Imagine a world where those who love chicken nuggets can have their cake and eat it too. Simply put, a world where no chicken will lose its life to satisfy the appetite of millions of people who crave chicken nuggets.
If Christie Lagally, CEO of Rebellyous Foods, has her way, you won’t have to imagine. A mechanical engineer who holds five patents, Lagally started the food technology and manufacturing company, Rebellyous Foods, in an effort to end factory farming by creating delicious, widely available, and affordable Plant-Based chicken products.
While there are currently delicious alternatives in the marketplace, most Plant-Based meats are two to five times the cost of meat and were developed for the retail sector, making them inaccessible to many…until now.
Affordability is Key
A primary goal at Rebellyous is to make high quality Plant-Based meat that is affordable so everyone can enjoy their products.
Another goal is to give people what they desire from meat or processed meat products like chicken nuggets, patties and tenders without the bad stuff like the slaughter, cholesterol, high saturated fat and all the antibiotic use in chicken raising.
The entire Rebellyous team wants people to enjoy the same foods they have grown to love without any harm to animals.
Why Plant Based Chicken Products?
Chicken is the largest segment of the US meat industry. It accounts for between 45 – 50% percent of production in the United States. Chicken recently became the largest consumed meat in the entire world after swine flu decimated the pig industry in China in 2019.
With reduction in harm to animals as a primary goal, Christie Lagally felt this was a great way to do her part in providing alternative food sources to the market.
Vegan Divide
Withing the Vegan community there are those who are adamant about not consuming anything that remotely resembles animal products. Yet, there are plenty of vegans open to products that minimize harm, torture, and cruelty to animals due to factory farming.
Not one to get in the middle of the philosophical reasons people become vegan, Christie is adamant about minimizing unnecessary breeding and slaughter of innocent animals.
Rebellyous continues to ramp up on volume production and cost effective production so that they can reach a much larger market than is typically identified as vegan or vegetarian. If they were to just stick to vegans, they would miss a huge opportunity to move the needle.
We want to meet people where they are at by providing similar products to what they are used to without the harm of industrial animal agriculture.
National School Lunch Program
One area they aim to make a huge difference is within the school system. The school lunch program depends on chicken nuggets as an easy way to get kids to eat their meals.
A little known fact is that within the school lunch program, children are often fed excess chicken that is processed at a very low price. It is low on the quality level in many cases.
Offering a solution is about providing a cost effective product that is high in quality protein.
It must meet the requirements of meat alternatives and has to be within the government guidelines.
Industrialized Animal Agriculture
What is often ignored by those who consume animal products is the impact Industrialized Animal Agriculture has on zoonotic diseases. When animals are bred and grown in intensified farms, there are more health issues that can no longer be ignored including the ongoing risks for various viruses.
Just a few years ago in Tennessee, there was an outbreak of bird flu in a turkey farm. Every bird within a 50 mile radius had to be destroyed. The same has happened with pigs.
This is something than can no longer be denied.
Christie Lagally is not only bringing awareness to why our food supply chain must change, she and the entire Rebellyous team are providing a solution. There’s no denying the good they are doing.
About Christie Lagally
A female CEO in a predominantly male-led sector, Lagally is no stranger to being a woman leader in a man’s world. Prior to starting Rebellyous, she supervised a team of 35 engineers–mostly men–at Boeing where she and her team optimized the 777 wing assembly. What she learned at Boeing is informing how she and her team are redesigning processing facilities to optimize them for Plant-Based meat, enabling them to create Plant-Based nuggets that are crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside, yet affordable.
Ultimately, they hope to replace some of the $40 billion spent on nuggets, patties, and further processed chicken products sold annually with their products.
To this end, Rebellyous has raised over $18 million so far in venture funding, including from Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Venture Fund, and Vulcan Inc., the company founded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen. Its products are now available at more than 350 Safeway and Albertson’s stores in the Northwest and Chicagoland area as well as Haggen, Met Market, and Good Eggs in the SF Bay Area.
Rebellyous Foods More Information on Products
