Swiss Brand Aims to Be the Impossible Foods of Vegan Chicken 

New company Planted launched in Switzerland this month with the mission of replacing chicken meat with a viable plant-based protein—akin to what Impossible Foods has done with plant-based beef. For the past year, founders Lukas Böni, Pascal Bieri, and Eric Stirnemann have been working to create a plant-based chicken meat that closely resembles its animal counterpart from a combination of pea protein, pea fiber, sunflower oil, and water that is formed into a dough before undergoing a proprietary extrusion process giving the plant-based meat a fibrous texture similar to a chicken breast. “We put a lot of research into the product to make it extremely close to chicken,” Bieri told Tech Crunch. “Hence, we price around a premium chicken at this stage. We do see strong potential to produce our product at a lower cost mid-term, given strong economies of scale.” Planted chicken is now available at select restaurants in Switzerland, and the company plans to expand its global distribution in early 2020.