PORTFOLIO

Planted revolutionizes the way we consume meat by providing a guilt-free alternative to meat products without compromising in texture. Planted uses solely plant-based ingredients to form meat-like structures, with authentic mouthfeel while providing all nutritional benefits of animal meat. Consumers are increasingly craving for a new alternative to animal meat that is healthy, natural, ‘cruelty-free’, environmentally sustainable, and clean-label. We are convinced that plant proteins should be used directly for human consumption and not primarily for animal use. The current system where plant proteins, water, and other resources such as antibiotics, land, labor, and time to create animal meat are used is not the right way to feed 10 billion people living on this planet by 2050. With our vision, we will provide healthy and delicious alternatives to animal meat in a sustainable fashion.
Planted’s vision is to be better and cheaper than animal chicken in the course over the next five years.

‘Planted meat’ made from plants is all-natural, no additives. Planted’s proprietary formulation and technology allow to produce all natural planted- based meats, free of GMO, gluten, and soy. Our unique technology enables us to tailor plant proteins into various animal-meat-like forms and shapes, ranging from short fibers as found in fish to long fibers in beef. Our first product, planted.chickenTM, is made of four ingredients: pea protein, pea fiber, rapeseed oil, and water. With our technology platform, we are able to flexibly choose ingredients and work with a variety of alternative plant proteins (oil press-cakes, chickpea, pumpkin, oat, sunflower, algae), and thus bring plant protein diversity to the consumers and avoid market traps such as soy or gluten. Special about the project “piecemaker” is that it embraces the consumers’ need for food to look nice. In this case, an automated process is designed to make the pieces look like hand-cut, which is particularly difficult with plant-based meats.

The data from the first prototype machine were analyzed for their physical principles. The gained insights allowed to scout for existing parts, assemblies and machines that followed these rules. Thus, the development could be fast tracked. Hygienic design principles – which are costly and difficult to realize - could be adapted from existing commercial solutions. By implementing the new insights and parts and automate the piecemaking process, the cost to make pieces dropped substantially. This price drop allowed to scale up production output 10x, which would otherwise not have been possible. Also, new markets in Europe could be entered because a competitive price was reached, catalyzed by the “Project Piecemaker”.

Extruded meat analogues based on yellow, heterotrophically cultivated Auxenochlorella protothecoides microalgae, Elsevier, ScienceDirect, January 2020