Dive briefs:
- Rebellyous Foods, a plant-based chicken nugget maker, has raised a $9.5 million equity round to build out production technology.
- The Seattle-based manufacturer plans to use the funds to continue rolling out custom-designed equipment to produce plant-based chicken nuggets.
- The investment comes at a time when not much capital is flowing to plant-based food companies due to a tight economy and slowing sales growth for some of the big brands in the sector.
Dive Insight:
Since launching Rebellyous Foods in 2017, founder and CEO Christie Lagally has set his sights on lowering the price of Big Chicken. And she has a very specific game plan: design a custom plant-based meat manufacturing process that can transform high-quality ingredients into the most effectively processed plant-based poultry.
In an August interview, Lagally told Food Dive that her company isn’t trying to make high-end chicken products or go after consumers looking for great dinner options. Rebellyous wants to move away from the comfort and convenience food market of processed poultry, such as frozen nuggets, tenders, popcorn chicken and patties, which account for more than half of all chicken sold today, she said. According to Statista, approximately 73.4 million people live in the United States. I ate chicken nuggets in 2020.
Lagally said many of those people are looking for cheap, consistently high quality products.
“The vast majority of consumers will replace chicken entirely if they can afford it in that price range,” said Lagerry.
Most plant-based chicken is made using machines and processes designed for real meat, which is inefficient, Lagally said. A former Boeing engineer, Lagarry said Rebellius is working on a production system called “Mach 2.” Considering input and manufacturing costs, it typically costs companies about $2.60 to make plant-based meat. With the new production system, Rebellyous will cost her $1.47, she said. According to her, the process is fully automated and she is designed to produce 2,500 pounds or products per hour.
Mach 2 is still in development and is expected to go live later this year, Lagally said.
So far, Rebellyous has launched fairly small. There are about 1,000 retail stores and about 100 school districts. Lagally said in August that about half of the company’s revenue comes from his USDA’s National School Lunch Program. During and after the pandemic, many poultry suppliers didn’t have extra product to offer school lunches, she said.
The investment in Rebellyous came late in the plant-based meat business. After seeing meteoric growth at one time, big players in the sector, including publicly traded Beyond Meat and Maple Leaf Foods, slowed last year. From Q4 2022 to date, this is only his third major investment in plant-based meat.the other two he Black Sheep Foods’ $12.3 million Series A December round and The Ish Company seed round It surpassed $5 million last month.
Lagally said in August that he was optimistic about Rebellyous despite the current slowdown in other companies in the segment. After all, decades-old plant-based meat has already become a “graveyard of companies that couldn’t expand their offerings due to quality issues.” , Lagally says, will give consumers the price and quality they want, and the sales will continue.
