Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
As a boy growing up in St. Louis, Todd Boyman would watch his mother set out dinners of gorgeous meats, to which his two sisters would point and ask, “Hey, Mom, what did that used to be?” The sisters adopted a meatless diet and eventually plied him with enough data and arguments to persuade him to do likewise. Boyman became a tech entrepreneur and has lived everywhere from Ukraine to China, but in the mid-2000s, he co-founded a side project with his sister Jody to make plant-based meat here in town. It’s called Hungry Planet Foods and is based in Town & Country. Earlier this year, the company raised $25 million and inked a distribution deal with Brentwood-based Post Holdings. The Boymans will surely need allies: They’re trying to disrupt a worldwide market for meat, poultry, and seafood that’s expected to reach $2 trillion in the next few years.
Describe the plant-based meat scene when you entered it. No one was thinking about this space. Jody and I spent a lot of time, resources, and energy explaining the logic of it, and people got it. But we’ve found that, for the most part, people aren’t that interested in being educated about the environment, human health, or animal welfare. They just want to eat delicious food that’s priced right, readily accessible, and familiar. So we decided: Let’s meet people where they are and give them what they love to eat, which is meat. But let’s make it directly from the same plants that animals consume, without using the animal as the intermediary, because the animal is highly inefficient. A conventional burger requires 10 times as much water as a plant-based burger.
Your task must’ve felt Herculean. As in most things in life, how you define the problem will dictate where you end up. Coming from the software world, I was thinking, What’s the entire problem I eventually am going to have to solve? so as to build a platform for solving all of it. To us, the problem was every type of meat out there, not just beef and burgers. And we had the luxury of defining it that way because we were self-funded; no one was clamoring for this food. So we started off saying, “Let’s take pork, chicken, beef, and crab, and let’s figure out how we solve for those four.” Once we did that, we took a pause, abstracted out the lessons, and created what we called a “plant-protein platform.” From that we could power any other type of meat that we need: lamb, turkey. Now we’re the only one in the market with nine protein types.
But your rivals who have specialized in plant-based beef are going gangbusters. Beyond Meat had a wildly successful IPO, and Impossible Foods is reportedly in talks to go public next year. Do you regret your long-term strategy? About 10 years ago, when those two were getting funded, we had a decision to make: Did we want to get on that same Silicon Valley path? We thought there was no point in taking the millions being offered to us to accelerate what we were doing, because we already had the food. It was already delicious. For us, the only question was: When will the market be ready? So, we decided to let those two [companies] do what Silicon Valley does best, which is educate a market about a new category, so that we could make sure that our food is authentically delicious, and not just delicious because people are told they ought to like it. So yes, we are executing exactly the plan we want to do.
Silicon Valley has many advantages besides capital. Why are you here? It was a fundamental conviction that big ideas for solving some of the most intractable problems in this country can’t just be running off to the coast to be funded and built. Good ideas exist everywhere, and they can be made successful anywhere. So we said, “Let’s do it in the heart of the Midwest and hopefully be an example.”
In 2018, Missouri became the first state to amend its meat-labeling law to block companies like yours from misrepresenting as meat any products not derived from “harvested” animals. Has that hurt your business? Not one bit. The law was written to say you can’t have misleading consumer packaging. But we’re not trying to tell people that our product is conventional chicken. People are buying from us very intentionally because we are not that. We’re 100 percent plant based, and proudly so.
Certain cultures around the world view meat consumption as a status symbol. Will that be a problem for you as you scale up? We’re hoping to help those regions “leapfrog” in their transition to meat created directly from plants. When you think about the developing world, they didn’t wire their countries with copper cables to get a phone line from one place to another. They got cell towers, and they’ll probably be on 5G before we are, because they don’t have legacy interests that are lobbying their politicians. They jumped to a much better solution. Likewise, plant-based meats are a much better solution. So we say, “Look, let’s just avoid the whole conventional animal thing, and let’s give you a better product. Better for you, better for the planet, better for the animals, from day one.”
Do you have any reason to believe that plant-based meats will prevail over cultured meats (i.e., grown from animal cells in labs)? The hurdle that the cultured meat industry is going to have is that we’re making so much progress over here, our prices are collapsing. We’ve already gotten past price parity on crab; ours costs about 30 percent less than conventional crab. And there are already Hungry Planet meats that when used in traditional favorite recipes—whether it’s a lasagna, or bolognese, chicken Kiev, or whatever—they’re indistinguishable from conventional meat. So that doesn’t leave a lot of room for [the cultured meat industry], unless they have a quantum breakthrough in taste, texture, or price.
What’s next? We are accelerating into retail. We’re in Schnucks and Dierbergs; we’re launching nationally in Sprouts; we’re in Albertsons-Safeway. And then, internationally, we’ve got people in the Middle East and Singapore. But we’re delighted to be headquartered in St. Louis and hitting on all these cylinders.
