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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Alternative Protein

Estonia’s ÄIO Raises €1 Million to Make Alternative Fats Out of Sawdust

Estonian start-up ÄIO has raised €1 million ($1.2 million) to develop alternative oils and fats for the food industry. The biotechnology firm, founded by TalTech bioengineers Petri-Jaan Lahtvee and Nemailla Bonturi last year, aims to replace environmentally depleting oils such as coconut and palm oils with sustainable, full-value alternatives.

ÄIO’s edible fats and oils are produced from agricultural and wood industry side-streams using processes derived from biotech research. The company’s proprietary production technique uses a fermentation process which the company says is similar to brewing beer or raising bread with yeast. During the fermentation process, the company uses what it calls a “red bug” microbe, created and patented by Bonturi. The result, according to ÄIO, is fats rich in healthy fatty acids and antioxidants.

“Our “red bug” cannot turn water into wine, but it can turn sawdust into food,” Bonturi said.

Nordic Foodtech VC, EAS, and other partners provided the funding. Mika Kukkurainen, partner and founder of Nordic Foodtech VC, said the global food industry is constantly searching for sustainable and healthy alternatives to palm oil and coconut oil. “Turning low-value side-streams into something so valuable is very futureproof and has great scalable business potential,” said Kukkurainen.

The company says it will use the funding to increase its production capacity, test products with the food industry, and apply for novel food permits to enter the European market. The company plans to begin industrial-scale production by 2026.

The news of ÄIO’s funding is the latest in an increasingly crowded field of startups looking to develop more sustainable fat alternatives for makers of alternative proteins. Last year CUBIQ raised €5.75 million, just a week after Melt&Marble announced they’d raised a €5 million Seed round to scale up production for its precision fermentation-derived fat alternative. In March, Lypid raised $4 million for its technology that microencapsulates plant oils in water to create spongy fats with high melting points. And last November,  Cultimate Foods announced it had raised a pre-seed €700 thousand to develop cultivated fat for hybrid alt-meat products.

Meala Raises $1.9M to Create Functional Proteins From ‘Home Kitchen’ Ingredients

Israel–based start-up Meala FoodTech announced today it has secured $1.9m in pre-seed funding from investors. The company, which is focused on developing functional proteins from what it says will be clean and recognizable ingredients, received funding from The Kitchen FoodTech Hub (part of the Strauss-Group), and DSM Venturing, the corporate venture arm of Royal DSM. The funding will be used to continue developing Meala’s functional protein platform and move it from lab to pilot scale.

The company’s focus is on developing functional proteins that can achieve the taste and mouthfeel of real meat but do so without a long and exotic-looking ingredient list. While the company doesn’t name names, it’s clearly contrasting the proteins developed with its cleaner-label ingredient platform with those used by companies such as Impossible and Beyond. But unlike those companies, Meala’s focus is B2B, where it will provide functional proteins for other CPG brands creating plant-based meats. In short, it’s hoping to be something akin to a clean-label version of Motif Foodworks.

“There is a significant need in the plant-based industry to effectively reduce undesirable ingredients and clean up labels,” said Hadar Razmovich, CEO and Meala co-founder. “This investment will help us get closer and faster to the market, better address the companies’ specific needs and provide affordable, smarter solutions.”

According to the company, its multi-functional proteins will improve the texture of meat alternatives and make them more realistic while also creating a “more full-bodied flavor” with what it describes as a short list of “home kitchen” ingredients. The company says its proteins will be designed to be used as “binding and gelling agents” with “superior water retention capabilities.” The start-up’s technology can be used to develop functional proteins for a variety of alternative meats, including burgers, sausages, nuggets with egg and fish.

The company plans to use the funding to further develop its platform technology and take it from lab to pilot scale and says it intends to have its products in the US and Europe by 2024.

The company’s positioning definitely feels of the moment, coming at a time when the plant-based industry is doing a bit of soul-searching regarding its approach of the last few years. That said, there’s not a whole lot of detail in the Meala announcement about what exactly its “home kitchen” ingredients will be, and without having tasted meats developed using its ingredients, it’s impossible to know just yet if they will achieve their intended goal. But if they can deliver on their promise to have the best of both worlds – a simple ingredient list and proteins that deliver realistic meat-like flavor – it’s not hard to imagine CPG brands lining up at their door.

Czech Startup Mewery Makes Cultivated Meat with Microalgae

Czech startup Mewery announced today they have created the world’s first cultivated meat prototype using microalgae according to a release sent to The Spoon. The company says it used a hybrid culture medium with microalgae extracts to create cultivated meat consisting of 75% pork and 25% microalgae cells.

