An alternative protein startup in San Francisco that was producing plant-based chicken nuggets is ceasing operations and has laid off its workforce.
The three-year-old startup, Nowadays, is in the process of winding down and selling off its remaining assets, including its intellectual property, according to a report from AgFunderNews.
I reached out to CEO and co-founder Max Elder to confirm the details and received an auto-reply email that said, "Nowadays has ceased all operations."
The company had 22 employees, according to its LinkedIn page.
Elder co-founded Nowadays with Dominik Grabinski in 2020 and had raised $9.75 million across two seed rounds, including a $7 million round that was announced in April 2022.
Nowadays was developing a chicken nugget alternative made from yellow pea protein, whole wheat flour, sunflower oil, maple fiber, yeast extract and mushroom extract.
The company's first product, a box of 50 "nuggets" that sold for $40, launched a little over two years ago.
They used an "extrusion process," rather than fermentation or cell cultivation.
"Our piece of plant-based meat behaves the same as a real piece of meat, which is why we can much faster and easier scale; we don't need to have all this blending and forming and preparation," Grabinski told the San Francisco Business Times in 2021. At that time, packing and shipping were the biggest drivers of cost, he also said.
Grabinski appears to have left Nowadays at the end of 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The biggest hurdle that led to the company ceasing its operations was raising new funding, Elder told AgFunderNews.
“The economics only work if you have the capital to really push a multi-year brand building and marketing strategy and it’s really hard to access capital now," Elder told AgFunderNews.
Its investors included Stray Dog Capital, VegInvest Trust, Tenacious Ventures, Cornucopian Capital, the Good Protein Fund, Selva Ventures, FoodHack, Beyond Impact and Gaingels.
