There’s another player on its way up in Boston’s plant-based meat sector.
Boston Meats, a company born out of Harvard and now residing in Greentown Labs, is quickly building momentum of its own with a capital raise north of $10 million in progress, plus a planned 2022 rebrand and move to bigger office space.
The startup is focused on a niche in the food tech space that its team feels hasn’t been thoroughly explored: getting the texture right for whole muscle cuts of fake meat, foods like beef, pork and chicken.
“In most scenarios, texture is a really key component,” said co-founder and CEO Christophe Chantre in a recent interview. “If it tastes like chicken but looks like a blob of cells, it's not going to work. We really need to be able to create that muscle structure, and that’s what we’re making.”
Boston Meats is working out of a facility in Somerville owned by Greentown, where some of its 13 employees can be found testing out new cuts through the company’s patented fiber manufacturing platforms, and offering guests plant-based pulled pork sandwiches.
It’s planning to launch its first commercial product in 2022, working with local restaurants at first, before thinking about how to distribute its food more widely.
“We can get a lot more customer feedback from restaurants,” Chantre said. “I think for a lot of them this is an exciting new industry, and there are a lot of chefs who are trying to reduce the amount of meat on their menu.”
It’s a market that’s seeing more and more competition across the country, as startups try to compete with the the big boys of Impossible Meats and Beyond Meat, which have exploded in the last few years and can be found in countless restaurants and stores. The sector has been growing close to 15% a year and is moving from a novelty to a staple, Chantre said.
“We see a huge opportunity,” Chantre said, looking toward the huge consumption of whole cuts globally. “Right now on the plant-based side, there isn't anything that's really kind of meeting that offering and so we can really go after that half of the meat market.”
The testing that the company’s doing right now is both qualitative and quantitative, but a large part of it involves having employees and outsiders like chefs taste test different samples. A chart in the startup’s kitchen, labeled an “analysis framework” includes dozens of different descriptors for meat, like gummy, tough, sticky and smooth.
All of that work is going towards an ambitious goal, but one that Chantre said is within reach.
“We’re probably already much better than a lot of like the commercially available products," he said, "but I think we really want to get to a point where it's really indistinguishable from an actual piece of meat."