Why microalgae? The company says there are several benefits to using the hard-working microorganisms, including eliminating FBS (Fetal Bovine Serum) as a cultivating medium. Mewery says its process also lowers costs and provides additional nutritional benefits, including additional vitamins, antioxidants, minerals, fiber, and essential fatty acids. The company also says its cultivated meat is one hundred percent cellular, contrasting with many prototypes that rely on soy or pea proteins.

Above: Roman Lauš and the Mewery team

Based in the Czech Republic, Mewery was founded by longtime entrepreneur and event producer Roman Lauš. After becoming interested in the nascent cultivated meat space while developing the agenda for the Future Port Prague event in 2018, Lauš eventually decided to create his own company. By 2020, he had assembled a team, and after a couple of years of research and development, they made the company’s first prototype. Now, Lauš and his team aim to have its first consumer-ready products – the first of which will be pork meatballs and pork sausage – on the market in two years.

To get there, the company is seeking additional funding this year to fund continued work on its biobank cell repository and the buildout of large-capacity bioreactors to scale volume.

“In this way, we want to ensure a more or less unlimited source of pig cells, which will move us closer to large-scale production,” said Lauš.

New School Foods Swims Against the Current In Its Approach to Alternative Proteins

In business, the daring entrepreneurs zig when others zag. In the world of plant-based alternative proteins, Chris Bryson, CEO and founder of New School Foods, decided to zig his way into a new approach, introducing a new patented freezing process to create whole cuts of salmon.

New School Foods, based in Toronto, comes out of stealth mode with a strong ambition fueled by research, investment capital, and a mission. As Bryson told The Spoon in a recent interview, companies in the plant-based protein space have primarily focused on small cuts such as nuggets and burgers using a process that uses heat in the extrusion, which precooks the food.

Bryson described how New School differs on both counts.

“We always intended to be a company that focuses on what we call whole cuts, he said. “We see that as sort of the next frontier of alternative protein. “Burgers and nuggets are great, but there’s a much bigger opportunity, and I wanted to work on that. With alternative proteins, if you can create the equivalent of a Tesla for food, it becomes exciting for people to switch and feel like there’s no compromise, and we can create real impact.”

Bryson said that before diving into the company’s approach to alternative proteins, he funded a lot of research, much of which yielded inconclusive results. One, however, hit the jackpot. “One of those projects came up with this complete alternative to extrusion. And it doesn’t use heat to create texture, and it uses cold or freezing to create texture.” And it is with freezing that New School can more easily produce whole cuts and offer healthy fats.

High moisture extrusion, Bryson said, is used in products such as Beyond Burger. As such, the food is precooked and often “uses color tricks” to make the transition more closely resemble an aminal product such as a hamburger.

Another differentiator for New School is its scaffolding.

“We create a mold with empty slots– thousands of these small vertical channels that we fill up, and we turn those vertical channels into protein fibers because it’s a mold. It gives us the flexibility to work with different proteins. And based on the animal that we’re trying to emulate, we can pick proteins that transition or cook at the same temperature that the animal protein does”.

Bryson goes on to say that the company’s focus is to create a salmon that looks and tastes like the fish that swims against the current and provides the “right mouth feel.”

“We spent countless months, if not years, focusing on how we recreate that no feel. And that comes down to recreating muscle fibers. So, our technology allows us to tune the width of the muscle fiber, the length of the muscle fiber, and the resistance of the muscle fiber,” he said. It also provides a platform that can be used for other types of fish, seafood, and alternative proteins in general.

New School aims to have a product commercially ready in 2024, first for restaurants and then for consumers. Armed with $13 million in funding from Lever VC, Hatch, Good Startup, Blue Horizon Ventures, Clear Current Capital, Alwyn Capital, Basecamp Ventures, and Climate Capital, Bryson said the funds would be used to build out a pilot facility in the Toronto area.

Podcast: The Bloomberg Alt-Meat Hullabaloo With Rachel Konrad

In this week’s episode, we catch up with Rachel Konrad, a former journalist who spent the last decade-plus working for Tesla, Impossible Foods, and now the Production Board.

Rachel joins Mike and Carlos Rodela to talk about her background, the recent controversy surrounding Bloomberg’s article declaring plant-based meat a fad, and how she helped Impossible bring food tech to CES in 2019 with the launch of the Impossible 2.0 burger.

