When Tindle Foods opened its Chicago headquarters in 2022, the food-tech brand wanted to introduce its plant-based chicken to the community.
Now Tindle wants to introduce its products to the rest of the country.
Next Gen Foods, the Singapore-based company behind Tindle, launched its plant-based chicken to consumers internationally for the first time in March 2021. Next Gen then opened a research and development center in The Hatchery in 2022 as a starting point for new product development as it scaled up Tindle into new U.S. markets.
"When we looked at the U.S. market and where we wanted to be based and where it made the most sense, Chicago was a pretty obvious location for us," JJ Kass, vice president of business development and strategy at Tindle, told the Chicago Business Journal.
Tindle has since expanded to a new research and development facility in the West Loop that is roughly 10 times larger than its kitchen was at The Hatchery as it looks to accelerate its nationwide rollout.
"The Hatchery ... helped us to develop a lot of our products. Our breakfast sausage, which launched this year, was entirely developed and created out of The Hatchery," Kass said.
Tindle has found its way into "pretty much all" the vegan restaurants in the city, according to Kass.
Starting this week, however, Tindle Chicken will be available in select retailers and grocery stores on the East Coast, Midwest and West Coast as it prepares for a nationwide retail rollout in 2024.
While Kass said that Chicago proved to be a perfect launching off point for the company's push nationwide, getting to that point didn't happen overnight.
One of the first retail distribution centers Tindle opened up was with KeHE Distributors, where one of its main customers is PlantX, which also runs Xmarket, a Chicago-based vegan food hall and grocery store. From that distribution center, located in Romeoville, Tindle has been able to expand to the broader Midwest.
Giant Eagle, for example, a grocery chain that can be found in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indianapolis, has started carrying Tindle products, as has FreshDirect, an online delivery service.
Already found in thousands of restaurants around the world and thousands of retailers in Europe, Tindle is just starting its U.S. retail expansion.
"We're in about 100 doors right now, and that spans across the Midwest, New York, California and Hawaii — and that number expect to continue to grow throughout the next year," Kass said.
