Sundial Foods is attempting to make plant-based chicken wings that look and taste more like the real thing, and the San Francisco startup is launching its first product at Orchard Grocer & Deli in New York City on Friday. Foghorn Taproom in San Francisco will start serving the wings on April 29.
The wings are made from chickpeas and soy beans, and formed around a small bamboo stick. Sundial tested an earlier version with an edible vegan "bone" but decided against it for the launch.
"We do want to make an edible version someday," co-founder and CEO Jessica Schwabach said. "So far in our consumer testing, we found most people say it's too weird."
Schwabach, 22, founded the company with Siwen Deng, 29, in 2019 after developing a vegan chicken concept at UC Berkeley's Alternative Meats Lab, and what started as a school project turned into a business.
"We were approaching this basic issue with plant-based meat products which is that consumers frequently complain of the dryness," Schwabach said. And instead of focusing on fats, "one of the simple issues we realized was that when consumers are interacting with plant-based meat, moisture just leaves the product too quickly."
So they've developed a way to create an edible film on the outside of each wing that not only helps retain moisture during cooking but also adds a bit of texture.
They spent a year developing prototypes in a basement kitchen, and then went through Nestle's R&D Accelerator in Switzerland in 2020. A year later, they were accepted into SOSV's IndieBio accelerator program.
The company has raised $4 million in seed funding from Nestle, Food Labs, Clear Current Capital and SOSV/IndieBio, among other investors.
An earlier version of the product was just soy-based, but the flavor was too astringent, and to compensate for that, they had to add too many chemical flavorings.
So they scrapped that idea and settled on a chickpea-base that's mixed with soy beans, gluten, sunflower oil, nutritional yeast, salt and water.
And the wings are layered during production in a way that attempts to mimic the structures of fibers, muscles and skin in real chicken meat.
"There are two components in the product with distinct formulas," Schwabach said, and they co-develop during the production process.
The company currently uses a shared production facility at Rutgers University's Food Innovation Center in New Jersey and is trying to make the process more efficient to bring down the cost.
Most of the ingredients are sourced domestically, so they have not been hampered by supply chain issues caused by the war in Ukraine, a major producer of sunflower seed. However, the chickpeas come from Israel, but their supplier is opening a production facility near Chicago soon, Schwabach told me.
Sundial Foods will be selling the wings for $9/pound wholesale. Orchard will serve the wings with buffalo sauce, plant-based ranch dressing and crudités for $10, and Foghorn Taproom in San Francisco will serve them with fries for $12.
The company will also be raising a Series A this year to help scale up production and work towards launching an e-commerce division.
