Dive Brief:
- European mycelium giant Quorn Foods is investing in and partnering with mycelium deli meat maker Prime Roots.
- Through the partnership, Quorn will help Prime Roots develop market expansion opportunities and collaborate on new offerings. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
- The partnership is being announced weeks after Prime Roots closed a $30 million Series B investment round to expand its koji mycelium deli slices nationwide. Quorn’s investment was part of the Series B round.
Dive Insight:
This partnership brings two companies that have a lot of similarities together and has the potential to benefit both of them.
Quorn is the original mycelium alternative protein maker. The company says it is the top alternative protein company in Europe. Created from a proposal in the 1960s to find a sustainable and plentiful food source, it was the first to figure out how to turn mycelium into food.
Quorn entered the marketplace in the U.K. in 1985 and has a wide portfolio of meat analogs. The company, which is now owned by Philippine noodle maker Monde Nissin, launched in the U.S. in 2002. Currently, Quorn is concentrating on its chicken analog portfolio here.
The long history and wide reach of Quorn — both in the U.S. and internationally — are a huge asset to Prime Roots, which is a newer and smaller company. The U.S.-based company started six years ago as co-founders Kimberlie Le and Joshua Nixon experimented with using koji mycelium to make a variety of meat analogs.
The first product from Prime Roots is sliceable mycelium deli meat, which had a small-scale retail launch in California last year. The recent investment round will be used to expand places where the company’s products are sold. Taking a small alternative meat startup’s products national is a daunting task, but a longtime player, such as Quorn, already has connections at retailers and distributors.
Quorn also has experience convincing retailers to take a chance on a new kind of meat alternative product. While Prime Roots is not the only deli meat alternative company in the industry, it is the only one entering stores with a mycelium product custom sliced behind the deli counter.
Through the years, Quorn has launched several products made from mycelium. In the U.K., the brand has a deli meat product line. It also has steak and beef products as well as sausages and seafood. As a result, Quorn has the ability to help Prime Roots turn its koji mycelium into an array of marketable products.
Prime Roots has done quite a bit of work on different platforms. The first prototype it made was a salmon burger. The company also has developed bacon prototypes.
Prime Roots is different than other companies using mycelium. Koji, which the company uses, has traditionally been incorporated into Asian cuisine to create and ferment soy sauce, sake and miso. Koji naturally has an umami taste that Prime Roots says makes it a good base ingredient for meat-like products.
Monde Nissin also might be looking for ways to rejuvenate Quorn. In the company’s most recent earnings report, revenues in meat alternatives declined by 6.2% compared to the same time a year before. The decline was especially steep in the U.S., with organic revenues down 33.6%. The company attributed the declines to the current challenging retail market for alternative proteins.
