“The reason we were delayed in deploying this was not because of the system itself. It was because the facility we previously were going to work with could no longer work with us anymore due to their own systems. ... So, we had spent two years finding that facility, and unfortunately, we were not able to continue with them due to things outside of our control, so we had to restart the process and look for another partner,” Christie Lagally, Rebellyous Foods founder and CEO, told FoodNavigator-USA.
‘A very different paradigm:’ How Mock 2 can reduce plant-based meat production costs
Founded in September 2017, Rebellyous Foods is a food-tech company that specializes in plant-based chicken, which the company sells to foodservice channels, including through the USDA National School Lunch Program, hospitals, corporate cafeterias, entertainment facilities and prisons, Lagally explained.
Rebellyous Foods partnered with RMS Foods to deploy Mock 2, a fully automated and continuous chilled dough substrate processing system that can create 2,500-5,000 pounds of plant-based meat per hour per production line. The patented Mock 2 system automates processes for hydrating texturized protein and measuring and mixing various ingredients to create plant-based meat.
RMS Foods is a food manufacturer in Hobbs, N.M., with expertise in plant-based meat, having worked with plant-based brands like Boca and Improved Nature in the past.
“We are making plant-based meat faster, better and cheaper because you could get even higher quality — consistent quality — and then lower price overall once you have applied this automated technology, the Mock 2,” said Lagally.
She added, “[Mock 2] is novel simply because it is a very different paradigm from the way we make plant-based meat today, almost all plant-based meat in the United States and globally is made via what is called mix-and-form production, where various ingredients are brought together to make a cohesive dough or substrate. ... The goal of developing a new production system is simply to ... bring this industry up to modern-day methodology.”
Growing the plant-based meat market ‘is not just about scale’
With Mock 2, plant-based meat companies can reduce the resources used to create a product, lowering production costs and helping the plant-based meat market achieve price parity to animal-based meats, Lagally claimed.
The Mock 2 system can replace roughly 12 employees with one automation technician, Lagally previously shared with FoodNavigator-USA. Additionally, Mock 2 can reduce energy costs by 80%, and the system takes up a third of the production space of current production methods, according to Rebellyous Foods.
Many alternative protein companies have struggled with scaling up production, but the problem might have less to do with scaling and more to do with which processes are being scaled up, Lagally explained.
“I always like to push back a little on that idea that scale solves everything. It does not. It certainly does not solve price parity. And if that was the case, Impossible, Beyond Meat and Morningstar would all be a price parity with animal meat. And in the entire history of all three companies, they have not been and that is one of the biggest main complaints from consumers is that plant-based meat costs too much. So, if it was just about scale, that problem would have been solved a decade ago,” Lagally said.
She added, “It is about how we produce plant-based meat at scale, and the way that the meat industry has scaled to successfully bring the cost of meat down is by developing automated processing equipment that is very specific to meat processing.”
‘We have been really able to extend our runway ... with revenue’
When further deploying the technology, Rebellyous Foods has “a lot of different avenues for growth,” including partnering with CPG companies, Lagally noted.
“We are talking to investors right now about taking our technology, streamlining it, and putting it into a second facility and a third facility. As we grow, we are going to need even more and more distribution and delivering our products to even more locations. So fundamentally, the next stage of our development is really about high-margin growth because that is what a sustainable company is,” she elaborated.
Rebellyous Foods is looking to secure “a mini round” of funding to complement the $9.5 million equity round it already raised, and to support profitability by growing the business naturally and bringing down costs by using Mock 2, Lagally explained.
“We have been really able to extend our runway by exactly what we are supposed to be, extending it with revenue. So as our revenues have gone up month-year over month-year solidly for the last four years, it is starting to, and has been, ... carrying our company overall,” she added.
