Canadian food-tech company New School Foods has announced the formation of NS/TX Industries (NS/TX): an expanded company that will house its manufacturing platform, consumer brand and manufacturing operations.
The company’s patented scaffolding process is claimed to be the first to use directional freezing at scale, delivering ‘hyper-realistic’ whole cut alternatives that combine plant-based muscle fibres and connective tissue into a single macrostructure.
This technology and assembly line was used to produce New School Foods’ alt-seafood products, including its flagship plant-based salmon. The technology has now been shown to work for red meat alternative applications, such as steak and bone-in ribs.
According to New School Foods, the industry-standard manufacturing process of extrusion has proven limited in its ability to create alt-protein products that meet consumer expectations. Through the NS/TX platform, the company said it will deliver further meat alternative products with an authentic look, cook, taste and texture.
To support a wide range of alt-meat and alt-seafood products, the platform has been designed to support maximum flexibility. The scaffold macrostructure can be made into any shape and size, with scaffolds able to be embedded with plant-based ‘bones’ to emulate steak and ribs.
Texture can be modified by tuning muscle fibre diameter, length and resistance to match any meat type. Additionally, texture, flavour and appearance can be modified by customising the pattern and composition of the connective tissue. Multi-layered scaffolds can be infused with nearly any protein, liquid oil, flavour or colour, the company said in a statement.
NS/TX aims to support a broader mission and more powerful manufacturing capabilities. It will serve as the overarching entity for New School Foods, the company’s consumer and restaurant-facing product brand; NS/TX R&D, a scientific and culinary innovation team that collaborates with other companies to develop custom formulations and products using the platform; and NS/TX Manufacturing, opening the company’s technology to the world and working with other food brands to build and scale their own (private/white label) and co-branded offerings.
New School Foods, the consumer-facing segment, offers a portfolio including the flagship whole cut plant-based salmon fillet, a recently launched salmon burger alternative, and new meat products in the future.
Chris Bryson, founder and CEO of New School Foods, said: “Our scaffolding technology has proven to be more flexible than we imagined, and shown that it can be a superior manufacturing”.
“We have spent the last year scaling up our manufacturing process into an assembly line that can create all of these products, and we decided that we don’t want to reserve this technology for a single brand. The creation of NS/TX allows us to partner with other brands to develop and manufacture the next generation of alternative protein products alternative to extrusion for red meat as well as seafood applications”.
The directional freezing process results in a product that begins ‘raw’ and transforms when cooked, just like ordinary meat. In scaling up the process over the last year, the company said it recognised that, just like the traditional meat industry, the excess material from shaping its whole cuts provide excellent additional products, including ground or flaked meats and fish, expanding efficiency and minimising material loss.
This announcement follows a string of major milestones for the company, including the launch of its flagship salmon fillet in more than 30 restaurants across Canada, partnerships with Bondi Produce and Gordon Food Service, and the completion of its vertically integrated V1 production line.
To date, the company has secured over $19 million in funding from investors and partners including Inter IKEA, Protein Industries Canada and SDTC.