New Alt Protein and Bioinnovation Hubs Are Popping Up From NYC to Israel

This week was a big one when it came to incubating the next generation of future food.

Not only did GFI Israel and Technion announce a new Sustainable Protein Research Center (SPRC), but the city of New York also announced it would build a “bioinnovation hub” with $20 million in new funding earmarked from NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.

The SPRC, which Technion and GFI Israel claim is the first of its kind in the world, “will coordinate the collaborative activities of dozens of researchers from more than ten different academic departments at the Technion and with additional universities and companies to address the world’s most pressing challenges of sustainability and human health.”

The new facility will have a 5-year budget of $20 million and will facilitate the recruitment of new faculty members in the field and support “the construction of a building for the Carasso FoodTech Innovation Center.” The new center will purchase and maintain capital equipment and recruit professional technicians and ” fund collaborative seed research and train graduate students and post-docs in related fields.”

Closer to home, the new Center for Planetary Health (C4PH) will be built next to Brooklyn’s Navy Shipyard as part of Newlab, a cross-industry innovation coworking center, and venture studio. The new C4PH will be funded by $20 million allocated as part of the LifeSci NYC initiative, a broad new push that is part of NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ “Working People Agenda.”

Adams commented on the new investment as part of the state of the city address.

“We’re also investing in the jobs of the future,” said Adam. “Last year, Governor Hochul and I announced a new life sciences hub in Kips Bay, which will create 10,000 jobs and $25 billion in economic impact. And this year, the city will kickstart a new effort to become the global center of sustainable biotech.

We will start by opening a first-in-the-nation incubator at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where biotech startups will transform the way we eat, build, and protect our environment. And as we work to create more jobs, we will also help New Yorkers train for the jobs that are in high demand right now — jobs in tech, renewable energy, and nursing.”

At last week’s Tufts Cellular Agriculture Innovation Summit, several speakers pointed to the need for increased government investment in biotechnology innovation and production infrastructure to help fund the next wave of breakthroughs that will help the future food industry leap forward. While the NYC investment may not do anything to solve the need for the billions of funding needed in production capacity capex the alt-meat industry will need in the future, it’s a sign – much like California’s $5 million allocation last year – that local governments are beginning to understand that investment in the alternative protein industry could make their states more competitive – and create more jobs – when these industries begin high-yield production down the road.

Meati Opens Up ‘Mega Ranch’ Production Facility, Plans to Produce “Tens of Millions of Pounds” of Fungi-Based Meat

Meati Foods, a producer of plant-based whole-food protein made from mycelium, announced the opening of its largest-yet production facility in Thornton, Colorado. The 100 thousand foot facility, dubbed the “Mega Ranch,” is expected to hit a production rate that could produce tens of millions of pounds of the startup’s fungi-derived meat product by late 2023.

The funding for the new facility comes in the form of a $150 million Series C raised last year and a recent $22 million extension round. The company’s total funding to date is more than $250 million.

Meati claims the Mega Ranch will be able to match and even exceed the scale of the United States’ largest individual animal-based ranches. The company says the Ranch is vertically integrated, which means it will allow for the growing, harvesting, processing, and packaging of Meati products under one roof.

Meati Foods’ CEO and co-founder, Tyler Huggins, said, “Investors and consumers recognize that Meati is a new, differentiated food. They only need to read our simple ingredient list and taste Meati to recognize that this is the cut-through option people have been waiting for.”

Meati’s product line, called Eat Meati, includes Classic Cutlet, Crispy Cutlet, Classic Steak, and Carne Asada Steak. The company sells them online through its website and through retail and food service partners like Sprouts Farmers Market, Sweetgreen, and Birdcall.

Meati’s announcement is yet another in a long line of alternative protein startups announcing scaled-up production capacity for their products in recent months. Earlier this month, fermentation-focused seafood specialist Aqua Cultured unveiled it has started construction on a new production facility in Chicago, and last month Believer Meats broke ground on what it claims will be the biggest production plant for cultivated meat, producing over 10 thousand tons of cultivated meat when running at capacity.

What’s Next For Cellular Agriculture: 5 Takeaways From Tufts Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day

Pioneers in cellular agriculture came together in Boston last week to discuss the state of the industry – and what it will take to take cell-cultivated products to the next level.

Tufts University’s inaugural Cellular Agriculture Innovation Day featured panel discussions with industry leaders, researchers, and other experts. The panelists reflected on how far the technology to grow meat and other products has come over the last decade, and shared their visions of how that momentum will continue over the next few years.

