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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

alternative proteins

Beyond Meat and Fresh n’ Lean Team Up to Do Meal Delivery

Right on the heels of its much-publicized IPO, Beyond Meat has announced a new retail partnership. Meal delivery service Fresh n’ Lean has announced the addition of Beyond Meat to its online menu, providing yet-another retail path for the alt-protein giant to tread.

Fresh n’ Lean specializes in healthy meals it preps and delivers to your door, sort of like a meal kit without all the work. Customers subscribe to a weekly meal plan to get ready-made meals that just need to be popped in the oven or microwave to complete. The menu, which rotates weekly, offers several different plans, from Keto to low carb to its Performance line, for which it’s partnered with several high-profile athletes. Customers can also order items a la carte.

Beyond Meat patties will be available via the service in bulk or as part of a plant-based version of the aforementioned performance line. It appears Fresh n’ Lean is betting hard on the popularity of Beyond on its menu, with company CEO Thomas Asseo saying in a press release that the company will sell 100,000 Beyond Meat patties in 2019. Good thing Beyond fixed its product shortage issue that was hampering supply and demand a little while back.

Fresh n’ Lean isn’t the first meal kit-like company Beyond has worked with. In April, Beyond announced a partnership with meal-delivery service Trifecta, who also emphasizes health and fitness in its menus.

With the plant-based meat sector poised to explode this year, alt-meat products from major players like Beyond and Impossible are becoming a common option these days on menus and in grocery store aisles. Impossible, who was just valued at $2 billion, has invaded the quick-service restaurant space and is now available at White Castle, Red Robin, Qdoba and, soon, Burger King.

Beyond, too, is in QSRs, including Carl’s Jr. and Del Taco. It’s also maintained a significant retail presence over the last couple years, with products in grocery stores like Whole Foods and Publix. While direct-to-consumer meal delivery is a relatively new area for plant-based proteins, I expect we’ll see both Beyond and Impossible making their way online to more services’ menus throughout the rest of the year.

Fresh n’ Lean’s plant-based Performance meals will launch in summer 2019.

InnovoPro Raises $4.25M to Bulk Up its Chickpea Protein

You’re hard-pressed to find a space undergoing more innovation right now than protein. Long gone are the days of steak and eggs being the best way to protein up. In addition to soy, whey, wheat, pea and even cricket-based protein varietals, there is also chickpeas.

Israel-based InnovoPro announced yesterday that it has raised a $4.25 million Series A funding round to power up production of its vegan chickpea protein powder. The round was led by Migros, Switzerland’s largest retailer, and Erel Margalit of Jerusalem Venture Partners.

InnovoPro says that its product, CP-Pro 70 chickpea protein, is Non-GMO, is not listed as an allergen, and is soy, dairy and gluten-free. The company also says its product can be used in a variety of hot or cold applications like egg-free mayonnaise, vegan ice cream, or vegan burgers.

Getting more protein in your diet can be fraught with ethical and environmental hurdles. Meat consumption isn’t great for the planet, while soy, almond and whey derivatives have their own negative environmental impacts as well. InnovoPro says that its production of chickpea protein “is green, clean and eco-friendly.” (It also doesn’t contain, you know, insects, which might be a turn off for some many people.)

Regardless of whether that eco claim turns out to be completely true, InnovoPro is hitting the market at a good time. Plant-based food sales grew more than 20 percent over the past year, hitting $3.3 billion. In addition to the environmental and health reasons people may have moving to more of a plant-based diet, the plant-based products themselves have also gotten more palatable and delicious. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods both make an excellent, plant-based “burger,” Seattle Food Tech creates a convincing “chicken nugget” made from wheat protein, and Exo makes a protein bar made from crickets.

In addition to competition from other forms of protein, InnovoPro will need to fend off other established rivals in the same space, as Nutriati and ProEarth are already in the the chikpea protein biz.

Can InnovoPro carve out it’s own market amidst all this competition? We’ll know soon enough as the first products made with InnovoPro’s protein will hit the market next year.

Beyond Meat’s Sausage Patties are Amazing, and a Smart Play for Breakfast Business

The first thing fans of Beyond Meat (of whom I am one) should know is that the company knows their product is hard to find and they are working on it. Beyond Meat just brought on a second production facility in Missouri to help fill the empty aisles at your local grocery store (except for you, England — sorry!).

The second thing fans of Beyond Meat should know is that its forthcoming sausage patty is, to this writer, the best product the company has created so far. It’s still in development with no announced release date, but after tasting it at the Beyond Meat R&D facility in El Segundo yesterday I’m convinced this product is a game changer in the alterna-meat category. In fact, I think it could bring in a whole new line of business for the company. But more on that in a minute.

Inside the Beyond Meat HQ, you can see the real science behind fake meat. PhDs in lab coats run samples of pea proteins through microscopes, while others try to replicate aromatic meat molecules from the plant world, while still others put patties in a machine that replicates chewing (or biting — two very different things) to test for elasticity. The team there is constantly iterating and running tests to make its plant-based products more meat-like.

Beyond breakfast is served
(photo: Chris Albrecht).
The flavor test to see how people identify sweet, sour, salty and umami
The triangle test, where people try to pick out the one that isn’t llike the others
The Beyond brats, while delicious were a little too perfect
The Beyond burger piled high
Meat-like texture
Frying up the fake sausage

The Beyond Meat tour featured a stop in its kitchen, where the company’s chefs whipped up some their burgers, brats and sausage patties for me to try. These were high-end creations piled with truffles, carmelized onions, pickles, and a variety of delectable sauces. And while all were delicious, the sausage patty really stood out.

Made from peas, mung beans, brown rice and sunflower seeds, the patty faithfully recreated the experience of eating a sausage biscuit from McDonald’s. And I mean that as high praise. It had nice peppery tones that gave the patty’s flavor some depth, the right color and smell, and a crust that gave it that slight crunch. To be honest, it’s a much better simulacra than the Beyond brats, which, while good, were over-engineered to the point of feeling synthetic.

Getting the patty right isn’t just about flavor, though. For Beyond Meat it also means entering into a new category: breakfast foods. Right now, the company offers plenty of options for lunch and dinner; the addition of the sausage patty could lead to people eating Beyond products multiple times a day. (Perhaps a Beyond sausage patty would go well with some JUST plant-based eggs in the morning.)

The Beyond rep didn’t provide a timeline for the patty’s release, but my guess is that it probably won’t be until next year, given that the company is still wresting with its existing supply issues and expanding availability for its sausage brats line.

For fans of Beyond Meat though, the wait will be worth it.