New School Foods has announced that it is moving beyond plant-based seafood and into making other types of simulated meat—for both itself and other food brands.
“Our bigger ambition is to create a superior production technology than how every other meat alternative is made.”
Since 2020, the Toronto food technology startup has been developing whole-cut protein alternatives made from plants with a taste, texture and appearance like their animal-based counterparts.
New School Foods’ flagship product is a salmon filet alternative, which it sells to consumers through approximately 30 Canadian restaurants and distributors.
“While we’ve certainly been working on improving salmon, our bigger ambition is to create a superior production technology than how every other meat alternative is made,” New School Foods founder and CEO Chris Bryson told BetaKit in an interview.
Last week, New School Foods opened the doors to its vertically-integrated Dufferin Street Facility in Toronto’s west end, and gave BetaKit and other visitors an inside look at and taste of “the extensibility” of its food production tech, which it plans to make available to other partners going forward to help them bring plant-based meat products to market faster.
There, the startup revealed that over the past couple of years, it has been quietly testing the capacity of its proprietary directional freezing tech and patented scaffolding process to manufacture other types of plant-based meats, like beef steaks and bone-in ribs, and served up some of the prototypes it has made to attendees.
Bryson, who sold his previous grocery e-commerce startup Unata to Instacart, asserted that New School Foods has now proven it can use the same tech to make both simulated salmon and red meat.
“You can already see that with very little effort, we’re able to get to something that’s pretty authentic,” he said.
To reflect its broadened strategy, New School Foods has formed a new parent firm to house its three business units: tech platform (NS/TX R&D), consumer-facing New School Foods, and manufacturing operations (NS/TX Manufacturing).
Image courtesy New School Foods.
“Because we are doing something much bigger, and because we want to open up this technology to other brands beyond the New School Foods brand, we’re therefore changing the name of the parent company to NS/TX Industries, to signal the [business-to-business] opportunity,” Bryson said.
Through NS/TX R&D, NS/TX plans to work with other firms to develop custom products using its tech, while NS/TX Manufacturing will be a commercial production and co-packing service that will help other food companies build their own and co-branded offerings.
The startup claims that its patented scaffolding process, which it developed in collaboration with Toronto Metropolitan University, is the first to use directional freezing at scale, which it says allows it to replicate muscle fibre and create plant-based products with the properties of connective tissue.
New School Foods has raised over $24 million CAD to date from a group that includes Inter IKEA and the federal government through Protein Industries Canada and other agencies.
This BetaKit reporter toured New School Foods’ facility, where he ate samples of the salmon, a salmon burger, steak, and ribs. While he is admittedly not a big salmon guy, he was particularly impressed by the simulated salmon burger, which is now on the menu of upscale Toronto diner Stefano’s. He also enjoyed the ribs, but was a bit underwhelmed by the steak, which tasted more clearly like an imitation—though he respected the ambition and is curious to see what New School Foods can deliver with some more research and development.
For his part, Bryson noted that just as New School Foods has improved its core plant-based salmon product over time, New School Foods intends to refine its other meat alternatives.
During the remainder of 2025, New School Foods plans to work with restaurants and chefs to ensure its recently-unveiled, but not yet released, red meat offerings are market-ready ahead of a broader rollout.
To support its growth strategy, the CEO said New School Foods plans to begin raising a Series A round “imminently,” and hopes to use that funding to establish version two of its manufacturing facility and scale up its operations in late 2025 and early 2026.
Feature image courtesy New School Foods.