A decade ago, “you could count the number of people dedicated to cellular agriculture on one hand,” said Isha Datar, executive director of the research nonprofit New Harvest, in a panel discussion at the event.

“To see 10 years go by, and to see 150 companies pop up, so much private investment pop up, lots more people in the academic space – to me, it’s like, ‘okay, the party has been started,’” Datar said.


All eyes on cell culture media

Cellular agriculture has many research and development hurdles to clear in coming years, said Mark Post, chief scientific officer at Mosa Meats, in a panel discussion.

In particular, the industry still needs to work “quite extensively” on the cost-effectiveness – and in particular, the resource efficiency – of its manufacturing processes, Post said.

The biggest cost driver for cell-cultivated products today is culture media: the nutrient-rich material that supports the growth of cells.

According to Andrew Stout, a PhD student focusing on cultivated cell lines and culture media at Tufts University, the cellular agriculture field has already seen success in cutting costs for some culture media components, such as growth factors.

Those components were the “low-hanging fruit” of culture media, Stout said at the event.

Moving forward, researchers in the field will likely address “the next lowest fruit,” such as amino acids and vitamins, he said.


Collaborating to solve key questions

Datar, the executive director at New Harvest, forecast that industry players will increasingly find answers to their questions by working together.

Much of the news from the industry in recent years has concerned individual companies and products – but over the next decade, we’ll hear more about how different companies and other players are working together to “solve [the] puzzle,” Datar said.

In particular, companies collaboratively address the challenge of scaling up using shared facilities, she said.

In 2021, we saw an announcement for one such facility in Europe: the Cultured Food Innovation Hub planned by Swiss flavor manufacturer Givaudan and other partners. The companies planned the Innovation Hub as a space for startups to access shared equipment, enabling more players to innovate in the field at lower cost.


Securing public funding

Bruce Friedrich, president and co-founder of the Good Food Institute, forecast that public funding will play an increasingly important role in helping the industry to address challenges of cost and scale.

In the last three years, governments around the world have already “gone from almost zero to hundreds of millions of dollars” in funding, Friedrich said.

Friedrich laid out a vision of government funding for cellular agriculture that would mirror investments in renewable energy and electric vehicles.

In the U.S., there could be bipartisan support for spending to support the industry, he said – pointing to efforts by the Good Food Institute to communicate with Republican lawmakers about the potential employment and economic benefits of such spending.


Introducing cell-cultivated products to the public

The speakers at the Tufts event also addressed the need to continue improving cell-cultivated products themselves before introducing them to consumers.

For Post, the chief scientific officer at Mosa Meats, one step to improve product quality could be improving the differentiation of muscle and fat tissues.

Academia can help to improve the quality of cell-cultivated products by identifying which genetic features can identify cells that will produce tasty end-products, according to Stout, the PhD student at Tufts University.

According to David Block, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Davis, another task for academia will be to ensure that cell-cultivated products are nutritionally equivalent to their conventional equivalents.

But the industry also has “an opportunity” to take more control over the nutritional quality and safety of its products than conventional agriculture, because cell-cultivated products are grown in much more controlled environments, Block said in a panel discussion at the event.


Moving toward semi-industrialization

The industry has begun to receive its first regulatory stamps of approval, and is “at the verge of getting regulatory approval in a lot of geographies,” according to Post.

In November, UPSIDE Foods became the first company to receive a “no questions” letter from the FDA – meaning the agency determined that the company’s cell-cultivated chicken is safe for consumers.

Eat Just, a San-Francisco startup, became the first company to receive regulatory approval for cell-cultivated meat when the Singapore Food Agency green-lit its cell-cultivated chicken in 2020.

With regulatory clearance in the works, and factories beginning to be built, “we are really getting to the level where [the industry] becomes sort of semi-industrial,” Post said.

But he added: “It will take a long time before [cell-cultivated products] will be a substantial part of markets where eventually we can make an impact on the environment, which is the root of all this.”

Uma Valeti, chief executive officer of UPSIDE Foods, said that it could be between 10 and 30 years before cultivated meat “takes off.”

GOOD Meat Receives Approval in Singapore to Use Serum-Free Media for Cultivated Meat Production

GOOD Meat, the cultivated meat division of Eat Just, announced today that it has received regulatory approval from the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) for the use of serum-free media for the production of cultivated meat.

