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At the cusp of a food revolution

The way humanity eats is fundamentally unsustainable. Animal agriculture, intensive one in particular, is now the second largest contributor to carbon emissions behind fossil fuels. Not only that, but animal agriculture on a large scale requires a profusion of water and land resources, making it one of the main culprits for deforestation and subsequent biodiversity loss.

Younger generations have been well-exposed to these facts, exemplified and encapsulated by thought-provoking Netflix exposés such as Cowspiracy. Gen Z’s overexposure to the climate change threat has made many of them acutely aware of the predicament the current livestock agricultural system poses to the earth’s livability.

These factors have all conflated into new food consumption habits. The recent and seemingly uninhibited rise of plant-based food is at the forefront of these changes. Major companies in the space such as Impossible or Beyond Meat have understood that the key to democratizing plant-based food was to recreate what meat tasted and felt like, not to try and switch the entire population to a diet made of stale grains and salad.

“The plant-based food market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.9% from 2020 to 2027 to reach $74.2 billion by 2027.” - Research and Markets

The plant-based food industry’s tailwinds are strong and unlikely to recede anytime soon. On top of the environmental concerns, plant-based diets are gaining popularity due to increasing health concerns about an overly carnivorous diet. The growing urban population, for whom environmental and health standards hold more and more weight, is even leading fast-food incumbents to change their ways.

“International restaurant chains, including Taco Bell, Chipotle, Jamba Juice, and Starbucks will be significant players in increased sales and consumption of plant-based alternatives. Large chains offering burger, sausage, and milk alternatives will encourage consumer habits to adjust to plant-based food products.” - Bloomberg Intelligence

NotCo: The origin story

The main protagonist for today’s story is Matías Muchkin, one of NotCo’s co-founders and its current CEO. Matías hails from the South American country of Chile, internationally known for a few things including its unique shape and the singular economic development path it took compared to its Latino neighbors. I briefly touched upon this in my deep-dive analyzing the Chilean startup ecosystem.

“Following an American-organized coup against left-wing president Salvador Allende in 1973, Augusto Pinochet led a right-wing dictatorship for 17 years. During his tenure, his cabinet was filled with “Chicago Boys”, American trained neo-liberal economists who undertook radically different economic policies than their Venezuelan or Cuban counter-parts.” - Realistic Optimist

Back to Matías. In 2013, he co-founded Eggless, one of Chile’s first companies to foray into the world of plant-based food. Eggless’ main product was plant-based mayonnaise, which gained some relevant exposure when distributed by some of Chile’s largest retail chains such as Walmart and Jumbo.

This first plant-based adventure made Matías hungry for more, pun intended. At the top of his mind was the dichotomy between how the pharmaceutical industry carried out new drug research, and how the food industry went about its own new food discovery. In 2015, Matías headed to the University of California, Berkeley to find out why the pharma industry was so advanced in this aspect, and if elements of it could potentially be applied to the antiquated way food development was done.

After defining the contours of the idea for NotCo, Matías went on the search for co-founders. The two acolytes accompanying him on the journey would turn out to be Karim Pichara, an astrophysicist focused on data and machine learning, and Pablo Zamora, a plant genomics researcher.

AI and food: NotCo’s nexus

At the very core of NotCo’s innovation lies Giuseppe, an artificial intelligence named as an homage to Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, famous for intertwining fruits and vegetables with human faces in his paintings.

Giuseppe’s essence is finding plant combinations that resemble popular animal-based products such as burgers, milk, ice cream, etc. To do so, Giuseppe was trained with the structural makeup of thousands of plants and animal-based foods. Giuseppe then got to work, churning out plant-based recipes that should, in theory, yield the equivalent of the animal-based food it was asked to replicate.

Giuseppe is continuously trained to get better. Real-world chefs prepare and taste the recipes proposed, before giving Giuseppe feedback on some detail he might’ve forgotten. A telling example of the need for these human tasters is the time Giuseppe conceived a perfectly tasting plant-based milk, that turned out to be completely blue. And as Matías noted: “it’s really hard to sell people blue milk”.

Giuseppe not only supercharges NotCo’s new product generation process. It is also a decisive competitive advantage against incumbent food producers looking to launch plant-based products. NotCo and its competitors rely on high-tech built exclusively for the purpose of generating novel and groundbreaking plant-based recipes.

The resources and expertise required to do so are heavy, meaning they can’t be treated as a side project within a mega-corporation. Instead of steamrolling these food industry giants, NotCo has taken a different approach to the matter, as we’ll see in the next paragraph.

