By Ariel Grossman, NoCamels -
Flip over the boxes of many products offering plant-based alternatives to meat and you’ll see that in their mission to imitate, they actually include a long list of highly processed ingredients that aren’t nutritious at all.
Israeli startup More Foods creates healthy and high-protein products using pumpkin and sunflower seeds, and just a handful of other simple ingredients.
With 40 percent of US consumers now buying plant-based alternatives in the pursuit of living healthily, it’s clear that these meat-free products are not just some passing craze.
And according to More Foods, “people like variety” in their diet – whether they eat meat or not.
“If you look at animal protein, people eat endless amounts of different types of meat, each with different textures and nutritional makeups,” More Foods founder Leonardo Marcovitz tells NoCamels.
“But I saw that in the plant-based space, it was limited to soy, pea, and seitan, and a lot of the ingredient lists on products [that used these proteins] were not clean-label or short. So I saw an opportunity to make a product that is tasty, and is also clean-label and has a short list of ingredients.”
The pumpkin and sunflower seeds More Foods uses are actually leftovers from the oil industry. After oil is extracted from the seeds, the high-protein “press cake” that remains is usually sold to make protein powder, fertilizer or animal feed.
The Tel Aviv-based startup is the first in the food industry to give the seeds value. It mills the leftover seeds into flour, combines them with nutritional yeast, black carrot juice extract, apple extract, natural flavorings and salt, and finally uses patent-pending tech that exerts a specific temperature and pressure to create products with a “meaty” bite.
More Foods’ pulled strips, chunks and minute steaks are all high in protein (27 percent), as well as fiber (seven percent), while Marcovitz says animal proteins normally have no fiber at all. The products also have twice the amount of iron than animal proteins like beef, and contain high levels of other key nutrients such as potassium and calcium.
Other plant-based products, which use pea or soy protein, normally derive the key nutrient through a process known as protein isolation. The process requires energy to separate the protein from the pea or soy’s other components, like carbohydrates.
More Foods, on the other hand, does not use protein isolation, and only needs to minimally process the ingredients it uses for its products.
That said, Marcovitz doesn’t see his company as another plant-based meat alternative, and doesn’t see other alternative meat companies as his competitors.
“We make products that are high in protein, that make you feel satiated and that have a really great bite to them.”
More Foods’ products are already being served at over 100 restaurant locations in Israel. And because the company is not trying to mimic burgers or sausages, its products can actually be cooked to suit a range of cuisines, from Mexican and Asian to Middle Eastern and American.
Landwer Cafe, which has over 70 locations across the country, started using More Foods in its dishes nearly two months ago at select chains. The popular restaurant will now be incorporating the high-protein strips, chunks and minute steaks into all of its chains.
One of the most popular shawarma chains in Israel, Dabush Shawarma, also embarked on a pilot with More Foods just last week.
“Our objective as a company is to help people broaden the way they eat,” says Marcovitz. “It’s positively surprising and encouraging to see that [a chain] that is normally associated with just animal protein now understands that plant proteins can also be used for main meals.”
The startup is now focused on expanding internationally, and is already being used in some restaurant chains in France and in the UK. It’s also in talks to supply makers of frozen packaged meals in Europe with its high-protein ingredients.
“We’re making tasty food at a manageable price. People eat ‘main meal ingredients’ every day, and that’s what we’re doing. Because that is the way we see ourselves, we’re not trying to replicate meat, and our products don’t taste extremely like meat.
“That’s why the name is ‘More Foods’. It’s not about more food, which is gluttony, but about trying new foods.”
