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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Big Food

Daring Foods Brings ‘Plant-based Chicken 2.0’ to U.S., Gets $10M Investment

Yesterday, Daring Foods, a startup that makes plant-based chicken, announced it is partnering with foodservice protein supplier Rastelli Foods Group to enter the U.S. market. Rastelli will invest $10 million in Daring in a deal that’s part finance and part infrastructure. The supplier will also have the exclusive rights to sell Daring Foods’ products to restaurants and retailers.

Daring Foods was founded three years ago in Scotland as a clean-label alternative to one of the world’s favorite meats: chicken. The startup began selling their Daring Pieces, which contain 14 grams of protein per serving, in the U.K. earlier this year. They have since relocated to be based out of New York and are pivoting to focus on the U.S. as their core market in the wake of the Rastelli deal.

Daring makes its bite-size signature meatless chicken from only five ingredients: soy, water, sunflower oil, salt, and natural flavoring. Daring’s co-founder and CEO Ross Mackay believes that this clean-label approach, along with their product’s realistic taste, will help the company stand out amongst competitors. “It’s plant-based chicken 2.0,” he said.

The deal with Rastelli will also certainly help. Mackay explained that Daring can tap into the distributor’s nationwide connections in the U.S. to ramp up and forge distribution partnerships very quickly.

Quite quickly, as it turns out. Daring Foods will begin rolling out its Daring Pieces nationwide in February 2020. Mackay told me that Daring is also developing new flavor profiles for its Pieces, including lemon & herb, as well as larger breast cuts. 

Chicken seems to be the next big faux meat, and plenty of companies are jostling to become the Beyond Meat of bird (including Beyond Meat itself). Seattle’s Rebellyous sells its plant-based nuggets wholesale to cafeterias, and NUGGS delivers its meat-free nuggets directly to consumers’ doorsteps. Swiss startup Planted makes plant-based chicken from four ingredients, though those won’t be available in the U.S. anytime soon.

Big Meat is also getting in on the alternative chicken craze: Tyson debuted its Raised & Rooted meatless chicken nuggets earlier this year, and Purdue’s new Chicken Plus is a blend of chicken and plant protein.

It’s too early to say if Daring’s products will taste good enough to stand out in the crowd of plant-based chicken options out there. But with the company set to enter the U.S. market next year, we’ll certainly have ample opportunity to put them to the test.

Nestlé is Launching Stouffer’s and Digiorno Products made with Awesome Plant-Based Beef Grounds

Today Nestlé announced it would launch two new products featuring its Sweet Earth Awesome Grounds plant-based beef. The Digiorno Rising Crust Meatless Supreme and Stouffer’s Meatless Lasagna come from two brands in Nestlé’s portfolio.

Sweet Earth was acquired by Nestlé in 2017. The company’s plant-based Awesome Burger and Awesome Grounds, both made with pea protein, launched in U.S. supermarkets this October. Now it seems Nestlé is experimenting with where else it can put Awesome to work.

Honestly, I’m surprised this sort of vertical integration hasn’t happened earlier with alternative protein. It’s a win-win for Nestlé. The Swiss CPG giant can leverage the popularity of its frozen products to give its newer plant-based meat brand a wider audience. In turn, it can use its new meat-free products to tap into the flexitarian market and attract new vegetarian consumers.

Considering how crowded retail shelves are becoming with plant-based burgers — with startups, grocery stores, and major corporations all launching their own alt-meat products — Nestlé is smart to cross-pollinate to try and give the Sweet Earth brand a leg up.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other Big Food brands follow suit. For example, Kellogg’s could put its Morningstar Incogmeato ground “meat” in a new line of breakfast sandwiches. Similarly, Unilever could add plant-based offerings from the Vegetarian Butcher, which the corporation bought last year, into any number of its food brands.

Both the frozen pizza and lasagna will be available on Amazon Fresh in Spring 2020. If that seems too long to wait to get your mitts on some meatless microwaveable lasagna, you can visit TryItMeatless.com tomorrow (Dec. 5) and enter to win a chance to try them before they hit the market.

Do Consumers Trust Big Food to Make Their Plant-Based Meat? Does It Matter?

When we released our story about Nestlé launching a meat-like, meatless patty dubbed the “Incredible Burger” last week, it sparked some… backlash from our audience. (To be clear: We welcome comments!) Here are a few examples:

https://twitter.com/rebarrett/status/1079005375674834946

Basically, some readers were skeptical that they could trust Nestlé — which, like most Big Food companies, has a less-than-perfect reputation — to make plant-based food sustainably. These reactions made us at the Spoon wonder: as an eating trend (like plant-based food) goes mainstream, will consumers buy products regardless of the company that makes them?

