Adam Yee interviewed Paul Shapiro about his book called Clean Meat. 3 months later, Paul approached Adam with an idea. Adam volunteered to make it.
Founded in 2018, Better Meat Co originally sold plant-based proteins to meat companies as a B2B ingredient company.
With 3 people, we were able to convince one of the biggest meat manufacturers to take a risk on the category of plant-rich meat (a new term developed by Food Systems Innovations). We were able to create a blended chicken nugget with 50% meat and 50% vegetables.
This project was an expedited beast. It took only 1 year to commercialize and Perdue thought we were more than 3 people.
Perdue Chicken Plus is sold in +7100 stores and is the only successful case-study of a plant-rich product sold successfully.
Lessons Learned
- A small team of three can impact a multimillion dollar company
- We are probably the only plant-rich product that has survived the test of time that no one knows about
- Meat itself is cheaper than plant-based ingredients
You can listen to this episode with Michael Wolf from the Spoon who interviews Paul Shapiro about Better Meat Co's journey.