That is what one food tech firm has achieved to contribute to global food sustainability and supply chain solutions

With the global pandemic, trade wars and political tensions raising widespread concerns about food sustainability, one firm that produces chicken meat products has leveraged food tech to make a plant-based equivalent to the poultry.

Using a proprietary method, one food tech firm, Shandi Global, claims to have created a plant-based product that feels almost like meat, and reacts to cooking like the real thing. Meat from different parts of a chicken are different in texture and taste prior to and after cooking. This inherent natural changing characteristic of meat had never been successfully recreated in any plant-based product before, according to the firm, which owns five patents protecting its invention.

Other technological firsts claimed include:

    • With the product’s unprecedented versatility and ease of use, chefs need not experiment and recreate entire menus to embrace this new supply. Ingredient compatibility is a major deterrent for food establishments to swop out current suppliers because changing just one ingredient may affect the taste of the dish and their entire kitchen operations.
    • The plant-based chicken is supposedly the only one in the world that has a protein content of close to 30%, on a par with the protein content of actual chicken meat.

The firm claims that only natural, non-genetically-modified organisms such as pea protein, chickpeas, quinoa, flax seeds, brown rice, and coconut oil, are used for the manufacture of their plant-based “chicken”.

According to Dr Reena Sharma, founder and CEO, Shandi Global: “We are currently focused on B2B (business to business) partnerships, whose established networks we are tapping on to quickly introduce our products to as many people as possible, to gain mass adoption of Shandi in kitchens around the world.   This will enable us to quickly expand, so that we can continue research and development to further improve on our offerings.”