US plant-based meat startup Tender Food has now turned into a larger tech company, Lasso, which has raised $6.5M to create a suite of clean-label ingredients with its fibre-spinning technology.
Who knew that cotton candy could be the solution to the food system’s myriad problems?
As the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement looks to clamp down on ultra-processed foods (UPFs) in the US, food producers are reckoning with the rise of GLP-1 drugs and a shift in product demand from a protein-obsessed nation.
But while the food climate is rapidly changing, the industry is largely reliant on outdated technologies, like extrusion. And most innovation is centred around stuffing healthy ingredients into traditionally unhealthy products (think prebiotic sodas) or championing new ingredients like mycelium (which is still slapped with the UPF tag).
One startup is looking to fill the void with a technology reminiscent of the fluffy, sticky, sugary floss that populates fairs and street food stalls across the world.
Tender Food has been around since 2020, built on technology developed at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. The firm leverages a fibre-spinning process to turn plant proteins into structured cuts of meat, akin to how sugar is spun to make cotton candy. Its alternatives have made it to restaurants and universities around the Boston area, including Clover Food Lab.
Now, though, Tender Food is expanding its horizons past plant-based meat, evolving into a tech company called Lasso, through which it will launch a slate of new brands and license its technology to other food producers – both aimed at creating better-for-you, additive-free consumer products fit for the anti-UPF, pro-protein, Ozempic-fuelled era.
The company has just closed a $6.5M funding round led by Rhapsody Venture Partners, with further participation from Safar Partners, Claridge Venture Partners, and others. It takes the firm’s total funding past $25.6M, including previous VC rounds and grants.
“It isn’t a big revelation that the plant-based meat category is struggling,” Lasso CEO Mike Messersmith tells Green Queen. “We are trying to build an incredible company and create impact in the food industry that really needs it. Expanding the category focus better allows us to create a path for that impact.”
A former president of Oatly North America, Messersmith joined the company in June 2024 and took over as CEO from co-founder Christophe Chantre in October. He confirmed that Chantre is no longer involved in the firm.
“He will always be a key player in the company’s development as a co-founder and was hugely instrumental in getting us to where we are, where we can really start pushing scaled commercialisation of the technology,” says Messersmith.
How Lasso spins fibres and proteins into clean-label ingredients
Lasso SpinTech, as the technology is called, was developed in a multi-disciplinary lab at Harvard, where researchers worked on applications “ranging from textiles to pharma to food”, Messersmith notes.
The company’s patented food manufacturing platform can use centrifugal force to weave proteins together into sheets of woven fibres, without high heat, artificial binders and gums, or additives. These can then be processed into a wide range of clean-label products.
“The technology resembles a large-scale ‘cotton candy machine’ where we use a rotary jet spinning process to turn a mix of ingredients into microfibers that are collected in sheets, which are then used to make a wide range of food products using standard post-processing equipment,” explains Messersmith.
“[It] is incredibly efficient, high throughput, and flexible, and we have now demonstrated applications across many high-growth consumer categories,” he adds. “We’ve worked with over 1,000 ingredients, including the full spectrum of protein and fibre sources, to make food.”
Since its flexible process works at an ambient temperature, Lasso can process everything from plant-based (like chickpeas) to animal-based (such as whey), wet or dry, and commodity to novel sustainable ingredients (think mycelium, fermentation-derived probiotics, or cultivated ingredients).
“Flexibility has always been built into the core of the platform, giving it the ability to create solutions across a range of food categories. Plant-based meat was the first killer application we focused the tech on to support funding and scale-up,” he says.
“As the food industry has evolved, with consumers demanding protein and fibre-rich foods across categories, it made sense to expand the range of Lasso SpinTech applications – both to realise the full potential of what the company is capable of, and also the reality of it being short-sighted to put all our chips into a single application within a single category.”
Energy-efficient production with prices close to conventional meat
Over the last four years, Lasso has scaled up from a countertop system in a lab to commercial volumes. “We have managed to increase our throughput by a factor of 10x every year over the past several years since the company was founded out of the lab at Harvard. All of that while not materially adding significant cost or size to the footprint of the hardware itself,” says Messermith.
Today, a single Lasso SpinTech machine the size of a washing machine can generate over 1,000 lbs of finished product per hour – comparable to industry processing equipment, like extrusion, baking, etc.,” he outlines.
This equates to over two million lbs of product annually (which could help produce 18 million protein bars, for example). The technology is much more climate-friendly than standard industry tech, requiring 95% less energy and producing 85% fewer emissions. In fact, Lasso SpinTech uses less energy than a toaster oven, while shortening the product development cycle from a year to several weeks.
“There are straightforward pathways to continue to scale the throughput of our individual systems, and because of its compact size, the machine itself can also scale by deploying multiple in parallel for high volume needs,” says Messersmith.
At $150,000, the production system represents a fraction of the capital costs of commercial extruders. Over the last year, Lasso has become unit-profitable and reduced the cost of Tender’s meat alternatives by over 85% (from $30 to $3.50 per lb), almost at parity with conventional meat.
