Eat More Plants

A food movement is happening in America, and you don’t have to eat tree bark to be a part of it.

While about 5% of Americans keep a vegan diet, many more now are eating plant-based foods on an occasional basis. There are several reasons people eat vegan foods, including health, concern for the planet and concern for animals. Recently, this has translated into soaring sales of vegan food products: In 2021, sales of plant-based foods grew three times faster than overall food sales. By 2028, the global vegan food market is projected to reach $61 billion, according to Fortune Business Insights — and that’s a modest forecast compared to similar research from Statista.

When the Impossible Burger came on the market in 2016, it was revolutionary. Never had a plant-based product tasted, looked and acted like real meat so convincingly. Although Beyond Meat had been around longer, the vegan burger category exploded with the entrance of Impossible Foods. The company could now be worth as much as $10 billion according to Forex, after securing $500 million in a new funding round led by Mirae Asset Global Investments in 2021.

Vegan burgers have become so mainstream, they’ve even managed to infiltrate the fast food space. In 2019, Impossible partnered with Burger King to offer a vegan version of the Whopper, available nationwide. McDonald’s (a Huge client), in turn, collaborated with Beyond to bring the McPlant to select locations. (The experimental run was discontinued in 2022.) Shake Shack, restaurateur Danny Meyer’s antibiotic-free answer to fast food chains (now with more than 400 locations globally), launched its own veggie burger in April 2018, the Veggie Shack. Instead of relying on an outside company, Shake Shack came up with its own formula, made from nine vegetables and two grains, after several years of research and development.

It seems we’ve reached peak veggie burger, so what’s next? Items like plant-based chicken strips and vegan milks have also infiltrated the market (can you go anywhere without seeing an Oatly ad?), along with multiple brands of vegan cheeses. Now, the vegan food industry is heading into its next phase: extreme specificity.

There’s only so much plant-based ground beef and nut milks can do. What about specific cheeses? Seafood? Eggs? How about all the vegans missing their filet mignon? The latest plant-based food startups are filling that void with hyper-specific products like calamari and tuna sashimi, sunny-side-up eggs with runny yolks and medium-rare steaks — all made from plants.

Eggs had long been neglected by the plant-based food industry. There are companies like Eat Just that sell a mock liquid egg product (mostly used for baking, scrambled eggs or omelets), but nobody was focusing on mimicking whole eggs and the myriad ways they can be prepared. New to the market, and filling a very specific egg niche, is WunderEggs, which claims to be the world’s first fully vegan hard-boiled egg distributor (the brand launched in Whole Foods in January 2023), and Yo Egg, which is currently the only brand offering plant-based sunny-side-up and poached eggs, both with runny “yolks.” It launched in the U.S. in February 2023 at select restaurants after a 2021 launch in Israel, with more products in development, including hard-boiled eggs and hollandaise sauce.

Yo Egg: The Inside Story

“I focused on eggs as the sector that had the least amount of solutions, and was falling way behind alternative meat,” says Eran Groner, co-founder of Yo Egg. As egg prices rose more than 60% last year, Yo Egg saw a boost in sales. The company has tripled its manufacturing capacity since it launched, making thousands of eggs per day out of its North Hollywood facility.

Groner, a seasoned food-tech executive with more than a decade of experience spanning factory farming and cultured meat production, used to work around chickens and cows. But then he realized removing animals from the equation was a way to be more sustainable and more stable. “Animals are the limiting factor. They utilize more resources that are not necessary. They pose other limitations, for example, with seasonality, and zoonotic diseases such as the avian flu,” says Groner. “If you remove the animals from the equation, you solve those problems. And you are minus the cholesterol, minus the saturated fat; you end up having a more sustainable product that utilizes way less water.”

When he tried vegan chef Yosefa Ben Cohen’s vegan sunny-side-up egg alternative, he knew he had found the answer. With Yosefa and her husband, Nisim Ben Cohen, as partners, the three launched Yo Egg as a fully formed frozen product, initially to be only used in restaurants. As the product evolved, they were constantly looking for feedback.

“The quickest feedback loop is through food service because food service allows us to put the product out there and get feedback from chefs and from consumers, and then we’re super quick implementing improvements based on the feedback that we have,” says Groner. He adds that selling an entirely new food product direct to consumers is difficult. People are reluctant to purchase something they’ve never seen before at a grocery store, but they’re more open to trying new dishes at a restaurant.

Currently, Yo Egg is available at select restaurants in Israel and across the U.S., including at chef Guy Vaknin’s New York City vegan restaurants Willow and Coletta.

“I look for products that offer three things: presentation, flavor and texture. It’s tough to hit all three, but I also typically work with the products to, for example, infuse that flavor or pump up the presentation,” says Vaknin, owner of City Roots Hospitality vegan restaurant group.

The Steak Alternative

Vaknin also serves Chunk Foods, a steak alternative, which also launched solely in restaurant settings. Chunk is ready to be pan-seared, basted, grilled, smoked, stewed, braised or baked, and it cuts, cooks, plates and pairs just like steak. Beet juice even gives it the proper coloring, and it sports the fibrous, tender texture of a cooked fillet.

