Motif Foodworks, a company that develops plant-based meat alternative ingredients, has continued its expansion into finished product formats with the debut of its food service portfolio later this month at the National Restaurant Association show.
The company says the portfolio, which includes alt pork (PorkWorks), beef (Plant-Based Ground and Motif BeefWorks, Plant-Based Burger Patties and Grounds) and chicken (ChickenWorks), will be available to food service providers later in 2023. The products are an evolution of their initial steps into the food product prototypes it started testing in 2022 under slightly different brand names and came just a month after the company dabbled in a direct-to-consumer trial.
The move comes despite the company’s recent insistence that they are still primarily a B2B player set on designing next-generation food ingredients for other brands. After the launch of its D2C trial last month, company CEO Mike Leonard told Food Navigator that the company is still a B2B company and they don’t intend to develop a consumer-facing brand of its own.
As appetites for late-round alternative protein investments cool, it looks like Motif continues to look for ways to accelerate its pathway toward revenue. The company, which laid off an unspecified number of employees last summer, has already raised $343 million and would likely have difficulty raising another significant round in the current environment. In addition to its continued expansion into finished products, the company expanded into bioprocessing services earlier this year and showed its openness to platform flexibility by expanding into molecular farming in a partnership with Ingredientwerks.
The expansion into a fully fleshed-out end product portfolio comes at an interesting time for Motif, as the company continues its fight with Impossible over patents which started last year when Impossible filed suit over patent infringement in March of 2022. Motif responded by challenging the validity of Impossible’s patents but endured a setback in October when the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board affirmed Impossible’s patent. The legal battle continues, with the trial set to begin in January 2025.
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