This week direct to consumer darling Daily Harvest launched its first meat substitute. Called Crumbles, the new frozen food product features 13 grams of protein per serving and can be added to tacos, soups, or pasta sauces.
Not surprisingly, for a brand that built a name for itself with millennials craving a healthy alternative to meal kits and uninspiring choices in the frozen food aisle, Crumbles features a pretty simple ingredient list. The French Lentil + Leek Crumbles, which Daily Harvest says tastes like a “Herby Lentil Burger,” has five ingredients: Lentils, butternut squash, hemp seed, quinoa, cremini, and tara. Compare that to the ingredient list of, say, an Impossible Burger, and it’s a lot shorter and a lot more likely to include ingredients you recognize.
And that seems to be the point. While companies like Impossible have chased realistic meat flavor in their alt-meats by using genetically-engineered heme and other science-forward ingredients, Daily Harvest has taken an alternative tack: create something that packs the same protein punch as meat, is “meat-ish” in its savoriness and mouthfeel, while not trying to fool you into thinking its meat.
I asked Daily Harvest CEO Rachel Drori if this was intentional.
“When we launch something new, we always go back to our main goal: to help people eat more real, minimally processed fruits and vegetables every day,” Drori said via email. “Instead of trying to mimic meat or engineer an alternative in a lab, Daily Harvest cooked up a new collection built entirely on nuts, seeds, legumes, and vegetables.”
In a way, it feels like a return to alt-meat 1.0 when products like the BocaBurger offered vegans and reducetarians an option besides a salad or veggie skillet at their local restaurant. But Daily Harvest takes things even further, creating a meat substitute that can act as a savory substitute for meat but doesn’t pretend to be meat at all.
There’s a particular genius to this approach because not only does help avoid any uncanny valley vibes for consumers, but it also simply tells us we don’t need meat. Crumbles, says Daily Harvest, is just as good and will give you the same satisfaction.
While Crumbles probably won’t convince hard-core carnivores to switch over, I think it could provide those who want to reduce their meat intake but aren’t excited about the current crop of analogs trying to mimic the taste of meat a potential solution.
For Daily Harvest, the Crumbles launch comes six months after their last funding round, a $77 million raise. At the time, the company was valued at $1.1 billion, in large part to the company’s strong sales growth. With a meat substitute arrow now its quiver, Daily Harvest has created another reason for potential investors to like it as it eyes an eventual IPO.