In a 30-day case study at Vaknin’s restaurants, Chunk was a bestselling dish, representing 29.6% of the food items revenue on average and accounting for 20% of the total restaurant revenue.

Chunk’s founder and CEO, Amos Golan, has a background in cooking and engineering. He experimented with fermented soy and peas while working for a chocolate company and was impressed by the resulting umami flavors. When he moved to the U.S. in 2016, he noticed a boom for what he calls “plant-based 2.0,” with things like the Beyond Burger launching in Whole Foods and the Impossible Whopper at Burger King.

“I got excited about it, especially as an Israeli — we eat rather clean, and we eat less-processed foods,” Golan says. “I would look at the back of packages and ask, ‘Why does there need to be 30 ingredients in here?’”

He answered his own question with the knowledge he had gleaned in his experiments with fermentation.

“I have these umami flavors, and I can get them without almost any processing, using a very traditional method,” Golan says. “What if I can create a more authentic steak texture [versus ground beef] and address that part of the market that is currently completely unaddressed, which is 60% of beef that is sold in the United States. No one has created an alternative for that.”

The predominant ingredient in Chunk is a patented fermented soy flour — Golan says the factory looks more like a bakery. He also claims he has the shortest ingredient list in the industry, and does not use any binders. Impossible and Beyond both sparked some backlash due to their long ingredient lists, which included what some consumers saw as too many chemicals.

“The powerhouse of the industry is methyl cellulose, which is a binder that is used throughout all products. Beyond, Impossible, they all have it, and it basically holds everything together,” explains Golan. “It also has this unique thermal behavior where it becomes tougher when it’s heated up, so it creates the bite. But when it cools down it’s a little bit like plasticine, so it’s not really a very pleasant bite when it’s cold.”

(Methyl cellulose is a chemical compound created by heating cellulose with a caustic solution like sodium hydroxide and then treating it with methyl chloride. It is classified as a laxative by the National Library of Medicine.)

Chunk mimics the fibrous texture of steak, it can be eaten at any temperature without any issues and it holds water and fat very well, yet also releases them so that when you take a bite, it’s a very juicy bite. Four ounces of Chunk has 25 grams of protein. With all these positives, crucially, Golan also realized the cost benefits of creating a product that could convincingly mimic steak.

“I thought, even if I don’t get to the economies of scale of meat from day one, I can still create a product that is valuable in terms of how much people are willing to pay for it,” he says. “I knew that I could get to the same price point as a burger patty, but I can sell it for twice as much because people are used to paying more for steak than a ground beef product.”

After perfecting his recipe, he shared the product with some angel investors and got his first $50,000 investment (to date he has raised $17 million). While Golan was at MIT, he launched Chunk in the U.S. in September 2020, with an R&D arm in Israel launching in December of that year. Currently, Chunk is piloting with restaurants in the New York and Los Angeles areas, and will launch in Chicago soon. The company is ramping up distribution, with plans to get into more food service locations in the U.S. and hopefully go nationwide next year. Once manufacturing can be increased, the strategy is to enter fast casual chains and finally retail. Plus, more products like roast beef are on the horizon.

But making fake beef is relatively easy. One of the hardest proteins to replicate has proven to be fish and seafood. But that also means the category is ripe for innovation and investment.

“Vegan seafood is the next big market. There have been quite a few companies coming up and getting funded the past couple of years, and there are some great new innovations,” says Diana Edelman, founder and owner of Vegans, Baby. “I think with vegan seafood, it’s tricky to replicate the real thing, and I’ve been really impressed with some brands, while some I think have some more work to do. Overall, this is the market I expect to really rise in the next few years and see a lot more companies enter into.”

Good Catch is the largest vegan seafood company and was one of the first, launching back in 2016 with vegan tuna. In 2020, they added frozen fish patties and have since expanded their frozen line even more, with the first-ever plant-based salmon burgers being added in 2022. Good Catch products are sold in grocery stores around the country and served in restaurants in select cities, with plans to expand in Europe. In January 2020, the company completed a $32 million funding round, while landing partnerships including General Mills’ venture arm, 301 Inc, and LightLife’s parent company, Greenleaf Foods.

A newer company is tackling some of the most complicated seafood to mimic in vegan form: sashimi, calamari, shrimp and prawns. Boldly, a new privately funded company out of Australia that is set to launch this fall, has all of these and more. Boldly was co-founded by Allen Zelden, who is also co-founder of PlantForm, the private-label arm of a plant-based manufacturing operation with global distribution. The startup aims to fill a gap in the plant-based market.

“If you look at the plant-based dairy category, it’s now about 15% to 16% of total milk sales, but it didn’t require billions of dollars to get there — it slowly chipped away, and now it’s doing quite good things,” says Zelden. “On the other hand, plant-based meat categories are today 1.3% of total meat sales. And historically, for the two years prior, it was sitting at 1.4%. So it’s actually gone backward, after billions of dollars invested. All that’s happened is that the category’s cannibalized itself while we celebrate these record-breaking investments. But no one’s focusing on the awareness side, and that’s what I keep coming back to.”