NotCo — for a new approach to plant-based
Who knew that the right amounts of pineapple and cabbage would taste like milk? It sounds like the kind of childish experiment that could only go one way, but as a pairing determined by some powerful AI, it could be the future of a business already valued at $300m.
Launched in 2015, NotCo is a Chilean food technology company making popular animal-based food products such as hamburgers, ice-cream and milk entirely from plants.
The company has become Latin America’s fastest-growing food company, in large part because its plant-based ‘NotMeat’ products have been incorporated into the increasingly popular vegan options sold in Burger King and Papa John’s pizzerias in Chile. NotCo and Burger King’s collaborative plant-based burger, the ‘Rebel Whopper’, is outperforming Impossible Foods on per-store sales figures according to TechCrunch.
What sets NotCo apart from plant-based competitors like Impossible Foods or Beyond Meat is the company’s use of AI. ‘Guiseppe’, the name of NotCo’s algorithm, has a vast taxonomy of plant ingredients from which to find the ideal combinations that will recreate products at the molecular level to closely mimic the taste, texture and behaviour of existing meat and dairy foods. For example, the company’s ‘NotMilk’ product, created by combining just the right amounts of pineapple and cabbage as decided by Guiseppe, heats, foams and freezes just like cow’s milk — something that is seen as a weakness of many of NotCo’s competitors.
The company raised $85m from its Series C funding round in September 2020 with investors including challenger brand VC fund The Craftory and Jeff Bezos’ venture fund Bezos Expeditions. The latter investment is likely to help the company’s distribution through the Bezos-owned channels of Whole Foods and Amazon.
The new funding powered NotCo’s launch into the US market in November 2020, initially with just two products; ‘NotMilk’ Whole and a reduced-fat version. But with Oatly increasingly taking share of alternative milks in the US and Impossible Foods tipped to launch its own plant-based milk in 2021, an already crowded market will soon be overflowing.
From the brand and product naming to its literal crossing out of images of cows on its packaging, NotCo is clearly a brand of opposition more than one of a proposition. It’s a different and perhaps less nuanced approach than plant-based challengers such as Impossible Foods or Oatly that have adopted more of a ‘Next Generation’ stance — a stance that communicates an acceptance of the ubiquity and value of the product the challenger seeks to replace but suggests that the world has now changed and we should all progress with the times.
NotCo’s more direct brand and communications strategy has worked very well for the business so far in Latin America, but the crucial question now is will the idea and its execution translate well to the US market and be enough to connect with audiences in the same way? With so many milk alternatives soon to be on the shelves, the alternative milk category looks set to get frothy in 2021.
