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I feel like the chicken sandwich wars deserve their own Ken Burns-esque documentary. Slow pans over pictures of fried chicken, layered with pickles, slathered with some top-secret spicy sauce, resting between artisanal buns. Maybe Peter Coyote could even narrate, reading tweets from various QSRs about the superiority of their particular sandwich, or from disappointed customers who stood in line for hours but were still unable to get one.
OK, that’s a silly idea. But in all honesty, chicken sandwiches, tenders and nuggets are about to get vastly more interesting and deserving of their own documentary. Especially since they won’t contain any chicken as we currently know it. Instead, future chicken battles will involve plant-based chicken and chicken meat that was cultivated from cells, not raised on a farm.
This was a big week for those types of alternative chicken. Consider these Spoon headlines from just the past couple of days:
- Nowadays Raises $2M and Launches First Product, a Plant-Based Chicken Nugget
- Memphis Meats Re-Brands as UPSIDE Foods, Announces Cultured Chicken as its First Product
- Future Meat Once Again Slashes Production Price of Cultured Chicken
- Target Launches Good & Gather Plant Based Brand (which will include plant-based chick’n tenders)
That doesn’t even count the news from earlier this month that plant-based meat giant Beyond Meat is focusing its development on a chicken product.
Why the sudden wave of alternative chicken? Well, for one, there’s money to be made. According to the Good Food Institute, the plant-based meat market is worth $1.4 billion, with sales growing by more than $430 million between 2019 and 2020, so it’s a category on the rise. And with retailers like Target launching — and promoting — their own line of plant-based foods, it’s easy to see the company pushing interest in plant-based foods even higher.
You could say that this “sudden” surge in plant-based chicken isn’t so sudden at all. Plant-based chicken, especially nuggets, is a pretty mature sector, with a number of options already available at your local market. From smaller startups like Rebellyous and NUGGS, to established meatless brands like Quorn and MorningStar Farms, and even conventional meat giants like Tyson’s Raised & Rooted, there is no shortage of alt-nugget options.
One has to wonder, however, what’s going to happen with all these plant-based players when cultured chicken comes on the scene. Cell-based meat recreates animal meat using animal cells and bioreactors. It’s actual meat, but it’s grown in a facility and doesn’t require the raising (and slaughter) of animals.
Cell-based meat is steadily moving from the realm of science fiction to reality. Eat Just made the world’s first sale of cell-based meat (cultured chicken!) in Singapore last year. And UPSIDE Foods said its first product will be a cell-based chicken that it hopes to sell commercially this year, pending regulatory approval. UPSIDE chose chicken because of its versatility and widespread use across geographies, and is building a big, full-stack production facility in the Bay Area to mass produce it.
The question hanging over UPSIDE and all cell-based meat companies, however, is whether consumers will want to eat “lab-grown meat.” Despite claims that it will be better for the environment, free from antibiotics and disease, and free from ethical complications, people may be averse to something they don’t consider “natural.”
Of course, all these alterna-chickens need to taste good in order to gain any sort of traction in the market. But if they do, the chicken sandwich wars won’t be between QSR brands — they’ll be between new entirely new types of chicken. Seriously, someone should do a documentary about it.
More Headlines
C3 Launches Brick-and-Mortar Food Halls for Its Virtual Restaurants – The company announced Citizens, a network of brick-and-mortar food halls for its virtual brands.
Motif Adds New Tech to Bring That Elusive Stretch to Plant-Based Cheese – Extrudable fat technology and Prolamin technology will create more authentic fat textures and create more stretchy cheese.
SavorEat Creates Plant-Based Egg Venture Called Egg’n’up – The alternative egg will be crafted from SavorEat’s patent-pending 3D printing technology that uses cartridges filled with a mixture of nano-cellulose fiber and other undisclosed plant-based ingredients.
Grubhub Debuts ‘Commission-Free’ Platform Aimed at Independent Restaurants – It will allow independent restaurants to build their own online storefronts and process orders free of commission.
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