“AI is to the new food industry what the advances in machines were to the agricultural industry” - Matías Muchnik on the Contxto Futurismo podcast

Building for mass, not hipsters

One of NotCo’s striking features is its unapologetic ambition to scale. To date, the company has raised around $433M, achieved unicorn status, and assembled an impressive cap table comprised of Tiger Global, Bezos Expedition, Kaszek Ventures, and Roger Federer to name a few. It also became a part of the prized Endeavor network in 2019.

NotCo doesn’t shy away from its vast goals or hide in over-moralizing. NotCo’s obsession with getting its products to taste, smell, and feel as close as possible to the animal-based alternative originates from its grand mission of making plant-based food mainstream.

According to Matías, one of his biggest achievements is that an overwhelming majority of NotCo consumers are not even vegan. They just like the products, and the environmental nudge that comes with buying them is a nice to have.

“The thing is, if we just do a super plant-based, vegan, trendy, hipster well-being brand, we're not going to move the needle of sustainability. We need to make a technology that will allow us to produce food products faster, better, more accurately, and at less cost while using fewer resources. We need to be a mass market company, not niche.” - Matías Muchnik in Forbes

The company is already planning an IPO for 2025, and distributes its products in the biggest LATAM markets such as Brazil and Argentina, but also in North America and Australia. It has also recently been dipping its toes into Europe. The leadership team undoubtedly has its eyes set on international expansion.

Disrupting the old guard, in a different way

Instead of waging an all-out war against meat industry giants such as fast foods and large food conglomerates, NotCo has taken to work with them from the inside to change them, sticking to the ethos of reaching the masses instead of pursuing an ideological war.

In Chile, NotCo collaborated with Burger King by launching its “Rebel Whooper”. In the US, NotCo partnered with Shake Shack to serve non-dairy chocolate shakes and frozen custard. Likely bolstered by the Bezos connection, NotCo signed a deal with US retailer Whole Foods to distribute some of its spearheading products such as the NotBurger and the NotMilk.

All of these corporate moves have been trumped by the joint venture NotCo recently launched with food giant KraftHeinz, a company that posted revenues of $26B in 2021. The joint venture with KraftHeinz isn’t a “partnership”. It’s a standalone new venture based in Chicago, which seeks to combine NotCo’s food-making and discovery abilities and KraftHeinz’s century-long of experience in mass food distribution.

The deal supposedly benefits NotCo by bringing in extra revenue for licensing its technology to an outside company, while also building global brand recognition by launching new products with KraftHeinz brands. For KraftHeinz, the deal represents a much-needed innovation, as they lose more and more market share to brands better catering to the new generation’s needs.

These corporate deals might make sense now, but how sustainable are they in the long run? If NotCo’s mayonnaise starts heavily competing with KraftHeinz’s “traditional” mayonnaise, how will that reflect on the joint venture?

One of NotCo’s long-term goals is to license its technology to more and more of these food conglomerates, enabling them to produce their own world-class plant-based products. Using the threat of NotCo products eating at their profits to entice conglomerates to buy NotCo’s technology is a business move bordering on prowess.

Conclusion

NotCo still faces a consequent amount of obstacles. Powerful meat lobbies are, unsurprisingly, not happy with this new contender. For an industry so dominant and intermeshed with the arcane of political power, the arrival of a dynamic rival backed by tech’s nouveau riche and increasingly flirtatious with the food industry’s biggest names screams danger.

In NotCo’s native Chile, a union of dairy farmers even sued the company for wrongfully utilizing the word “milk”. NotCo’s reply was biting, brazen, and representative of a company knowing they’re on the right side of history.

“NotCo has not displayed conduct of any kind that would meet the general definition of disloyal competition because the brand name NotMilk suggests, in fact, that the product is not about milk.” - Rest of World

It will be interesting to see if governments switch from subsidizing the meat/dairy industry to subsidizing the rapidly growing and consolidating plant-based one. Similar to the energy sector, the switch from fossil fuel subsidies to green energy will be painful, but necessary.

Overall, with such powerful societal and economic tailwinds pushing it forward, I don’t really see an end to NotCo’s inexorable rise, and even less so to the growth of the plant-based food market.

The Realistic Optimist provides weekly, in-depth analyses of some of the most relevant stories in our now-globalized startup world. Subscribe below to receive it directly to your inbox and don’t hesitate to share it with your colleagues :)