Chris Bryson isn’t your typical CEO.

As the head of Unata, a digital grocery company that was bought by Instacart in 2018, Bryson famously had one-on-one coffee appointments with every one of his employees at least once every four months. 

And when he decided he wanted to throw his time, brain power and money into the alt-meat sector, he didn’t hire a food scientist and produce more of the same plant-based products already flooding the market. 

Instead, he undertook an extensive (and expensive) three-year R&D process with multiple universities, searching for a breakthrough idea that would turn the industry on its head. 

“Everyone is so focused on taste. Taste is important, but there’s so much more to it,” Bryson said. “There’s price, of course. Today’s alternatives are two to three times more expensive, and people are, at the end of the day, driven by price more than anything else. But the thing not nearly enough people are thinking about is texture. And that’s where we focused a lot of our efforts.”

Focusing on texture is how his second startup venture, New School Foods, ended up homing in on a technique called “directional freezing,” which relies on a series of cold-based processes to recreate the muscle fibers of conventional meat. 

The science is surprisingly simple: In short, a seaweed-based gel with a high concentration of water is placed on an extremely cold surface. As the water in the gel freezes, ice crystals grow up through the gel, creating an arrangement of tubes that are similar to the molecular structure of muscle fibers. 

Melting the ice leaves hollow tubes throughout the gel structure. New School Foods takes this empty scaffold and fills it with plant proteins, oils and other ingredients to create a whole cut protein product. 

The Toronto-based company says that, by using different temperatures and different gels, it can use its patented process to tune the diameter and length of the tubes to mimic different types of meat. So while Bryson and his team plan to go to market with a plant-based salmon in 2024, he contends there’s no limit to the different types of products the company can produce. 

In a conversation with Alt-Meat, the serial founder talks about why he felt compelled to get into the alt-meat arena, his tenets of good product design and why Canada might just be the epicenter of future foods.  

Alt-Meat: How did you get involved in the alt-protein space?

BRYSON: After the sale of my first company, I met a few people who opened my eyes to the realities of how our food system works. The more I learned about factory farming, the more it disturbed me. I felt like it was such an important problem, and I felt compelled to work on it, to help companies and to see the entire industry be more successful.

I didn’t think I had any business starting a company in this space because I’m not an engineer or a food scientist. I thought I could contribute my time and money, working with alternative protein startups as an angel investor. And that evolved over time into eventually founding New School Foods in 2020.

Alt-Meat: What made you take that leap? 

BRYSON: Very quickly I noticed that the majority of plant-based companies just didn’t have the ability to invest in research and development because investors ask the kiss-of-death question: ‘Can I taste it?’ So everyone rushes to the existing technologies, like extrusion, and guess what? They end up producing more of the same.

Alt-Meat: Extrusion is used in a wide array of conventional and plant-based products. Why did you decide that wasn’t going to work for New School? 

BRYSON: In general, I don’t think any industry should be limited to just one tool in the toolkit, and especially with extrusion, I think the technology has some fundamental challenges that make it non-viable for producing whole cuts. 

The problem is that extrusion uses heat, so no matter what you do, you’re going to end up with a pre-cooked product. That’s why the products that are on the market today are mostly ground and flaked products. But that’s not how meat is sold at the grocery store. 

People don’t talk about the implicit expectations that customers have around how a product looks. When you’re buying a product, you’re making a judgment call well before you cook it or put it in your mouth. 

If you put a pre-cooked product on the shelf next to the product it’s trying to imitate and it doesn’t look the same because it is already cooked, then you’re going to have a hard time with customer adoption. You’re going to see mainly vegans or flexitarians buying it, not a wider audience. And our mission is to cross that threshold and create products that appeal to the mass market.

Alt-Meat: How do you decide what to try instead of extrusion?

BRYSON: In effect, I had to go back to the drawing board. But like I said, I’m not an engineer, so we sponsored a bunch of R&D projects at universities across the globe, looking into texture and flavor. 

We did a call for proposals, and we picked the ones that seemed the most exciting. Auke [de Vries, lead food materials scientist at New School Foods] calls it ‘shopping around for researchers.’ I knew that most of the projects would probably fail, but I hoped something interesting would come out of it. 

Our project with Ryerson University in Toronto directly led to figuring out how to recreate muscle fibers with plants. At first, the supervising professor told me, ‘You’re crazy.’ I knew they were the right partner because they appreciated how complicated the problem was. 

Alt-Meat: Once you had the right partner, where did it go from there? 

BRYSON: We had to understand the basics:  How big is a protein fiber? How are protein fibers from different animals different? And once we understood that, we had to figure out how to create those muscle fibers. And once we had that foundation, then started to tune the fibers to different lengths to mimic different textures. 

It starts with our scaffolding technology. It’s a gel made from seaweed-derived ingredients so it’s edible. The thing that’s cool about this unfilled scaffold is that we can fill it with protein A or protein B, which yields different color characteristics, different cooking conditions. 

Our system gives us the freedom to work with liquid fats, which allows us to get away from coconut oil and other solid, saturated fats. We can work with oils that have healthy benefits like omega-3s.

