A French plant-based meat-producing firm is set to revolutionize the industry with its plant-based pork and is being financially backed by the Hollywood star and academy award winner Natalie Portman.
Paris-based firm La Vie recently raised an investment amount of 25 million euros ($28.3 million) from investment funds and pro-climate celebrities like Natalie Portman, who is an avowed vegan and a long-time climate activist who has been quite articulate about climate change and global warming.
Highlights —
- Natalie Portman joins the funding board of vegan meat-producing French company, La Vie
- The extraordinaire and genius of La Vie’s products
- How La Vie’s faux bacon is taking the vegan meat market by storm
What’s Extraordinary About La Vie’s Products?
Though La Vie is not the first company to produce vegan pork, what sets it apart from other brands is the perfection of its products. La Vie has been focusing not only on making vegan pork but also on imitating the pork fat that pork releases once it is cooked.
“We’re the only ones in the world today to have succeeded in developing a vegetable fat that cooks, fries, infuses and browns like animal fat”, enthused the company’s chief executive and co-founder, Nicolas Schweitzer.
After being tossed in a frying pan for several minutes, the rashers of La Vie’s imitation smoked bacon were golden brown, crunchy, and similar in taste to the real McCoy.
“We have a reduced salt version as well”, claimed Vincent Poulichet, 32, the company’s scientific expert and the other co-founder.
The lardons received a C-rating on France’s “Nutri-Score” which is a food health rating scale, a middle score on the A to E ranking.
“Worse than broccoli, but better than pork lardons”, the company notes wryly on its website.
New startups and established food manufacturers have been rolling out a variety of products with the ambition to replace beef, chicken and pork with plant-based counterparts. But making faux bacon taste like real bacon is another challenge.
5000 Trials Later!
La Vie’s founders, who formed their company back in 2019, believe in winning consumers over taste is the real key to success.
“After three years of research and 5,000 trials we succeeded in the somewhat crazy challenge of reproducing the taste of pork”, said Schweitzer, 34.
The pork fat in La Vie’s imitation bacon and lardons is produced mostly from sunflower oil and specially treated water. The ingredients in the meat part contain soy protein, salt, natural colourants derived from radish skins and tomatoes, and natural flavours.
After testing La Vie’s products at home in the United States, Portman joined as one of the company’s financial backers.
“It was by giving people a taste of our products that we managed to put together this extraordinary round of financing”, said Schweitzer. “Right away, investors said, ‘Oh, yeah!’”
Venture capitalists like Oyster Bay, Seventure and Partech joined the funding round, as did the owners of several successful European startups such as Oatly, Vinted, Back Market and BlaBlaCar.
More than one in four consumers globally admit that they are trying to limit their meat consumption, in addition to the 10 percent of people who are vegetarian, or vegan as claimed in a 2021 report by market research firm Euromonitor International. London-based market research firm Fairfield speculates the vegan meat market to grow by nearly 19 percent annually between 2021 and 2026, to hit $13 billion.
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