This company says it can make plant-based ‘meat’ taste better

afr.com:

Nourish Ingredients, a company with backers including superannuation fund Hostplus and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, is preparing for a capital raising next year as it rolls out a breakthrough product it says makes plant-based “meat” so much better.

Chief executive and founder James Petrie said Nourish had spent three years developing the product made using a fermentation process with lipids found in nature, which replicates the taste and smell of animal fats. But the Tastilux product, when added to plant-based “meat” does not alter its meat-free status. “The fat is where the flavour is,” Mr Petrie said.

Nourish Ingredients CEO and founder James Petrie (left) and Ernesto Vecilla, Nourish’s head of culinary innovation.  

Mr Petrie said the plant-based “meat” category had largely won over vegans and vegetarians but mainstream consumers who may have tried plant-based “meat” needed to be converted to regular buyers through better taste. The sector’s slowing growth rates needed to accelerate.

“It is not growing as fast as we need it to be growing,” Mr Petrie said. “Now it’s time for the industry to deliver.”

The industry, which is being heavily backed by venture capital, is going through the early stages of a shakeout, where scale is becoming more important at a time when overall sales are slowing.

Sydney-based All G Foods, which produces the Love Buds brand, on October 17 merged with Fenn Foods from Queensland, which makes the vEEF brand. The chairman of the merged group, Jan Pacas, said size is increasingly important in the plant-based “meat” sector. Mr Pacas is chief executive of All G Foods, a company in which supermarkets group Woolworths is an investor through its venture capital arm.

“The best companies will