MyForest Foods Co. has secured a $15 million venture loan to support its push to scale production of its bacon product.
MyForest, formerly Atlast Food Co., said this week that it secured the financing from Connecticut-based Horizon Technology Finance Corporation (NASDAQ: HRZN). Horizon funded half of the total, and a private investment vehicle managed by Horizon Technology Finance Management LLC, Horizon’s adviser, funded the other half.
The MyForest capital plan included debt financing to support a portion of the roughly $50 million that the company is investing in new factories in the Capital Region, according to Eben Bayer, MyForest CEO, in an email.
MyForest’s first and flagship product is a vegan bacon made from mycelium, the root-like structure of mushrooms.
The company is building what it says will be the world’s largest vertical mycelium farm inside an 80,000-square-foot facility in Green Island. It recently started work on a 60,000-square-foot facility at a Saratoga Springs location that has not yet been disclosed.
The Saratoga facility will be dedicated to processing mycelium meat slabs into packaged bacon, Bayer stated in the email.
The company plans to hold ribbon cutting events later this summer for each facility.
MyForest has been selling the bacon product in a pilot stage at Honest Weight Food Co-op in Albany since November 2020.
“We have increased our deliveries to Honest Weight Food Co-op as of January but are still struggling to keep the product on shelves,” Bayer stated in the email.
Once the new facilities come online, the company plans to distribute the product into more grocery stores around the Northeast.
MyForest raised $40 million last year to support the increase in production. The startup is a spinoff of Ecovative Design, which also announced last year that it had raised $60 million.
Ecovative makes environmentally friendly materials from mycelium. It spent years developing a strain of mycelium closely resembling meat, which MyForest used to develop the MyBacon product.
MyForest has 23 employees right now and is hiring for several positions: chief financial officer, bookkeeper, food production associates, HR and a data scientist. As the company nears the opening of the new facilities, Bayer expects to post more jobs, including for plant operations, food production, farming, sales, marketing and IT. He previously said he plans to triple the number of employees this year.
Bacon is the focus for MyForest right now, but it’s still planning to develop and release other mycelium-based products, like whole cuts of meat, pastas and more.
MyForest recently said it was partnering with Whitecrest Mushrooms to produce nearly three million pounds of mycelium annually at its farm in Ontario. Similar partnerships will come, the company said, as it works to break into the $6 billion bacon industry.
