Mike Messersmith, CEO of Tender Food

Elysabeth: We’re going to find out today from my guest. He is the CEO of Tender Food, Mike Messersmith. I’m so happy that you’re here.

I don’t know of any other company doing this exactly, but that’s because maybe I don’t quite yet understand the technology. So I want to share that screen that talks about spinning and I know you’re not going to divulge any secrets, of course.

Mike Messersmith: No, we can talk about it. That’s a good visual there. So at its core of what we do, we can take a broad spectrum of simple raw material ingredients with a foundation of protein and fiber. So to make our alternative protein products like plant-based chicken and plant-based pork, we take fava bean protein, rice protein, and oat fiber. That gets mixed up kind of like a dry cake mix or something like that. It goes through the machine that the team created.

So this is hard tech, where it gets spun and it really does look kind of like an industrial cotton candy machine about the size of a commercial washing machine, so to speak. Sometimes in manufacturing you go into these factories and the thing is the size of an aircraft hanger. This has a really small footprint and is very flexible. The protein and fiber goes through it, it spins around, and we literally spin fiber that’s collected and then take it out. Then the downstream processing looks very similar to what lots of other brands would do. So you would shred it, you season it, you package it and out it goes to a restaurant.

So the real special magic of what the team here has built has been in developing a really deep understanding of these ingredients and how we can work with different protein sources and different ingredients and then turn it into these really delicious, textured, edible, fibrous structures, because that is how a pulled pork or how a pulled chicken would look at any restaurant or barbecue restaurant. I think that texture is what’s really lacking in a lot of the offerings in the plant-based world today.