Ah, the carnival. There’s a Ferris wheel, face painting, games designed to drain your life savings, and a cotton candy machine full of... fake meat??
OK, that might be a bit of a stretch, but Boston-based food tech company Lasso wants to be known as the proprietors of the “advanced cotton candy machine,” aka Lasso SpinTech.
It’s a patented technology that uses centrifugal force in a cylindrical machine to spin fiber, transforming the texture of just about any food ingredient while maintaining more nutrition than other processing techniques.
The startup was previously known as Tender Food, a meat substitute brand. That once-buzzy market is dragging, though, per Forbes:
- Sales of plant-based meat and seafood stalled in 2022 and declined in 2023, with dollar sales down 19% (The Good Food Institute).
- Beyond Meat reported a net loss of $44.9m in Q4 of 2024 and a 4.9% decrease in net revenue YoY in 2024.
- Consumers are shying away from veggie mystery meat with unidentifiable ingredients.
Lasso CEO Mike Messersmith told AgFunderNews that “[2020] was the peak of the plant-based meat enthusiasm funding,” and that there was curiosity about a method to “process plant proteins in a way that doesn’t require an extraordinarily long ingredient list.” He also cited issues with texture and cost.
Now, whether or not a fake meat fiber donut is a worthy substitute for, well, a meat substitute is yet to be seen, but Lasso is hoping to break out of that category, leveraging SpinTech to produce fiber- and protein-packed fruit snacks, chips, pet food, and beyond. Tender, their original plant-based meat brand, is now under Lasso’s portfolio.
Their newer ventures focus on helping consumers meet protein goals, increase their dietary fiber intake, and know exactly what they’re eating (*cough* it’s chickpeas).
Take their in-house fruit snack brand: they throw plant protein, fiber, and fruit into the SpinTech (about the size of your washing machine), and it spins and weaves together the ingredients to create chewy gummies without additives. Yum!
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