Brief: Plant-based seafood co New School Foods lands additional funding from IKEA & others ahead of commercial launch

• The round brings Ontario, Canada-based New School Foods’ total funding to $18 million.
• The company has also officially unveiled its new 28,000-square-foot pilot facility in Toronto that will enable commercial-scale production.

Why it matters: New School secured $12 million in seed funding from Lever VC, Hatch and others in 2023, around the same time it first announced plans to construct the pilot facility.

And while both consumer and investor enthusiasm for plant-based proteins has waned recently in some markets (notably the US), not all efforts are cooked, so to speak. “New School Foods is a true pioneer in the alternative protein industry, and we were impressed by the team, their products and the production technology they’ve developed,” said Robert Carleke, innovation ventures manager at Inter IKEA Group.

He highlighted New School Foods’ “continued devotion to sustainability and innovation” in particular. IKEA, of course, has highly publicized plans to make at least 50% of the offerings in its stores and restaurants plant based.

It has offered a veggie version of its famed meatballs for some years now, and in 2023 followed this up with a vegan hot dog. New School recreates the structure of a whole-cut salmon fillet with proprietary muscle fiber and scaffolding technologies; the company claims its analogues look, cook and taste like the real thing (and even flake like salmon).

Unlike many other plant-based companies, New School Foods fully runs its own manufacturing operation without relying on a co-manufacturer. This, the company says, “ensures that we have greater control over quality, unit costs, and can invest in continuous innovation for both our process and formulations so as to solve the most important issue at hand – creating plant-based alternatives that appeal to a wider customer audience.”

Whole-cut meat and fish analogues are significantly more difficult to produce than ground products, making the need to own the manufacturing process all the more important, adds the company. “Whole cuts come with a host of complex challenges like texture, connective tissue, muscle fibers, and other macrostructures that exist in animal proteins.”

Earlier this year, New School teamed up with vegan chef Matthew Kenney for the launch of the New School Culinary Council, an invite-only collective of chefs and restaurants selected to give feedback and guidance to New School head of its commercial launch. Along with the additional funding, the new pilot facility will enable commercial-scale production. The pilot plant’s assembly line is based on the company’s novel technologies, which it says are scalable and able to create other whole-muscle protein analogues via the same process and equipment.

Both the funding round and the new facility are key in the company bringing its products to market in the US and Canada.