Chunk Foods’ Founder Amos Golan Wants to Make Sirloin and Ribeye Steaks without the Animals

Amos Golan Chunk Foods CEO

Chunk Foods is not just another alternative meat-producing startup. Sure, there are plenty of those. But Chunk, the brainchild of Israeli entrepreneur Amos Golan, is much more than a firm producing eggs, or poultry made from plants or meat developed in a lab. The company makes clean-label, plant-based whole-cut products.

So, you might ask, what does that mean? Well, we’re glad that you asked that because this was the question that we wanted to see answered when Chunk Foods founder Amos Golan sat down with Jewish Business News for an interview. Now, obviously these days people no longer actually sit down for an interview, but we did talk.

Basically, Chunk Foods is not interested in making simple or inexpensive frozen meat alternatives like the ones that have been popular in Israel for decades. Nor does it seek to develop fillers or additives or even fresh ground meat alternatives for the fast food industry like in McDonald’s hamburgers.

What Chunk Foods wants to do is make the fancier cuts of meat from alternative substances. So think about soon having that sirloin steak, veal, T-Bone, Tenderloin, Kobe and maybe someday even the meats of rare species made from alternative ingredients, but that tastes and has the texture of the real thing. These count for 60 – 80 % of beef sales in the US for whole cuts – by volume since these things are more expensive and bigger than burgers. And this is why Chunk focuses on the products that are more expensive like steaks and roasts.

Amos Golan, 35, is the founder and CEO of Chunk Foods. He started out on his current path as a graduate of the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program for Outstanding Students at Tel Aviv University where he obtained an MS.c. in Organic Chemistry. Then Amos gained a second Master’s degree focused on Human-Computer Interaction from the MIT Media Lab where he conducted research and worked on various futuristic projects with fortune 500 companies.

So, what led him to the alternative meat industry and the founding of Chunk Foods?

Well, Amos Golan told JBN that he moved to the US for school in 2016 which just so happened to be an important year for the plant-based foods industry. That was the year that two Israeli firms in the field got off the ground, Beyond and Impossible Meats.

“I had just landed in Boston the summer of 2016 and saw all these new products popping up at all the trendy restaurants and got really intrigued,” Amos said.

Amos loves food and cooking and attended the Cordon Bleu culinary school, where he was trained in classic French cuisine and worked in several restaurants in Tel Aviv. “I already had an interest in food having studied cooking in London, so food and cooking is part of what I have always loved,” he said.

And Amos Golan is not a vegetarian, but he wants to see reduced animal-based food consumption for environmental reasons. His motivation is based on the environmental problems meat production causes.

Anyone who has read books like “Fast Food Nation,” or who has seen the documentary “Supersize Me” (and if you haven’t you should) knows how much the animal-based food industry – meat, poultry, eggs, dairy, etc. – whether it is for fast foods, junk foods, home cooking or even additives to so many store bough processed foods from cakes to ice cream, harms the environment.

Numerous amounts of energy go to the industry every year, along with a tremendous amount of animal waste that needs to be dealt with. Much of the waste ends up polluting the local environment, including drinking water. And cows give off a great deal of methane (use your imagination here) gas that goes into the atmosphere and adds to the problem of climate change. Also, such animals were supposed to roam free, with their droppings getting stomped into the ground becoming a fertilizer, thereby playing their part in the ecosystem. But this is no longer the case and has not been for a long time.

So, one need not be a vegetarian to want to see quality and affordable animal-based food product alternatives proliferate. And the world does not need to do away with animal-based foods entirely to solve the environmental problems, just cut back on most of them.

Most people, however, who are concerned about the environmental consequences of eating animals will say “I want to eat my burger now – the environment can wait,” because the alternatives currently on the market just aren’t there yet when it comes to getting both the taste and the texture of meat just right.

But for now, Chunk Foods, like other firms in this field, has yet to solve the cost and taste are factors. As Amos himself put it, “we need to get to price parity.” In other words, the industry will not take off until it can offer same quality/taste for the same (preferably lower) price. Hopefully, as the technology advances from greater research efforts the processes will be simplified and made cost-efficient.

Before starting Chunk Foods, Amos quit his job and developed his ideas in his home kitchen in Brooklyn developing the prototype himself, something he really craved. “Craveability,” is the word he uses to describe what it is about a certain food that makes it so desired by people. (This may be a new word and if so Amos should copyright it.) Like how it feels when you bite down into a really good steak or even your favorite kind of cookie or fruit. Amos says this is one of the most important things about food.

Chunk Foods got off to a start with a check for just $50,000. And in just two years since raised $17 million from investors like the Marvel movies star Robert Downey Jr and they now have 25 people and expect to soon have up to 40 employees.

“As someone who loves food and engineering and always had a passion to have my own factory and to be an industrialist, it was only natural to go into this field,” said Amos about his company’s growth.

On the future for Chunk Foods, Amos Golan told JBN, “We need to be even tastier than meat and make sure that the consumer knows this is better for them and better for the environment. The problem has been that even when people care about the environment and the animals the end products just haven’t been good enough to get people to change over to them.”

So, Amos Golan and Chun Foods hope to change this.