Tender Food rebrands as Lasso, expands novel spinning tech beyond alt-meat
Summary
It will enable Lasso to launch its own brands utilizing the tech and license it to partners.Developed by Kit Parker, Luke MacQueen, Christophe Chantre, and Grant Gonzalez at Harvard Universitys Wyss Institute, Lasso SpinTech leverages centrifugal force to spin food ingredients into fibrous material with a unique texture.The device, which the firm says looks like an advanced cotton candy machine, can be used with 1,000+ ingredient combinations and parameters to control fiber thickness, composition, arrangement, density, and moisture content. It was originally applied to alt meat through the Tender Food brand but is now being deployed to a wider range of products, said CEO Mike Messersmith, who took the helm at Lasso last year.The machines are about the size of a washing machine, use less energy than a toaster oven, operate at room temperature, and require a fraction of the capital and operating cost of texturizing technologies such as extrusion, said Messersmith, who was previously North American president at Oatly.The commercial scale system produces about 1,000 pounds of finished product per hour, or more than 1.5 million pounds of finished product per year, which is equivalent to more than 12 million protein bars.Over the past year, the Lasso team has created prototypes in snacks, bars, confectionery, and pet food, said Messersmith, who acknowledged that the alt meat sector had not delivered the exponential growth that many investors and industry stakeholders had hoped for back in 2020.At that point, it was the peak of the plant-based meat enthusiasm funding and they saw some of the gaps and opportunities around how can you process plant proteins in a way that doesnt require an extraordinarily long ingredient list, he told AgFunderNews. They had a strong hypothesis that this technology could enable a foundational throughput that would allow us to achieve a cost structure so that you could approach price parity.But obviously, the [alt meat] category has some challenges, particularly in the US. So were going from single application to a technology platform company with multi-category applications.In categories such as snacks, Theres a lot of pressure from consumers and customers to bring more nutrition and cleaner labels without binders and gums, to bring novel textures and unique product offerings, he said.Lasso SpinTech can work with animal and plant-based proteins and a range of other raw materials from fruits and vegetables to mycoprotein, he said.We can make products with extraordinary nutrition and super clean labels that are affordable, including fruit and veg snacks without the added binders, gums, gels, and added sugar to hold them together. I feel like in 2025, its never been easier to do a hyper-focused brand launch, which could mean we sell some things through the internet, some things on Amazon, get some small-scale brick and mortar distribution.It doesnt mean our ambitions are necessarily to take that all the way to 10,000 doors and market ubiquity, but we feel like when we demonstrate the real world impact and application of our tech with products that are tangible, that people can see, brands will ask, can we work with that technology and put it into our factory?