New School Foods
- $600,000
- Chris Bryson
- Capital Raised: $12 Million
New School Foods, founded in 2020 by the experienced entrepreneur Chris Bryson, the Canadian startup creates plant-based seafood with the same texture, flavor, nutritional benefits, and cooking experience as traditional seafood. They have developed a novel directional freezing technology through two years of deep R&D in collaboration with three research universities. The company is the first to produce plant-based foods with this technology, a unique new addition to the plant-based meat processing toolkit. The company’s patented technology and IP are hard to imitate or circumvent and are wholly owned by the company via IP assignment from its university partners.
New School Foods will launch whole-cut plant-based salmon fillets produced through its unique freeze structuring process. The product contains highly realistic aligned protein fibres, which cannot be produced with existing methods such as high-moisture extrusion. Omega 3, 6, and astaxanthin (to represent the pink salmon colour) will also be included in the product.
Problem they solve
- Overfishing: More than 90 percent of wild fisheries are classified as overfished or harvested at maximum capacity, and aquaculture growth is slowing and presents its own challenges, leaving the worlds with an urgent need for new approaches to meet this growing demand.
- Carbon footprint: A study done by Nature Climate Change shows that “fisheries consumed 40 billion litres of fuel in 2011 and generated a total of 179 million tonnes of CO2-equivalent GHGs (4% of global food production)”. Fishing for crustaceans has the most carbon intensive fleets.
Why we believe
- Established Technological base: They have a unique patented process in the usage of hydrogel, a material critical for this process and well covered in its IP. The company is leveraging Ryerson, McGill, and St. Francis Xavier Universities to conduct its R&D projects and have fully assigned IP to New School.
- Strong Leadership: The founder and CEO, Chris Bryson, has a successful track record of building and exiting an enterprise software company Unata, acquired by Instacart in 2018. He is an active member of the Glass Wall Syndicate (being an angel investor himself) and is well networked with the members of the syndicate including Lever, Blue Horizon, New Crop Capital , Stray Dog Capital, and many others.
- Bedfellows’ quality: The set of investors represent well regarded names in the Alt Protein VC community including Lever VC & Blue Horizon ventures. Senior partners involved in the deal from Lever VC were also involved in the early investment & exit of Beyond Meat and investment & scale out of Impossible Foods.
Investors
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Entrepreneurs
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