Alt-Meat: The fat is a big part of what makes fish fishy, but what about the flavor? 

BRYSON: We have also created custom flavors — that was another one of the academic research projects that we sponsored. Often, when I’ve tried plant-based seafood products, they taste like seafood, but I can’t necessarily tell if it’s species X or Y. I call it ‘mystery fish flavor.’ So we studied what makes an authentic salmon flavor and an authentic tuna flavor so we could understand the specific ingredients that differentiate them at a molecular level.

Then we created our own custom flavor components that we add to the product. And when we do our sniff test — because a lot of flavor comes from aroma — and we sniff actual salmon next to our product, the aromas are incredibly similar. It’s not mystery fish.

We ended up with an incredibly malleable and scalable technology. Extrusion is relatively expensive — to buy an extruder that can process the volume we’re looking to do, it can be $2.5 million. But the machinery we’re using is off the shelf from an adjacent food industry. We already know it is scalable and can do what we want. And it costs about half as much as an extruder. So right away, the infrastructure costs are lower. 

Alt-Meat: Why did you focus on seafood?

BRYSON: I figured that if we could develop a technology that worked for seafood, then it would extend into other applications because the bar for texture is a bit higher with fish. 

Also, not a lot of people were working on seafood. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a product on the market that’s really broken through into the mainstream in the seafood category, so that gives us an opportunity to play in a space that maybe has less noise going on.

And less people are focused on sustainable seafood even though it’s a huge, unaddressed issue. We can’t just solve for beef and chicken; we also have to solve seafood if we’re going to fix the planet.

I’d say we’re starting with seafood. The technology that we’ve developed for re-creating muscle fibers goes way beyond salmon.

Alt-Meat: What does your product do that other products on the market don’t?

BRYSON: The way a product cooks is super important. If you can’t tell when it’s done — which is a complaint about some of the plant-based burgers out there — then it doesn’t feel like a substitute. It feels like a weird, ‘uncanny valley’ product. 

The technology that we’ve developed isn’t just about texture or flavor, it’s also about creating the right cooking conditions. The whole idea is that it starts off raw and as it cooks, it transforms into a flaked and fibrous product. We don’t use heat at all in the manufacturing process, and we’re selective about the ingredients. As the product cooks, it visually transforms. 

Alt-Meat: When I saw a video of the product being cooked, I was impressed. It really looks like you’re cooking a piece of fish. 

BRYSON: That’s because we effectively are. We’ve recreated the muscle fibers, we’re putting in proteins that start off raw, we’ve created a much more authentic, scientifically speaking, representation of how meat behaves.

We think that the cooking experience is going to be a huge benefit for chefs. And at the end of the day, when it comes time to introduce new products, if we can convince chefs, we can convince the broader audience. 

Incidentally, 70% of seafood sales happen in restaurants, so part of our goal was to create a product that would appeal to chefs. On our website, chefs can reach out to us and start a dialogue so we can start working with them to refine the product. 

Alt-Meat: It sounds like you’re planning to go the foodservice route. Are there plans to create a CPG or license the technology to other companies? 

BRYSON: We believe that there is a strong B2B future for this company, but usually when a new technology comes to market, it’s best to showcase what it’s capable of. We think it’s important to create buzz and bring this product directly to chefs and work with them to finetune our technology and make it the best version that it can be before opening up the door to B2B relationships. If we can showcase how great our products are directly to people and keep finessing things and making the product as good as it can be, I think that will help create more demand.

Alt-Meat: You’ve now had a hand in creating two very different products. What can we learn from how you think about product development?

BRYSON: I think one of the tenets of good product design, in food science or not, is to marry the outcome, not the solution.

For example, with New School, it was important to go back to first principles and understand how this industry operates. Where are the opportunities? What works well, and what doesn’t? And then taking it one step further, if we really want to create products that appeal to the non-flexitarian audience, what are the fundamental things we need to recreate that are not being addressed by what’s out there?

I take a lot of inspiration from nature. As Auke says, nature’s a great designer. So we started with, ‘how are those muscle fibers formed,’ and we built from there.

Alt-Meat: I understand you’re building a facility in Toronto. 

BRYSON: Yes. It happens to be where we live, but we really picked that location because we think economics and price are such an important part of the value equation for the customer. We think that we can build a more cost-effective company in Toronto than we could in San Francisco, for example. It’s important that we save every dollar so we can translate that back to the customer. The customer is what matters the most. 

Alt-Meat: People seem to be at the core of everything you do. For example, after Instacart bought Unata, you stayed on as an adviser for two years. Can you talk about that?

BRYSON: At Unata, we had built a culture that prioritized a sense of wellbeing and an environment where everyone felt safe. But most acquisitions are disruptive. You’ll never find two company cultures that are the same. There might be an obvious synergy, but you figure things out as you go. That uncertainty can be destabilizing, so it was important for me to make sure that my team felt like they were looked after and that the transition was positive. And it was. There are many people from Unata that are still working at Instacart.