At first, maybe not so much. During a conversation about the evolving plant-based meat market, The Spoon founder Mike Wolf speculated that earlier in the adoption curve people tend to be more value-driven, seeking out certain products motivated by the ethics of the manufacturing process, the sustainability quotient, or the reputation of the parent company. Early adopters often put more value in the ethics and mission of a product, like how Impossible Foods is out to save the planet by reducing meat consumption.

As Big Food companies like Nestlé concentrate on the meat alternatives space, early adopters might be skeptical of their motives and, therefore, their products. However, as you get to what Wolf calls “the Costco consumer” — one who’s more driven by more by price value than by, well, values — the company behind the product might not mean quite as much. These mainstream consumers aren’t buying the product to make a values statement: rather, they’re selecting it because of its reduced cost, good taste, or maybe even branding. In general, they won’t boycott a product because they don’t like the ethics of the company who makes it.

This sort of apathetic consumerism might grate with the more woke shoppers. But in a weird way, it shouldn’t. Young startups are all well and good, and have been doing a great job drumming up consumer interest in meat-like meat alternatives. However, if plant-based (and, down the road, cell-based) meat has a prayer of actually disrupting the industrial meat industry, Big Food pretty much needs to be involved.

Of course, how they get involved is important, too — in no way should Big Food companies get carte blanche. They shouldn’t use their sizeable market muscles to force out startups who are on a mission, or stifle new companies. Environmental concerns are also top of mind: plants may be more sustainable than meat, but Nestlé still has to be conscious the makings its ingredients, manufacturing processes, and packaging as sustainable as possible.

Tyson Foods has a 5 percent stake in Beyond Meat. (Photo: Beyond Meat.)

All this to say, some people — especially early adopters — might not like how Big Food companies entering the meat-like meat alternatives market with their Incredible burgers and vegan hot dogs. That’s perfectly alright. These objectors don’t have to get their plant-based protein from major CPG companies; there are plenty of other delicious options which, at least from the outside, seem to have the ethical upper hand.

But giant CPG companies like Nestlé have the manufacturing power, global reach, and distribution channels that can help plant-based meat go from (relatively) niche product to mainstream food staple: one that costs the same as or less than conventional meat. In order for alterna-meats to really catch on, they have to be within reach for the “Costco consumer.” And that pretty much inevitably means working with Big Food — even Nestlé.

Do you agree? Is getting Big Food involved the only way that meat alternatives can go mainstream? Sound off in the comments or on Twitter @TheSpoonTech! 

Nestlé Introduces Plant-Based “Incredible Burger” to Disrupt Beyond and Impossible

Nestlé SA is hoping to carve out a piece of the plant-based pie — er, burger.

Today Bloomberg reported that the Swiss food company will launch a meat-free patty modestly called the “Incredible Burger” (not to be confused with the Impossible Burger) under its Garden Gourmet brand. The burger will be made of soy and wheat protein, and will join Garden Gourmet‘s meat-free lineup, which already includes smoked sausages, nuggets, cheeseburgers, and schnitzel. It’s expected to head to market in spring of 2019.

This announcement isn’t especially surprising. Nestlé is one of several Big Food companies investing more heavily in plant-based foods, taking advantage of growing consumer demand for vegetarian and vegan products. It isn’t even the first meat-free play by Nestlé: last year the corporation acquired meat-free company Sweet Earth and recently bought a majority stake of plant-based food company Terrafertil.

However, the Incredible Burger is the first notable Big Food effort to compete directly with meat-free products meant to look, cook, and bleed like the real thing. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods — we’re looking at you. These startups have a lot of name recognition and are basically synonymous with the new wave of plant-based “meat.” Comparatively, Nestlé is late to the game.

But is it too late? It depends where Nestlé focuses their efforts. Impossible and Beyond may have a hold on the U.S. market, but they haven’t expanded much outside of the U.S. (yet). Nestlé would be smart to concentrate on the European market, where, despite several competitors like Moving Mountains and Naturli’ Foods, there’s still plenty of room for it to carve out its own space in the plant-based meat market. Given Nestlé’s size, it already has scale, manufacturing, and sales channels it can leverage to expand quickly. However, Beyond is set to go public in 2019, so it could theoretically raise enough money to present a challenge to Big Food players like Nestlé — or at least scare them a bit.

In the end, the plant-based meat market isn’t a zero-sum game. Demand for meaty meatless foods is widely predicted to grow over the next year, and Europe especially has a huge appetite for plant-based protein. It may be late to the game, but Nestlé’s new burger will still likely see “incredible” success.