New version of plain chicken
According to foreign media According to The Spoon , recently, U.S. artificial meat company NUGGS announced that it will release their plant-based chicken nuggets on the retail market this spring. NUGGS will cooperate with fast-moving consumer goods distributors Acosta and Green Spoon, and the products will enter 10,000 retail stores, but the specific retail companies that they will cooperate with have not been announced yet.
NUGGS was founded in 2019, and sold chicken nuggets directly to consumers through DTC (Direct To Consumer) in the early days. Like Beyond Meat’s burger steak, NUGGS’s vegetable broiler nuggets also use pea protein as the main ingredient. NUGGS announced that it will also iterate on product based on consumer feedback, with the upcoming version 2.0 product.
Nugs previously received a $ 7 million angel round from McCain Foods, the largest manufacturer of frozen potato products in the world. When entering a grocery store, plant meat products are often placed in the freezer area and placed with many plant meat brands, and McCann Food ’s resources in the retail channel will help NUGGS.
Currently, the retail price of NUGGS is $ 5.99 in a box of 10.4 ounces (about 0.3 liters). The same specifications of the product are better than those sold in Target Morningstar Vegetable Chicken Nuggets is more expensive, but more expensive than Quorn vegetable chicken pieces sold at Wal-Mart are cheaper .
It is worth mentioning that meat giant Tyson has also launched its own Plant meat brand Raised & Rooted , the first product contains plant meat chicken meat (also using pea protein as the main ingredient) and mixed hamburger (combining beef and pea protein); with traditional chicken meat and Compared to beef burgers, Raised & Rooted Less saturated fat and lower calories.
Before NUGGS, founder Ben Pasternak created a gaming application and got a venture capital investment at the age of 15. NUGGS’s team is also very young. Currently, there are 8 people, 3 of whom are under 20 years old (including founder and CEO Ben Pasternak). They also have relatively little experience in food manufacturing and channel expansion.
NUGGS ’s vegan chicken pieces contain 22 grams of protein (twice animal chicken pieces) and are free of eggs, wheat, soy and cholesterol. According to the NUGGS website, a box containing 25 chicken nuggets (approximately 5 meals) is priced at $ 24.99, which is a contract discount $ 1 a piece of chicken; but two boxes (50 pieces) have a long-term discount for only $ 29.99.
It is worth mentioning that there is still much room for growth in plant-based protein products. According to a report from the American Plant-Based Food Association, in 2019, US plant meat has maintained a high growth rate of 18%, and the market size has grown to US $ 939 million in just a few years, accounting for 2% of US retail sales of packaged meat. Therefore, the plant-based market is not a zero-sum game. Although there are already many related companies on the market, most of the products are around burgers instead of chicken, leaving plenty of room for new entrants.