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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

seattle food tech

Rebellyous Develops Patent-Pending Production System That Puts Plant-Based Meat at Price Parity With Animal Meat

Seattle-based plant-based meat startup Rebellyous Foods has announced they have developed a new patent-pending production system prototype that can produce plant-based meat at price parity with traditional meat.

The company claims the new system, which it calls the Mock 1S, will eventually reduce the cost of plant-based meat manufacturing by 95% through a combination of workforce reduction through automation, reduced energy consumption, and a 90% reduction in waste, and other improvements.

What makes the new Mock 1S system more efficient than traditional plant-based meat manufacturing? According to Rebellyous CEO Christie Lagally, the system is custom-designed for making plant-based meat, whereas traditionally, plant-based meat manufacturers utilize conventional food processing infrastructure that isn’t designed for the job.

“If you walk into a typical plant-based meat production facility, it would be exactly the same equipment as you would see in a typical meat processing facility,” said Lagally.

According to Lagally, plant-based meat production plants today utilize bowl choppers, tumblers, and conveyor belts that combine to texturize dry protein, emulsify the oils, water, and starch, and eventually mix it all together. With the Mock 1S, she says the system performs “just-in-time hydration” and emulsifies and mixes the dough at the right temperature in one automated process flow, all without using conveyor belts or wasted steps.

Lagally, who is a former Boeing engineer, had the vision for re-inventing plant-based meat manufacturing ever since she founded the company as Seattle Food Tech back in 2017. With this week’s announcement, she believes they’ve reached a significant milestone that will help her company to scale production of the company’s plant-based chicken and offer it at prices that are the same as you’d find from the likes of Tyson or other big-meat producers. Longer-term, she believes the system they have developed will allow them to produce their much cheaper than traditional factory-farmed animal meat products.

When I asked her if she planned to eventually offer her system to others to help them scale production, she said they might eventually go down that path, but for now, they’re happy to use it for their product.

“It’s not off the table. But I’ll tell you, that’s not our first goal. Our first goal is to deploy. We just deployed this new system, so we’ll start using it to make cost-competitive plant-based chicken we’ll scale it up.”

Lagally told me that with this milestone in the books, the company is now in fund-raising mode to help invest in scale-up of their production capability. The company plans on implementing the next-generation Mock system (the Mock 2) in their current production facility and begin to look for a new location in 2023 where they can ramp up production to meet the growing demand for their product.

And just how big is that demand currently?

“We are now in almost 600 retail locations. We will be announcing some new retail locations and about a month. We are serving 46 school districts ranging from northern Washington to the southern tip of California.”

While Lagally says they aren’t ready to show the Mock 1 off publicly – they currently have 5 patents pending for the system – you can see a walkthrough tour The Spoon took of the Rebellyous plant last year here to get a peak of their early thinking about how to reinvent plant-based meat manufacturing.

Seattle Food Tech, Maker of Plant-Based Nuggets, Rebrands as Rebellyous

Today Seattle Food Tech, a startup that makes and sells plant-based chicken nuggets for the foodservice industry, announced it is rebranding as Rebellyous.

“Now that the company is pretty well established and we have a product that’s resonating, we feel like we’ve defined ourselves,” Rebellyous’ CEO and founder Christie Lagally told me on the phone this morning. “[The rebrand] is an opportunity to give our success a name.”

Founded in 2017, Rebellyous makes vegan chicken nuggets from ingredients like soy and wheat protein. By focusing on B2B foodservice sales and scalable manufacturing (Lagally is a former Boeing engineer), the startup’s goal is to sell their plant-based nuggets for the same price as chicken. They’re projecting consistent price parity with chicken nuggets in roughly two years. Rebellyous has raised just over $2 million in funding so far.

While the name Seattle Food Tech may accurately describe the startup’s goals — to use technology to affordably scale plant-based food production in, well, Seattle — it didn’t necessarily resonate with customers in the same way as Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods. “Our partners were looking for something that described our brand,” said Lagally.

The new name comes at a time when the startup is beginning to ramp up production in earnest. According to Lagally, Rebellyous’ nuggets are in 6 to 10 restaurants in the Pacific Northwest through their partnership with vegan food wholesaler Earthly Gourmet. They’re also on menus at two Swedish Hospital locations in Seattle and have completed two trials in office cafeterias: one at Adobe in Seattle and one at visual computing tech company Nvidia in the Bay Area.

According to Lagally, Rebellyous’ new name is meant to express the company’s “lighthearted but determined efforts to make plant-based meat accessible to everyone.”

There’s not a lot of plant-based chicken competition gunning for the B2B foodservice sector as of yet. However, as demand for alternative proteins continues to grow you can bet there soon will be — especially once poultry giant Tyson Foods launches its line of plant-based protein. It’s a smart move on Rebellyous’ part to rebrand with a name that’ll stick in customers’ minds and (hopefully) keep them coming back for more.

