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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

plant-based meat

Scoop: Seattle Food Tech Raises $1M to Jumpstart Plant-Based Meat Manufacturing

You’ve heard of Impossible Foods, you’ve heard of Beyond Meat — but there’s a new plant-based meat company on the scene. Seattle Food Tech launched in 2017 and recently raised a $1 million seed round, led by Fifty Years and Blue Horizon.

The nascent company hopes to produce plant-based meat at a scale and price comparable to traditional meat. In February, they finished developing their first product: a “chicken” nugget made of textured wheat, oil, chicken flavoring, cornstarch, and corn breading. What sets the product above its humble ingredients and makes it so good, according to founder and CEO Christie Lagally, is how it’s processed.

“It’s really all about the processing,” she told The Spoon. In order to make plant-based meat at scale and at a price competitive with meat, plant-based food companies have to develop intensive manufacturing technology specialized to their product.

This is the big way that Seattle Food Tech is disrupting the meat — heck, even the plant-based meat — industry. Along with several partners and equipment suppliers, Lagally is working on developing specialized machines for plant-based meat production. Essentially, she wants to industrialize the meat alternative industry.

At the moment, the “nuggets” are made through a contract manufacturer. However, the end goal of Seattle Food Tech is to start a facility specifically designed to manufacture plant-based products on a large scale. If they succeed, Lagally believes that it would be the first and only company to do so.

Seattle Food Tech also distinguishes itself from other plant-based meat companies in its go to market strategy. While Impossible Foods goes after restaurants and Beyond Meat sells on supermarket shelves, the Seattle-based company plans to market their product wholesale to institutional dining halls, such as school and hospital cafeterias.

By opting not to sell their nuggets as a CPG, Seattle Food Tech would be able to offer them at roughly the same cost as meat — around $2 per serving. Lagally says that eventually, once they get their volumes up, they might consider putting their products in large grocery stores, such as Walmart and Costco.

They hope to have their nuggets in schools and hospital dining halls by fall of 2018. Next up, they want to tackle “chicken” strips, which, along with nuggets, are two of the most eaten low-cost chicken products. This is a tougher mechanical lift than the nuggets, since replacing the strip will require extrusion to mimic the texture.

Lagally said that Seattle Food Tech will use their funding to hire staff and continue developing specialized manufacturing equipment.

“Fundamentally we can’t replace meat if it’s not convenient, good tasting, priced well, and widely available,” said Lagally. To do that, Seattle Food Tech will need some very innovative manufacturing technology — and some very good-tasting nuggets.

Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio Makes a Titanic Investment in Pea-Protein Burgers

Finding “fake” meat isn’t a problem these days. Grocery stores are packed with the stuff. The bodega around the block sells it. Hell, even Ikea introduced a vegan Swedish meatball in response to customer feedback about healthier café food.

Trouble is, most of these options are poor substitutes for the real deal, and they’re not doing much to persuade the everyman to go vegetarian or vegan.

Which brings us to Leonardo DiCaprio.

This week, the Hollywood star and active environmentalist announced his involvement as an investor in Beyond Meat, a startup that’s using pea protein to create burger patties. Bill Gates is also an investor, and the move makes sense for Leo, whose list of environmentally focused causes and companies keeps growing. He’s already an investor in LoveTheWild, a sustainable seafood company, as well as plant-based snack maker Hippeas. And there’s his own foundation, too. “Shifting from animal meat to the plant-based meats developed by Beyond Meat is one of the most powerful measures someone can take to reduce their impact on our climate,” he said in a statement.

He’s actually been giving Beyond Meat feedback on their products since the company’s earliest days. But the financial backing should help Beyond as it moves to get its products into more locations and convince the general populace that alternative-meat can maintain taste as well as your reputation at the tailgate party.

To that end, company website claims their burger, “looks, cooks, and satisfies so much like beef that it’s in the meat section of grocery stores.” One reporter went as far as to document her experience cooking and eating a Beyond burger, and had mostly pleasing results.

Where a lot of meat alternatives use grain, soy, or seitan for their products, Beyond, along with a few other companies, looks to provide an option that’s still rich in things like iron and protein, and, most important, mimics the taste and texture of real beef.

That latter fact could prove to be a really big differentiator as the food industry continues to search for ways of making the most iconic American dish more sustainable. There’s overwhelming evidence that beef production is irrevocably hurting the environment. The EWG estimates that beef (along with lamb) puts out 10 to 40 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as grains and vegetables. Meanwhile, methane from cattle generates 20 percent of all U.S. methane emissions.

Despite all that, beef remains in high-demand. And that’s what makes companies like Beyond Meat potentially so exciting. They’re not just producing another version of the veggie patty; they’re trying to stay sustainable and satisfy public tastes at the same time. Their products are an actual alternative, rather than a mediocre substitute. Even TGI Fridays thinks so.

Impossible Foods is another company experimenting with plant-based beef substitutes. Their mission is similar to Beyond’s: provide a more sustainable way for people to enjoy meat. They also announced $75 million in funding earlier this year.

Impossible is currently focused on getting into more restaurants, which leaves the retail sector mostly to Beyond. The Beyond Meat burger is the first of the company’s products to sit alongside actual meat at the grocery store, which is another big step towards convincing skeptical consumers that meatless, er, meat is an enticing alternative.

And that’s probably going to be the biggest challenge for companies building a business model on alternative-meat. Until consumers can be motivated to change their outlook and behavior, meat substitutes, whether plant-based or made in a lab, will get bypassed by more consumers than not.

Of course, history is full of technologies and innovations that were initially met with skepticism and are now all the rage. (Hi, Tesla.) The same may prove true for startups like Beyond Meat. And getting high-profile celebrities like Leo involved is definitely a start when it comes to influencing consumer choices.