A three-year legal dispute between West Sacramento-based The Better Meat Co. and another maker of alternative meat products is over, with Better Meat winning the patent fight.
In 2021, when Better Meat was trying to raise growth capital, Boulder, Colorado-based Meati Foods allegedly sent letters to potential Better Meat investors saying that Better Meat was in an intellectual property dispute.
In December 2021, Better Meat filed suit against Meati in federal court in Sacramento, alleging the competitor interfered with Better Meat's raising of investment capital by inventing a dispute about its patented process. Its patent had been granted in July of that year.
Meati Foods countersued, alleging Better Meat was using a process Meati had invented.
The Meati Foods case was dismissed in October 2022, with a federal judge in Sacramento ruling that if Meati wanted to pursue the case, it should counterclaim the first lawsuit, which was also filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. Meati pursued that avenue.
In an order filed earlier this month, Chief U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly Mueller rejected Meati’s patent claims.
"This case is now concluded, and we look forward to continuing to build a better food system," Better Meat Co. CEO Paul Shapiro said. He declined to comment further on the suit.
Meati representatives declined to comment.
Better Meat is a 2018 startup that's 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 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.
Meati is a producer of meat-like proteins made from mushroom root. It was founded in 2017, and its products are sold under its own name in about 7,000 retail locations in the U.S.
Better Meat is still trying to raise growth capital for its operations, which sell all the product it can make at its West Sacramento factory and headquarters. Better Meat has nearly doubled its production of protein over last year, but still sells out as fast as it makes it.
Better Meat uses products like pea protein and mycelium, the root-like structure of fungus, to create meat substitutes and meat extenders.
Better Meat now makes its fungi products in a 9,000-liter fermentation vessel. Through ongoing research and development work, the company can now produce 68% more of its patented Rhiza mycoprotein than it did last year in the same vessel.
Shapiro said the company could easily increase capacity by 200% and still find a market for Rhiza, which is a shelf-stable powder product. The company can easily ship its product anywhere. He said Better Meat would like to do its expansion in the Sacramento area, but if someplace else works out better economically, that might be where the expansion goes. Better Meat’s feedstocks, which are vegetable proteins, are mostly produced in the Midwest.
Neutral-tasting Rhiza is allergen-free and 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.
Better Meat now has 22 full-time employees, all of whom work at the company’s production location and offices in West Sacramento. Shapiro declined to disclose Better Meat's revenue.