Seattle Food Tech Launches Plant-Based Nuggets at Hospital Cafeteria

The food at hospital cafeterias (and cafeterias in general) can get a bad rap. But today in Seattle, limp salads and neon jello were replaced by crispy chicken nuggets that just happened to be made out of plants.

The Swedish Medical Center in Seattle’s Capitol Hill became the first hospital to serve Seattle Food Tech‘s (SFT) signature plant-based nuggets during a one-day pop-up event. The nuggets are made of wheat protein, soy, oil, and (vegan) chicken flavoring, and covered in a crispy breading. Each five-nugget serving contains 19 grams of protein, which is about 50 percent more than a regular chicken nugget. The hospital served a special of eight nuggets plus fries for $4.95; a comparable-sized serving of traditional chicken strips with fries is $7.50.

We got to taste SFT’s nuggets at the Smart Kitchen Summit last October, and they were pretty good. The company has since tweaked the recipe, and the newest version is crispier on the outside and juicier on the inside. There’s a tiny bit of a soy aftertaste, but a swipe of barbecue sauce or ketchup easily masks that. Passers-by at the hospital who stopped for a sample seemed to be fans of the plant-based nuggets, with a few even saying that they wouldn’t have known that they weren’t eating chicken.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

While SFT’s pop-up at the hospital is just a one-day experiment, it’s been the company’s plan all along to sell their nuggets wholesale to large institutional dining establishments like corporate and hospital cafeterias and school lunchrooms. Led by CEO Christie Lagally, who cut her teeth at Boeing and the Good Food Institute, SFT doesn’t want to just make really good-tasting vegan nuggets; they want to revolutionize the plant-based manufacturing process so they can make good-tasting nuggets accessible to big groups of people at low price points.

SFT has raised $2 million in VC funding and last year completed a stint at the prestigious Y Combinator. Lagally told me the company has four institutional customers in place, though she wouldn’t disclose which ones. It also recently doubled its staff and commissary kitchen space to ramp up production to supply the new partners. Next up, Lagally and her team are developing “chicken” patties, “chicken” strips and “fish” sticks.

Judging from the reaction at the Swedish Medical Center, SFT won’t have a problem tempting customers to try its nuggets, or getting instiutional partners to serve them. Now it just remains to be seen if the startup can scale sustainably and keep costs down. A tall order to be sure, but with SFT’s team (specifically Lagally’s engineering background) and its smart go-to-market strategy, I’m betting we’ll soon see a lot more of their plant-based nuggets popping up in cafeterias.

Seattle Food Tech Raises $1M, Will Ship its Plant-Based Chicken Nuggets this Month

Seattle Food Tech, a startup that creates plant-based “chicken” nuggets, has raised a fresh $1 million in capital from investors including Liquid 2 Ventures, Sinai Ventures Fund, Uphones Capital and VegInvest (h/t Food-Navigator). This brings the total amount raised by Seattle Food Tech to $2 million.

Seattle Food Tech separates itself from other alterna-meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible in a few ways. First, the company uses a specialized means of production to better replicate the texture of “real” chicken nuggets through a combination of wheat, oil, chicken flavoring and more. The company says it can implement this manufacturing at large scale production.

Large scale production is important, as unlike its competition, Seattle Food Tech is not going after the consumer market and instead targets commercial customers like school and hospital cafeterias. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote earlier this year:

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.

Since the time of that article, Seattle Food Tech’s B2B go-to market strategy remains a smart one as competition in the fake meat space has certainly become more fierce. Next year Beyond Meat will go public, and Impossible will bring its heme-burgers to grocery store aisles. Beyond is already rapidly expanding its product line, and by sticking with institutional customers, Seattle Food Tech can sidestep costly marketing battles with better funded companies.

That strategy seems to be already paying off. Even though Seattle Food Tech has only been around for nine months, the company said in a press release that it will start delivering alterna-nuggets to select customers this month.

We had a chance to taste Seattle Food Tech’s nuggets at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit show here in Seattle, and they were actually pretty good! You can check out the company’s Founder and CEO, Christie Lagally in this video from the Summit, talking about the future of meat:

Plant-Based, Cellular & Sustainable: Exploring The Future of Meat

Video: Plant-Based, Cellular, and Sustainable — What is the Future of Meat?

Cell-based meat (also known as “clean” and “lab-grown” meat) is set to hit the market by the end of 2018, even though the FDA and USDA are still figuring out how to regulate it. At the same time, plant-based meat companies are seeing unprecedented levels of consumer interest and investment, even from Big Meat companies.

Watch as our panel from the 2018 Smart Kitchen Summit, featuring Tom Mastrobuoni of Tyson Ventures, Christie Lagally of Seattle Food Tech, and Thomas Bowman of JUST, Inc., explores the challenges and opportunities of the future of meat: plant-based, cell-based, and otherwise.

Plant-Based, Cellular & Sustainable: Exploring The Future of Meat

Look out for more videos of the panels, solo talks, and fireside chats from SKS 2018! We’ll be bringing them to you hot and fresh out the (smart) kitchen over the next few weeks.

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.