Chile is the third-largest market in the world for mayonnaise – with a population of just 17 million people. Logically NotCo, a tech company that produces food products that replace animal protein with plant proteins, released a vegan mayonnaise as their first product. Within the year since it was released, NotMayo has captured 10% of the Chilean market according to founder Matias Muchnick.
The Not Company uses a proprietary technology to analyze the genome of plant proteins and determine how they could replace similar proteins in animal products. Muchnik claimed in the original article for TechCrunch:
“We have mapped 7000 plants and we don’t think we need more than that.We mapped them for their amino acetic structures… that looked like animal-based proteins.”
Ironically, NotCo never set out to become a brand company; in fact, they planned on using their machine learning technology to advise food companies how to replace animal products with plants. However, their mayonnaise was so successful that they are currently developing NotIceCream and NotYogurt to follow their first product. They plan on releasing meat products by 2020.
The main limiting factor on their growth is the supply chain; they can currently produce 64 tons of mayonnaise a month, but will need to grow as they begin to export to Latin America. NotCo received a US$3M from Kaszek Ventures and SOS Ventures to help them do just that as they expand into the Brazilian and Argentine markets.
Read more on LAVCA or TechCrunch.