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With relations between Americans and Canadians souring, a wave of economic nationalism has prompted one Toronto startup to aggressively expand its plant-based salmon.
If there are two things Canadians love right now, it’s homegrown products and salmon.
But both industries are under threat – the former from a trade war and hostile political rhetoric from its southern neighbour, and the latter from climate change.
In Toronto, one startup is tackling both challenges with a unique proposition. Salmon without the fish, made in Canada.
“People don’t just want better options, they want Canadian-made, Canadian-led alternatives that reflect our values, our innovation, and our independence,” says Chris Bryson, founder and CEO of vegan seafood firm New School Foods.
He’s right. Two in five Canadians will “absolutely do everything” to avoid American products now, and 88% would purchase items promoted as “made in Canada”.
“We are seeing Canadian restaurants trying to source more Canadian products and switching away from US producers,” Bryson tells Green Queen.
In the last four months, the company has signed agreements to bring its plant-based whole-cut salmon to over 30 restaurants nationwide, spanning Michelin Guide standouts, boutique hotels, ramen and sushi shops, and emerging chains.
Further, it has announced distribution partnerships with Gordon Food Service, the largest family-operated food distributor in North America, and speciality food purveyor Bondi Produce. These will give New School Foods access to a broad range of establishments across Canada.
“We see a growing opportunity in Canada where Canadians want to buy from Canadian companies, and we’re excited to step up to the plate,” says Bryson.
How New School Foods makes its whole-cut vegan salmon
“New School Foods doesn’t just provide a product that is fully Canadian, but also a superior product that is sustainable and scalable through breakthrough technologies we developed,” Bryson suggests.
The company employs directional freezing technology to make its whole-cut salmon analogue. Unlike extrusion, a widely used technique in the industry that denatures proteins via heat, this process allows products to start raw and cook like conventional meat.
The “cold-based” production method is built around a plant-based scaffolding that mimics animal muscle and connective tissues, with the same diameter, length, strength and behaviour. The layers of tissue are reproduced via a patent-pending injection process and give the product its trademark flakiness.
New School Foods has developed an assembly line, dubbed V1, to apply this technology on a commercial scale, which it says is the first of its kind for directional freezing.
“We recently completed the initial build of our V1 commercial line to support our commercial soft-launch. We’re scaling it up and optimising it every week – this is where the bulk of our time and effort goes, as we have developed a completely new manufacturing technology,” explains Bryson.
“We’re very excited about its scalability and flexibility, as we do see it able to produce much more than salmon,” he adds. “For example, we recently started processing the waste from our cutting process, and turned it into a salmon burger. We soft-launched it last month, and it’s doing super well. And the production process uses all the same equipment we use for making the fillet.”
The technology platform itself is “species-agnostic”, so it can be used to create other kinds of meat and fish too. Plus, the scaffolding can be used with any protein type, be it plant-based, fermentation-derived, or cell-cultivated. This paves the way for B2B co-manufacturing and white-label partnerships, opening up another revenue stream for New School Foods.
Why Canada needs alternative seafood
The startup, founded in 2021, carries out all its R&D, engineering and production at its recently opened 28,000 sq ft facility in Toronto. This, it suggests, allows for rapid iteration of new products, which use off-the-shelf food manufacturing equipment that significantly lowers costs compared to extrusion or cellular agriculture.
This is crucial at a time when salmon prices are rising amid farm closures, tariff disruptions, and climate change events in Canada. The government will ban open-net farming in British Columbia in 2029 (amid criticism from environmentalists over a five-year delay in its implementation), in response to dwindling salmon populations in the region’s waters.
The province’s farming industry has previously been caught dumping piscine orthoreovirus-infected (a fish virus) blood into Canada’s largest wild salmon migration route, and scientists had warned in 2012 that a virus was infecting both its farmed and wild salmon, which is a detriment to human health too.
The tariff war has made things worse. The Trump administration has imposed a 25% tariff on most Canadian goods, and Canada has reciprocated with its own set of duties. The US is its largest supplier of seafood, accounting for 31% of its import value in 2023. Salmon was the top imported species (21% of the total), with the US providing $280M worth of the fish that year.
Meanwhile, Trump’s repeated threats of annexation to make Canada “the 51st state” have been met with fierce backlash and a shift towards local manufacturing. Now, more than half of Canadians say they will stop buying a product if there’s no homegrown alternative.
New School Foods CEO ‘extremely confident’ in alternative protein sector
All this makes alternatives like New School Foods more important than ever. At the same time, alternative proteins – and especially vegan seafood – are having a tough time attracting customers. Seafood analogues make up just 1% of the plant-based meat category, as well as the conventional sector.
For Bryon, this was to be expected. “Lots of products were launched that didn’t taste great and were expensive, so the value proposition didn’t add up for a broader audience,” he says.
At the same time, the number of vegan seafood products has been far and few between, especially at “the level of sophistication and quality of the products in the alt-meat category”. “So it makes sense that there’s less traction, because there’s less product maturity,” he explains.
“I’m extremely confident that we will see that change in the years ahead as companies like ours launch products that actually meet customer needs. At the end of the day, there needs to be a compelling value proposition for customers, and many products are just not there yet. Through proper investments in R&D and newer production technologies like ours, that can be solved.”
While the company doesn’t share its revenue numbers, he reveals that 2025 is “already driving significantly more revenue than 2024 as more restaurants put New School Foods on their menus”.
Does it have plans to enter retail too? “Our priority at the moment is working with restaurants and chefs,” he says. “We believe we need to first earn the trust and respect of chefs in order to earn the trust of the end consumer. This also allows us to keep rapidly improving our product based on feedback, and to highlight the versatility of our products. Almost every week, we find out that chefs have discovered a new application for our products.”
New School Foods’s expansion comes on the heels of a $6M funding round led by Inter IKEA, the holding company of the furniture giant, taking its total raised to $18M. It came during an investment drought for alternative proteins, where startups attracted 27% less capital in 2024 than the year before.
“The 2018-19 era showcased that there is indeed demand for more sustainable foods. We also see that all the time in our sales process. The problem is that there is an R&D and product quality gap, and customer expectations have not been met,” contends Bryson.
“That only gets solved via investments into better ingredients and better production technologies. There will always be an audience for delicious and affordable products; we just need to keep closing the gap.
The post As Tariffs Drive Canadians to Buy Local, Vegan Salmon Startup New School Foods is Ready appeared first on Green Queen.