At 29 in his second startup, Brice Klein has perfected a routine of working late, often leaving the office at 8pm or later. But as he will gladly tell you, that demanding schedule often led to unpleasant compromises.
Chief among these was food. Klein, one of the first employees of a vertical farming company aiming to revolutionize manufacturing, found himself eating less-than-innovative food night after night.
“I have distinct memories of leaving the gym or my mother’s house at 9, stopping at Mollie Stones at 9.15 or 9.30, a few minutes later putting the Amy’s Veggie Korma I’d just purchased in the microwave, and then I collapsed on the couch as I threw it down while watching an episode of The office before going to bed,” Brice said Fortune.
“I didn’t feel good about my existence,” he said. “It wasn’t a particularly great meal. I thought ‘this kind of gets the job done’.” It was especially challenging for him since Klein was a vegetarian.
“For a long time I ate a block of tofu or more than one hamburger or half a pack of Quorn or Protein+ Pasta in the evening, but each of these still felt like a concession on some combination of flavor, cost and health,” he said. remembered.
These days, Klein is still looking for convenience, but he feels much happier than the mixes he’s throwing in the microwave or frying pan. As one half of the duo behind Choppy, Klein and his business partner and best friend, Saba Fazeli, also 29, are eating many of their creations: chopped steak, pulled pork, or carne asada made of 90 percent plants and 10 percent parts of animals.
For his part, Fazeli left a job at Beyond Meat to solve what he saw as a problem in the alternative meat industry: Plant-based proteins simply don’t taste like animal-based ones.
Looking at the last three years of plant-based meat sales would seem to confirm this hypothesis. Plant-based proteins burst onto the scene around 2018, promising to save the climate and the health of Americans, and have been skyrocketing for a few years thanks to low-cost funding from venture capitalists.
But many startups stumbled during the pandemic and have yet to recover. Unit sales of plant-based foods held steady from 2020 to 2021, then declined in 2022. Industry pioneer Beyond Meat is in “survival mode,” according to one analyst. The company’s “bleeding” veggie burger led to its most profitable IPO of 2019, but its one-time market capitalization of $3.8 billion has shrunk to just $450 million today. And funding for alternative proteins has slumped to its lowest level in nearly a decade, according to venture capital tracker Pitchbook, which asked last year: “Have we reached peak plant-based meat?”
“Add meat”
Klein and Fazeli met as freshmen at Stanford, where they quickly bonded over their shared love of board shorts and skateboarding and graduated as mechanical engineers. The two exchanged about 70 business ideas before landing on Choppy (company name: “Momentum Foods”), whose slogan is “putting meat back into plant-based meat.” They are one of the few startups aiming to promote plant-based meats by adding something until recently unthinkable: real fat.
In San Francisco, Mission Barns is working on developing lab-grown fat to add to plant-based patties and burgers. In London, startup Hoxton Farms, launched after its omnivorous founders had a disappointing experience eating a plant-based burger in a pub. “We realized what was missing, it’s fat,” said co-founder Max Jamilly Fortune. They tested this idea during the pandemic by cooking plant-based burgers at home with added pork fat, and then moved on to growing pork fat cells in the lab, in the belief that lab-grown fat would circumvent the issues ethics related to breeding. and animal slaughter.
According to Pitchbook, the company, which now has about 50 employees, has raised $29 million at a $50 million valuation. And while Jamilly touts the climate benefits of lab-grown fat, he believes its real selling point will be the taste.
“Health, environmental and animal welfare are enough to make you order something off a menu or put it in your shopping cart at the supermarket, but that won’t make you eat that food every week,” he said. “What makes people keep eating is taste.”
And, he added, “Any chef will tell you, any day of the week, if you add fat, the flavor will be incredible.”