input in a larger equation about longevity. That’s why when he enters consumer CPG, it never feels like side-hustle opportunism. It feels like an extension of the logic that made him great.
His latest move is Cob Foods, a sorghum-based “popcorn” brand he joined as co-founder and lead investor, anchoring a $5 million seed round. Cob replaces corn with sorghum — a tiny ancient grain that pops like popcorn but avoids the digestive chaos corn causes for millions. It fits seamlessly into Djokovic’s personal mythology: the athlete who rebuilt his body by rebuilding his diet.
His gluten-free transformation has been picked apart for years — the fatigue, the breathing issues, the mid-match collapses that vanished when he cut gluten and prioritized gut health. So when he invests in a snack, it isn’t an endorsement. It’s autobiographical. It’s Novak exporting the operating system that kept him on top for over a decade.
But Cob didn’t start with Djokovic. It started with founder Jessica Davidoff trying to solve a problem doctors couldn’t: her son’s severe corn allergy. Popcorn was impossible to replace, so she ran her own experiments. When she discovered sorghum — airy, clean, naturally gluten-free — she realized she’d found more than an alternative. She’d found a category waiting to happen. Her small-batch runs sold out instantly. She didn’t need hype. She needed a partner who lived the same philosophy she built the brand on.
Djokovic wasn’t approached as a pitchman. Samples went through nutritionists, testing protocols, and the Djokovic household before he ever considered investing. He joined only after the product proved it could survive the same scrutiny he applies to his own diet. When he signed on, it wasn’t for a fee. It was for ownership.
The $5 million seed round isn’t about survival. It’s about velocity. Manufacturing expansion, flavor development, retail readiness — the scaffolding required to compete in a category worth more than $3.5 billion a year. Popcorn is beloved, but corn itself is becoming culturally complicated: allergens, additives, digestion issues, sustainability questions. Sorghum hits every pressure point shaping modern food choices. It’s gluten-free, corn-free, drought-resilient, toddler-safe, and nutritionally dense. It’s the rare ingredient that satisfies both health logic and consumer curiosity.
And Djokovic has been quietly building toward this moment. He’s backed hydration companies, performance-focused wellness brands, and recovery technologies — always through the same pattern. Identify a gap in his own life, solve it with experts, then scale it for the world. Cob is simply the first time that formula has landed in a mass-market snack category.
But the real story is the attention economy. In the old model, Djokovic would have been paid to hold someone else’s product in a commercial. In the new model, he holds equity. His global fan base becomes free distribution. His reputation becomes brand credibility. A courtside photo with a bag of Cob becomes media. A training clip mentioning sorghum becomes marketing. His lifestyle becomes the campaign.
Cob frames itself as a popcorn alternative, but the pitch is bigger: it’s a post-corn philosophy shaped by health, sustainability, and necessity — wrapped in a grain that fits the modern world better than the one it replaces.
Athletes used to rent their names to brands.
Now they build the brands that reflect their lives.
And Novak Djokovic — with a bag of sorghum and a slice of equity — just made his next move.