Many in the industry believe that using animal-free growth media will not only help the cultivated meat industry achieve what is effectively its raison d’être through the severing of reliance on a cruel animal agriculture industry, but it will also lead to greater scalability, lower manufacturing costs, and a more sustainable product. It also paves the way for the production of larger quantities of real chicken made from cells.

GOOD Meat had previously obtained approval from SFA for its first chicken product in November 2020, and subsequent approval for new formats of its poultry in November 2021. With the latest regulatory approval for serum-free cultivation media, Eat Just says its cell ag meat division will soon transition to a more efficient and favorable production process.

According to the company, its chicken has been featured on menus at restaurants, in hawker stalls, and via food delivery. And now, beginning this month, diners can reserve weekly tables to try out Good Meat’s cultivated chicken at Huber’s Butchery, a Singaporean producer and supplier of meat products.

The company is also working on a Singapore production facility with production partner ABEC. According to Good Meat, the new facility will hold the largest bioreactor in the cultivated meat industry and will be able to use the serum-free production process for its cultivated meat when it opens next year.

“Not too long ago, observers thought removing serum was a major limiting step to scaling cultivated meat,” said Josh Tetrick, co-founder and CEO of Eat Just. “I could not be prouder of our team for doing just that and receiving approval to commercialize it this week. It’s yet another step forward for our company, the cultivated meat industry, and the health of our planet.”

This week has been a big one for animal-free growth media. On Monday, Multus announced they had raised $9.5 million to fund the production of a growth media production plant. And yesterday, cultivated meat pioneer Mosa Meat announced they had been able to grow cultivated fat without fetal-bovine serum.

Multus Biotechnology Raises $9.5m Series A To Build Growth Media Production Plant

Multus Biotechnology, a UK-based startup, has announced the close of a $9.5 million Series A investment round to build a growth media production facility. The funding includes an equity-free grant of $2.5 million from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. The round was led by Mandi Ventures, with key investors including SOSV, Big Idea Ventures, SynBioVen, and Asahi Kasei Corp.

With new funding in hand, Multus plans to build a growth media production plant in the UK that it hopes will accelerate the cultivated meat industry towards price parity with affordable food-safe growth media at commercial scale. The London-based startup will also accelerate product development in advanced growth media formulations and food-grade raw materials. This week’s funding follows a $2.2 million raise in 2021 and the launch of the company’s first product, Proliferum® M, an all-in-one solution to eliminate the use of foetal bovine serum in cell culture.

Last week, the Spoon discussed the new funding round and the company’s plans with Multus CEO and cofounder Cai Linton.

Tell us about Multus platform.

“At Multus we combine novel ingredient discovery with intelligent formulation design to create high performance growth media suited for the cellular agriculture industry. For example, we use precision fermentation and computational protein design to make growth factors affordable and unlock capabilities in growth media design.”

Like many in this space, Multus is focused on creating animal-free growth media. Tell us about your thinking here and how your platform gets there

Growth factors have historically been a leading cost-driver in serum-free growth media. Another area we are investing heavily is nutrient-rich plant-derived ingredients that are food-safe, affordable and scalable using well-established food-manufacturing practices. These complex ingredients allow us to design high-performance growth media for a variety of cultivated meat-relevant cell types with no animal serum and a clear route to scale. To capture the complexity of a large ingredient library and new cell types and performance objectives, we combine machine learning with high-throughput formulation screening to optimise our growth media efficiently in our MediOp platform.

How did the Multus founding team get started and how did you decide what problem to tackle?

We have taken the challenge of designing affordable, food-safe growth media for the cellular agriculture industry to be an engineering challenge. At Imperial College London, I met my co-founders – Kevin with a background in data-science, Reka with synthetic biology and regenerative medicine, and myself with bioengineering – to combine data science and engineering principles to biology and build enabling technology to accelerate the cellular agriculture industry’s time to market and time to price parity and scale.

There is no silver bullet in growth media. Every aspect from amino acids and growth factors to the formulation optimisation and manufacturing is considered in our interdisciplinary approach. With growth factors, we realised in 2020 that similar proteins are already produced at much larger scale and lower price points than we will ever need in the cellular agriculture industry by companies in the industrial enzyme industry. The difficulty with growth factors is that they inherently have a short half-life due to their function as cell-to-cell signalling molecules in dynamic systems (i.e. humans/animals). When the system is stable (i.e. a large bioreactor), the rapid degradation of growth factors creates an expensive problem. Therefore, we decided to utilise readily scalable and affordable technology in precision fermentation and focus our innovation in computational protein design to create biodesigned growth factors with enhanced potency and prolonged activity.

