Founder Spotlight: Christie Lagally (Rebellyous Foods)
Meet Christie Lagally:
Meet Christie Lagally:
At Rebellyous Foods, we make delicious, juicy, and crispy plant-based chicken nuggets and patties. Our ready-to-heat-and-eat foods cook just like conventional chicken products, so they can seamlessly integrate into an organization’s busy meal schedule. Rebellyous Foods wants to be a solution for busy food service operations to be able to offer affordable plant-based meats that everyone will enjoy. We do that by implementing unique food production methods and novel equipment in large-scale production to produce affordable plant-based meat at high volumes.
Location:
Seattle, Washington, USA
What led you to where you are today?
I started Rebellyous after realizing that the plant-based meat industry was being held back as a solution for climate change and other social harms due to the small scope of the industry. The US meat industry produces nearly 108 billion pounds of meat, and yet the plant-based meat industry only clocks in at around ⅕ of 1% (0.2%). As a result, production of plant-based meat products is the reason this industry isn’t making a measurable impact on climate change. As a mechanical engineer, I saw an opportunity to change this through the design and implementation of novel food production equipment. At the time, in 2017, I was working briefly for the Good Food Institute, and prior to that for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. My experience as an equipment designer enabled me to start a company based on the need for better production equipment for plant-based meat.
What do you wish you knew before embarking on your entrepreneurial journey?
I wish I had known how deeply entrenched our food system is in the economics of meat. Animal meat is low-cost, high-volume, and deeply rooted in economic conditions and variables unrelated to the products themselves. These economics make it even harder for plant-based meat to compete with animal meat, but at Rebellyous we are working to change that.
What can you help the VEGPRENEUR community with?
Advice to entrepreneurs, connections with investors, connections with customers
How can the VEGPRENEUR community help you?
Connections with investors, posting jobs, networking events
Fun fact about you:
In a previous job, I worked on designs for the Thirty Meter Telescope Project and as an intern tested parts for the James Webb Space Telescope -- both tools that will help humanity discover the origins of our universe.
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