“We use a wide array of ingredients, which can allow us to find really high-quality sources but also be really selective on cost structure. Because our technology creates texture naturally and our low-heat process doesn’t create off notes, we avoid having to add high-cost additives, binders, gums, or flavour maskers,” the CEO explains.
“When we deployed [the tech] at our partner manufacturing site, we were able to really demonstrate amazing throughput with very low loss. High-throughput, low-loss, and easy-to-use is a great recipe for cost competitiveness, especially on new technology, keeping operating and labour costs low.
“The technology is incredibly resource-efficient. It uses very little electricity and water with very little waste, which means that the cost to operate it to make food is very competitive. The machine itself is quite efficient to fabricate, meaning our depreciated equipment cost is extremely low.”
Flexible tech can tackle UPF grievances
UPFs have become a thorn in the side of food tech over the last couple of years. With many studies linking these products to a host of diseases – despite experts warning that nutrition and processing should not be painted with the same brush – consumers have voted with their wallets.
Sales of plant-based meat fell by 7% in 2024, and many alternative protein companies have restructured or fallen into insolvency. Even big players, like Beyond Meat, have changed tack to highlight whole foods amid falling sales and mounting debt.
How does Lasso plan to win over consumers with its fibre-spinning tech, at a time when anything remotely processed is facing scrutiny? Messesmith reiterates the fact that its process eschews the need for additives to hold ingredients together, instead using physics to weave protein and fibre into something “super nutritionally dense”.
“A big component of the UPF debate is people pushing back on overly complex ingredient decks that have lots of ingredients they don’t understand or are familiar with. People want protein-dense foods across the stores, but they hate the impact that has on the ingredient decks required to make those foods,” he states.
“We are making major progress in creating better, cleaner- and simpler-label foods that people want because of our advanced technology process that invents new types of bars, snacks, and foods across the store. Because we are ingredient-flexible, we can accommodate new, less processed ingredients as they come to market to continue to push our products.”
The GLP-1 potential is personal for Messersmith
The other trend the industry has had to contend with is the GLP-1 boom, which has given giants like Nestlé, Conagra, and JBS pause. One in eight Americans has already tried a weight-loss drug, and Messermith himself is an active user.
“I started taking GLP-1s over a year ago, and it has had such an incredible and profound effect on my diet and health. I started seeing a nutritionist as part of that journey, and she advised me of the importance of building a snacking routine that matched my GLP-1 diet: protein, fibre, nutritionally dense foods to eat throughout the day to stay full and keep up muscle mass,” he recalls.
“One of the big effects for me was that many of the snacks I used to love to eat (sweet snacks, sugar-laden snacks, fat- and carb-based salty snacks) I could no longer eat. They really didn’t fit my new diet,” he adds.
It’s why one of the things Messersmith is most excited about is Lasso’s potential to create products that he’d love to eat himself. “It may sound selfish, but I know a lot of people experience that same level of diet change when they are taking GLP-1s, and many of their favourite food rituals really change,” he highlights.
“We think that by creating really clean-label, protein and fibre-rich, delicious products, we can make something pretty exciting for people on that journey.”
Lasso launching its own brands and licensing SpinTech platform
Asked about Lasso’s financial performance over the last 12 months, Messersmith says: “We have kept pretty disciplined on our existing plant-based meat business with a regional New England-based distribution approach. That has been steadily consistent while we have been developing the new category applications that we are excited to bring to market here in the next couple of months.”
Speaking of which, the company has created prototypes for over 15 categories, including snacks, bars, confectionery, and pet food.
“We really think our technology platform is pretty extraordinary in what it can create for the food industry and the impact it will have. We can’t wait a decade for that adoption to occur, so we are being pretty aggressive on how we show what is possible and invite other partners equally interested in change and new solutions,” says Messersmith.
“We are launching some own brands because we want to show what is possible with the tech, and no one can move as fast or with as much intention as we can. We are also in deep, advanced discussions with several global food partners about using the technology for their own businesses, which is an incredible compliment and pathway to scale and impact at an expedited rate.
“The own-brand launches could be great businesses on their own and also serve as public billboards for what is possible with our Lasso platform, which will invite more partners into the conversation about working with us to expedite scale. Ultimately, our goal is to establish our technology as an industry standard, and drive volume through it, whether our own brands that we spin out if successful, or our licensing partners.”
Armed with the new funds (which Messersmith called a “major milestone”), Lasso has three key focus areas for the next 12 months: launch brands in new categories like snacking, finalise and kickstart key manufacturing and licensing partnerships, and continue deploying the technology with a spotlight on scale-up and supporting continued ingredient expansion.
Messersmith is not revealing the first category Lasso will expand to, but says he’s “really excited about the snacking category and looking at spaces like salty snacks, fruit snacks, and other spaces that really are looking for protein [or] fibre solutions”.
Lasso isn’t the only food tech startup leveraging fibre-spinning tech – Germany’s Project Eaden has created pork-free ham using a fibre-spinning process inspired by the textile industry, and raised $15.6M in January as it expands into several other meat alternatives.
Dutch startup Rival Foods, meanwhile, secured $11.5M for its shear-cell tech to make whole-cut vegan meat. Its production system resembles a pressure cooker with a rotating part, using temperature and rotation to enable deformation and alignment of proteins to create fibrous textures.
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