Tender

Combined, pork and chicken make up more than 60% of global meat production and emit more than 1 Gt of CO2e annually. Multiple plant- and cell-based alternatives exist, but they struggle to expand beyond meat mush into whole cuts. Until alternative meats can replicate the structure and feel of grandma’s pulled pork, they’ll never expand beyond the packaged and processed meat aisle. Tender is developing a fiber spinning technology that spins scaffolds finer than human hair out of common plant-based ingredients like soy and cellulose. These structures enable cells to “differentiate” into tissues, fiber, and muscle and ultimately replicate the structure of a whole cut. They’re starting out with a plant-based pulled pork and chicken and will expand into other meats from there. Other texturing technologies like 3D printing are either low-throughput or struggle with fibrous textures. Tender can spin kilograms of fiber per hour at the lab scale, and they make a product that would pull its weight at a state fair. They can also work with a variety of ingredients, enabling them to eventually touch a range of muscle cuts across both meat and seafood.