Four-year-old Tender Food Inc. is making big moves in the crowded meat-substitute market. Two years after getting $12 million in seed funding, it announced its Series A round on June 17at $11 million as well as a partnership with Clover Food Labs.
The additional funding will enable the Somerville company, formerly known as Boston Meats, was led by Rhapsody Venture Partners, with existing investors Lowercarbon Capital and Safar Partners as well as new investors Claridge Partners and Nor’easter Ventures.
With the new funds, Tender is eyeing expansion, scaling production and commercialization of its first products while lowering its production costs even further.
According to Christophe Chantre, co-founder and CEO of Tender, the Series A funding is all about scaling capacity to meet the demand that they have built up on the food service side and from larger corporate partners.
Tender has grown over the past two years, expanding its team from 16 to 24 full-time employees, scaling technology, and focusing on expanding into local restaurants to test products. It is now setting its sights on manufacturing capacity.
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Currently, Tender supplies over a dozen local restaurants. With the $11 million in seed funding, the company looks to grow that production by "several orders of magnitude over the years," with the ambition of reaching millions of pounds in annual capacity, according to Chantre.
“We're building larger machines so that we can build larger lines and then building more production lines,” Chantre told BostInno. “It's about getting to really industrial scales with our existing systems and then building more production lines.”
Mimicking muscle fibers in meat
The machines that Tender uses are part of what sets Tender apart from other plant-based products, the company said. The machines can weave "plant protein fibers like twirling together cotton candy," said Chantre.
These "cotton-candy machines," as Chantre referred to them, are extremely fast, versatile and flexible, enabling Tender to keep prices low and production high, a dynamic that will continue as the company scales up.
“A piece of meat is made from muscle fibers,” said Chantre. “So what we're doing with these cotton-candy machines is, we're recreating that muscle-fiber structure and texture, but using those systems, and we can use plant ingredients as inputs.”
One of Tender's ultimate goals is to be competitive with the price of real meat. Currently, plant-based meat is 77% more expensive than animal equivalents. Chantre declined to share Tender's production cost, but he said the prices of plant-based meat and real meat need to be competitive for the industry to take off — and that Tender can achieve that goal.
“We're confident that we'll be able to get to prices that are a lot more competitive with animal meat, which in our view is really critical for this industry to grow,” Chantre said, “First is taste. It needs to taste delicious.”
