Planted Foods comes in second at the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award 2022

Last year’s winner is this year’s runner-up: The Planted Foods team wins silver at the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award 2022 for revolutionizing the food industry by creating plant-based protein made of 100% animal-product-free ingredients. Planted Food’s vegan meat alternatives do not include any additives, chemicals, GMOs, antibiotics, or hormones. Planted Foods was founded in 2019 by Christoph Jenny, Eric Stirnemann, Lukas Böni, and Pascal Bieri.

Planted is serving up – and cleaning up: the vegetarian meat produced in Kemptthal, Zurich, is served up on more and more plates and is now the market leader in the Swiss retail trade. “We are the fastest growing company in Europe in the alternative protein sector,” says co-founder Pascal Bieri.

There is a spirit of optimism in the former Maggi factory. Employees dip skewers in a marinade for the retail trade. On the first floor, technicians are tinkering with new textures in the laboratory, in the kitchen next door the results are put to the test, in the Planted-Hiltl Bistro employees meet in a living room atmosphere to exchange ideas, and in the next building jackhammers are rattling away on the next Planted expansion.

The heart of the company is a glass greenhouse built into the historic factory building. On the one hand, this ensures hygiene in the production process, “but it also suits us symbolically; after all, we ‘plant’ meat”, says Bieri. In the greenhouse, the start-up produces the plant-based ‘meat’ from fiber and vegetable protein – peas, oats, and sunflowers – mixed with water and rapeseed oil as the basic product for all Planted lines, such as Pulled Pork, Chicken, Kebab, and Schnitzel.

The ETH spin-off founded in 2019 by Bieri, Lukas Böni, Christoph Jenny, and Eric Stirnemann produces a meat substitute that is on a par with animal meat in terms of fibrousness and bite, but far more ecological: Planted products consume only half the water and reduce CO2 emissions by two-thirds compared with animal meat. The research team is currently working on using fermentation to produce plant-based meat that is even juicier, tastier, and in larger pieces. “Our goal is to be better than animal meat,” says Bieri. “Not only in the area of sustainability but also in terms of health, tolerability, and taste.”

Two production lines have been in operation in Kemptthal since spring 2022, which have enabled the company to double the production volume to more than a tonne per hour. Planted is now available throughout Europe via the online shop and is also present with its own teams and retail and gastronomy partners in Germany, France, Austria, Italy, and the UK. The aim is to establish plant-based meat as an everyday alternative to the animal counterpart, for example, at football stadiums. Planted already supplies the player canteens at several Bundesliga clubs in Germany, but the fans in the stadium can still buy only animal kebabs. That should change: “A plant-based alternative should become a matter of course and more accessible,” says Bieri.

In order to further increase capacity, produce closer to European customers, and also eliminate the customs disadvantages, the plan is to open a second production facility in a neighboring country. That’s no coincidence: western Europe is the world’s most important market for plant-based meat. According to a study by the Good Food Institute, sales of alternative proteins increased by 19% in 2021 to EUR 2.3 billion compared with the previous year – higher than in the US at EUR 1.9 billion.

And growth will continue to accelerate: according to the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, the market for alternative proteins is expected to grow to USD 28 billion worldwide by 2025. This scenario has tempted the big meat multinationals, which are buying up scores of start-ups for vegetarian meat in the US and Europe. Interested parties have also presented themselves at Planted, but Bieri dismisses them: “A sale is not our goal; we want to bring about change.”

He and his co-founders want “to have an impact on the planet and to persuade people with a good product”. The investors also share this vision – among them illustrious names such as Stephan Schmidheiny, Philippe Gaydoul, and Yann Sommer – particularly since there is no pressure to sell from an economic point of view. Planted is growing rapidly and the gross margin is right. “We haven’t sold a single kilo of Planted at a loss,” says Bieri. Or to put it another way, the protein rocket from Kemptthal flies under its own power.

On September 1st, 2022, Planted announced the closing of its Series B financing round of 70 million Swiss francs. The round was led by L Catterton, the largest global private equity firm in the consumer goods sector.  Planted met their previous investors, Vorwerk Ventures, at the TOP 100 Investor Summit in 2020. In its Series A financing round in spring 2021, the startup raised a total of CHF 17 million.



This article by Jost Dubacher was first published in the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Magazine 2022.