West Sacramento's Better Meat Co. gets $1 million Israeli grant to make meatless fish steaks

West Sacramento meat substitute company The Better Meat Co. has won a $1 million grant to work with Israeli startup company Oshi to commercialize a sustainable substitute for salmon fillets.

The grant is from the Israel-based Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation, or BIRD Foundation, which supports collaboration between Israeli and U.S. companies in research and development.

“It’s a big deal for us,” Better Meat Co. CEO Paul Shapiro told the Business Journal.

Salmon are in steep decline due to the "amount of destruction that humanity is inflicting on the natural world," Shapiro said.

The Better Meat Co. will send its mycelium-based meat analog that has the texture of meat to Oshi in Israel, where that company will finish the textured fungi protein to make it like real salmon.

Shapiro said they have managed to get a texture that mimics the flakiness of a salmon fillet, but it will likely take a year of research and development to perfect it and develop processes and equipment to produce it on a large scale.

Just because a food item works in a lab, doesn’t mean it's a simple transition to making it in mass quantities, Shapiro said.

Both companies share the philosophy that it's better for the environment and for animals to make foods that mimic meat rather than harvesting it from live creatures, he said.

The Better Meat Co. started in 2018 to make products that replace or enhance meat. Its pea protein has been sold for years as a vegetable and fiber extender for chicken strips. It also makes a variety of products to replace beef and pork products in hamburger and sausages.

Better Meat doesn’t sell products under its own brand. Rather it is a business-to-business supplier to branded product makers, including Hormel Foods Corp. (NYSE: HRL) and Perdue Farms. The Better Meat Co.’s vegetable blend is the "Plus" in Perdue's Chicken Plus formulations of tenders and dinosaur-shaped dino nuggets.

The salmon will be made out of The Better Meat Co.'s mycoprotein, which is the root-like structure of fungi. The company makes it by placing fungi in a nutrient solution where it grows overnight into a fibrous, gel-like product with the consistency of apple sauce, Shapiro said. It is then dried to make a shelf-stable powder.

The end product is allergen-free, neutral-tasting and can have the texture of animal meat or fish. It has more protein than eggs, more fiber than oats, more potassium than bananas, more iron than beef and is packed with vitamins, Shapiro said.

The Better Meat Co. has 24 employees, and it is basically sold out of its product for the foreseeable future, Shapiro said. "Demand outstrips supply for us."

The company is contemplating how to expand, but capital costs are high and margins are low. Shapiro declined to disclose Better Meat's revenue.

“We are always eager to talk with other companies” about opportunities, he said, but Better Meat plans to remain true to its goal of weening the world off animal agriculture.

“The reason we started this company five years ago was to try to make a dent in the problem,” Shapiro said. "Sadly, the world is on fire, and the two main drivers of that are fossil fuels and animal agriculture."

Oshi was founded as Plantish in 2021. Based in Rehovot, Israel, it is focused on creating whole cut fish fillets without harming fish.