West Sacramento's The Better Meat Co. granted its fourth food patent, for Rhiza meat replacement product

West Sacramento-based The Better Meat Co. received another patent for products it makes to replace or enhance meat.

The new patent, the company’s fourth, is for the methods of producing and processing Rhiza, a trade name for a mycelium-based meat analog that has the texture of meat, along with a lot of vitamins.

“We have been, and are, selling it,” CEO Paul Shapiro told the Business Journal. “Our problem is demand. We are selling it as fast as we can make it.”

The Better Meat Co.’s factory and headquarters are in West Sacramento, where the company built a pilot plant three years ago.

Better Meat ferments its product in a three-story vessel, but to meet demand the company will need to have a much larger operation.

Better Meat is a 2018 startup that has developed methods to turn vegetable and fungi products into nutritious meat substitutes or meat enhancement products. It 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 Salisbury, Maryland-based Perdue Farms. The Better Meat Co.’s vegetable blend is the "Plus" in Perdue's Chicken Plus formulations for tots, tenders and dinosaur-shaped dino nuggets.

“We’ve come a long way. We’re still growing, but we still have a long way to go,” Shapiro said.

The company has 22 employees and usually a few interns. Shapiro declined to disclose Better Meat's annual revenue.

The company’s Rhiza mycoprotein is made of a root-like structure of fungi. The Better Meat Co. makes the product by introducing fungi to a nutrient-dense solution, where the fungi react and grow a fibrous, gel-like product overnight. It has the consistency of apple sauce, Shapiro said. The company then dries that to a shelf-stable powder.

The end product is allergen-free and neutral-tasting Rhiza, which can have the texture of animal meat. It also has more protein than eggs, more fiber than oats, more potassium than bananas and more iron than beef, according to the company.

Right now, the majority of Better Meat’s sales are vegetable and fungi proteins that are used to enhance chicken, pork, turkey, beef or fish in packaged consumer goods, but Shapiro said the zero-animal products are the future.

Some restaurants serve a steak made of Rhiza, but it needs to be flavored to be appetizing.

Better Meat may be near the end of an intellectual property dispute with a larger and well-funded rival, Boulder, Colorado-based Meati Foods. While Better Meat was trying to raise investor money last year, Meati allegedly sent letters to investors saying that Better Meat was in an intellectual property dispute.

Soon after, Better Meat filed suit in federal court in Sacramento against the competitor, alleging that Meati interfered with Better Meat's raising of investment capital by inventing a dispute regarding its patented process.

Meati Foods countersued in December, alleging Better Meat was using a process it invented.

The Meati Foods case was dismissed earlier this month, with the federal judge in Sacramento ruling that if Meati wanted to pursue the case, it should counterclaim the first lawsuit, and it would have to do that within 21 days of Oct. 12.