Dining out? The meat you’re eating – pork, beef or chicken – may have been whipped up in an industrial cotton candy machine at Somerville’s Tender Food, part of a revolution in vegetarian foods seeded at Harvard.
Saus serves Tender in its pork carnitas sandwich and The Somerville Dip, a beef short rib sandwich with au jus. “Customers are very into” the fake meat, and cooks love working with it, especially since it “chars like real meat,” said Tanya Kropinicki Walker, co-owner of Saus. The eatery, which is an all-vegetarian at Bow Market, hopes to relaunch its Tender crispy chicken sandwich in November.
Clover Food Lab plans to relaunch its version of a Tender crispy chicken sandwich Oct. 22 – customers relish it, said Chris Anderson, the head of food at the Cambridge-born chain, just as “customer attachment to bowls have grown” since Tender products were added.
Tender’s fake chicken cooks up as savory and crispy, so “customers are comfortable trying something new,”Anderson said.
The food, though, begins as powdered plant proteins and dietary fibers mixed with water to form a dough. The mixture is run through an industrial machine similar to a cotton candy machine and spun to create musclelike fibers that are seasoned and formed into chicken breasts, pulled pork or beef. The meats are packaged and shipped to restaurants, where they are cooked and plated to look and taste like real meat.
They “taste good and hopefully are also a healthy, nutritious and affordable option for consumers,” co-founder Christophe Chantre said.
A meat chicken breast contains 43 grams of protein, according to the USDA, and that is hard to replicate, Chantre said; but Tender products contain comparable amounts and are high in dietary fiber, which real meat does not contain. “There’s huge amounts of people that don’t eat enough fiber – which is just vegetables.” he said. “With the amount of fiber in our products, we could get a heart-healthy certification.” (Tender is not yet pursuing the certification.)
“Climate and sustainability” are at the core of Tender’s mission “to enable massive growth” of the protein alternative industry, now just 1 percent of the meat industry, according to the Global Food Institute. One reason it matters: The food industry produces one-third of carbon emissions globally, according to a study by the European Union.
“Meat without the animal”
Chantre started Tender, formerly Boston Meats, with Luke MacQueen and Grant Gonzalez at Harvard University after professor Kit Parker pitched the idea of developing “meat without the animal,” Chantre said.
Tender’s development remained at Harvard from 2013 to 2020 before moving to Greentown Labs at Somerville’s Somernova campus. It outgrew the space and relocated down the street in another Somernova space at 17 Properzi Way.
In addition to being served at all Clover Food Lab and Saus locations, Tender is found locally at Mamaleh’s Delicatessen and Wusong Road, and at Reunion BBQ in Boston. Olin College in Needham offers Tender products to its students, and the meat alternative company hopes to get into other local universities soon, Chantre said.
Mooji Meats, another Harvard plant-based start up, is based out of Baltimore. Mooji sells plant-based rib-eye at La Voile in Brookline and had trials at Boston Chops in Downtown Crossing, the Prima Steakhouse and Nubar at the Sheraton Commander.
“I have not tried Mooji yet and cannot compare Tender with its 3D-printed meat alternatives,” Chantre said. The 3D printing means “you can do really precise features – but what I think is unique about our technology is we’re able to create that really fine fiber that you have in a piece of muscle at a really, really fast rate.”
Growing an industry
The Cambridge area has been good for food innovation because of its schools and research institutions. “There’s a fair amount of funding from investors here in town,” Chantre said. “Beyond that at the government level, there seems to be more and more interest from Gov. Healey’s office to support climate and really try to make it a hub for climate technology generally, and food in particular.”
After raising $12 million in seed funding in 2022, Tender got $11 million in Series A funding, or a secondary investment opportunity, in June. Boston’s Motif Food Works raised $345 million in investments since its start in 2019 yet must shut down because of costs from an intellectual property lawsuit with the most well-known maker of plant-based “meats,” Impossible Foods, according to industry reports this month.
After more than three years as solely a technology company, Tender is transitioning to become a technology and commercial company – meaning “we have a responsibility toward customers, toward Clover and so on and our end consumers, making sure that our products are food safe every single time,” Chantre said.
“We’re still very much focused on innovating and creating that next generation of products, and so still investing heavily in product development technology so that we can continue to deliver even better products to consumers,” Chantre said.
This post was updated Sept. 30, 2024, with a handful of terminology suggestions from Tender Food, expanded direct quotations and a correction from the company about whether its products are gluten free.
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