Can you tell us more about how you are using computational biology and machine learning to solve the problem of growth media.

We also recognise scientific understanding of cell metabolism in the new cell types used in cultivated meat is not sufficient to prompt rational design of growth media, especially when using complex or food-grade raw materials. As such, we have turned growth media optimisation into a data-science problem by capturing large amounts of data on cell behaviour and using computational modelling and machine learning to analyse the data and efficiently find the best combinations of ingredients to maximise performance.

As time goes on, we are accumulating more and more data with different ingredients and different cell types to continue improving the efficiency of our platform and thus the control we have over cell growth. One of the unique benefits of our MediOp platform is that we can efficiently customise growth media to meet multiple objectives in a short time-period. This will be especially important when large-scale production of cultivated meat puts constrains on access to raw materials and rapid re-formulation becomes an important business need Multus will be able to meet.

Tell us your plans post-funding.

To bring our novel ingredient discovery and intelligent formulation design, we are investing in a first-of-its-kind production facility to make food-safe growth media at commercial scale with non-dilutive funding from Innovate UK through the EIC Accelerator. We recently announced we achieved ISO22000 certification in our production lab, a major step forward in becoming the all-in-one solution and preferred supplier of growth media to the cellular agriculture industry. Our facility is being built in the UK and will be able to support several companies scaling from bench to pilot, and pilot to commercial manufacturing.

Aqua Cultured Foods Building Manufacturing Plant to Commercialize Fermentation-Derived Seafood

Chicago-based food tech start-up Aqua Cultured Foods has begun building a new manufacturing facility for its plant-based seafood products in the West Loop area of the city. The facility, nearly three times the size of Aqua’s current base, is already food-grade and requires minimal upgrades to enable the company to scale production of its fermentation-derived protein.

According to the company, their production methods use standard food production equipment, allowing quicker buildout. Aquaculture says its production methods are also space-efficient, comparing their usage of space as being similar to vertical farming.

“This move is the final step on the road to commercialization of our alt-seafood, and it’s what we and our supporters have been waiting for,” said Anne Palermo, CEO of Aqua Cultured Food.

Unlike many alt-seafood companies creating more straightforward plant-based analogs, Aqua Cultured utilizes biomass fermentation to grow its protein. The company uses its proprietary fungi to produce seafood analogs such as tuna, calamari, and shrimp.

Aqua Cultured Foods says it is currently holding tasting events with strategic partners including restaurants and plans to roll out its products in the second quarter of this year.  

No Meat Factory Raises $42 Million to Expand Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing Capacity

No Meat Factory, a leading plant-based alternative protein manufacturer, announced today that it has closed a Series B funding round, raising $42 million USD. The funding round was led by new investor Tengelmann Growth Partners, with participation from existing investor Emil Capital Partners (ECP). The company plans to use the funding to expand its production footprint in North America and build out its manufacturing capabilities to service the global market, increasing access to affordable alternative proteins for mainstream consumers.

No Meat Factory will use its new BRC-certified facilities in British Columbia to produce plant-based alternative protein products for its brand partners. Products will include meat alternatives for convenience products like nuggets and hamburgers and whole-muscle alternatives. Its second production facility, which will begin operations in early 2023, will increase production capacity and provide additional manufacturing capabilities for plant-based deli and sausage alternatives.

“The traction No Meat Factory has experienced in just a few short years is evidence that consumers want greater access to plant-based alternative proteins and brands are looking for ways to deliver quality at an affordable price,” said Dieter Thiem, CEO and cofounder of No Meat Factory. “With this latest funding round, we are excited to not only expand our operations to meet the needs of our partners, but to take advantage of the support and expertise of our investors as we expand our footprint globally.”

No Meat Factory will also continue to make significant investments in its global research and development organization that focuses on commercializing the latest innovations in alternative protein.

“No Meat Factory has an exceptional founding team with decades of experience in the plant-based industry, and we are thrilled to come on board to support the company’s next phase of growth,” said Patrick Schaich, Investment Partner at Tengelmann Growth Partners.

The funding is notable because it comes at a time when the plant-based meat industry has been struggling and has seen overall VC capital going into the space decline significantly. One factor in No Meat’s Factory’s favor may be its cofounder team, which includes Dieter Thiem, who was the former president of plant-based meat manufacturing company Flora Protein (which sold to Garden Protein) and COO Leon Bell, who was previously with ADM, where he helped launch the company’s plant-based meat solutions.