Slashing CO2Looks like meat, tastes like meat.
Big Picture
Combined, pork and chicken make up more than 60% of global meat production and emit more than 1 Gt of CO2e annually. Multiple plant- and cell-based alternatives exist, but they struggle to expand beyond meat mush into whole cuts. Until alternative meats can replicate the structure and feel of grandma’s pulled pork, they’ll never expand beyond the packaged and processed meat aisle.
How it Works
Tender is developing a fiber spinning technology that spins scaffolds finer than a human hair out of common plant-based ingredients like soy and cellulose. These fiber scaffolds allow the team to create products that replicate the structure, flavor, and mouthfeel of a whole cut with less processing and fewer ingredients. The result is a range of nutritious plant-based meats that taste like the real deal and cost less than anything on the market today.
Unfair Advantage
Other texturing technologies like 3D printing struggle with low throughput or with fibrous textures that have undesirable mouthfeel. Tender can spin kilograms of fiber per hour at the lab scale, and they make a product that would pull its weight at any state fair. They can also work with a variety of ingredients and have launched plant-based pulled pork, chicken breast, and crab cakes that are already outselling Impossible burgers 2:1 in Boston restaurants.
50
Compatible
alternative meat ingredients
CHRISTOPHE CHANTRE CEO & CO-FOUNDER
Christophe previously researched bioprosthetics as a postdoc at Harvard’s Wyss Institute.
GRANT GONZALEZ CTO & CO-FOUNDER
Grant holds a PhD in Materials Engineering from Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
LUKE MACQUEEN CSO & CO-FOUNDER
Luke holds a PhD in Engineering Physics from the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.
Muscle tissue engineering in fibrous gelatin: implications for meat analogs
Nature
Scientists Are Spinning Up Lab-Grown Meat
WIRED
Lab-Grown Meat That Doesn’t Look Like Mush
The New York Times