Interview with Christie Lagally, Founder of Rebellyous Foods
Christie Lagally is the founder and CEO of Rebellyous Foods, a food production technology company working to make plant-based meat price-competitive with traditional chicken products. This week, we had the honor of interviewing Christie for the blog!
What exciting things are happening at Rebellyous Foods that you’d like to share with us?
Thanks to the work of our talented engineers, the Rebellyion is now in the execution stage on our game-changing plant-based meat production technology. Five years of preparation have gone into developing our first-of-its-kind, patent-protected Mock 2 production technology. It’s not just food technology, it’s climate technology to make plant-based meat available and affordable to everyone.
There has been a lot of speculation about the ‘death of plant-based meat’ in the news lately. What do you think the future holds for the plant-based meat industry?
“Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” seems to apply well to the plant-based meat space.
Growth continues. Customers are adopting new products, and loving them. Products improve weekly, and companies are meeting the needs of more customers in more markets. What is missing is price-parity of great products, and on that Rebellyous is the leader. With our technology, we are on track to ship the same delicious, high-quality products we produce today at a price-parity to animal meat products by the end of 2023.
Could you share a few words of advice for people wanting to reduce their consumption of animal products?
Find what works for you.
Reducing meat is better for your health, for the animals, and for the environment, so it’s worth putting in the effort, but it’s not one-size-fits-all. Plant-based meat is a great one-for-one replacement, and Rebellyous is working hard to bring price-parity products to consumers later this year.
We know that most people are struggling with the cost of groceries these days, and price-parity will make a huge difference.
Who/what inspires you in the plant-based space?
I’m inspired by two of my first investors, Ela Madej and Seth Bannon at Fifty Years VC.
They are working to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, and they are amazing at seeing the big potential in early stage ideas. So many people believe that big problems always require big, massive, overwhelming solutions. Ela and Seth can see how the future changes by scaling small, simple, even obvious, ideas.
What gives you hope for the future?
The future of food is bright!
At Rebellyous, we are committed to making it both possible and highly desirable for chicken and meat processing facilities to convert to plant-based meat production. The most impactful way to make plant-based meat affordable and accessible to everyone is by supporting America’s current food production facilities to make plant-based meat. Rebellyous’ new Mock 2 production system, and the even larger Mock 3 production system, will be able to produce plant-based dough at volumes comparable to meat production — and make substantial impact for the climate, people and animals.