One might say that a butcher who doesn’t sell meat isn’t a butcher. But a new crop of delis and butcher shops serving up plant-based meat say that’s not the case at all.
Butchers and delis are American staples. There’s New York’s Katz’s, Canter’s in Los Angeles. They’ve come to be synonymous with sandwiches piled high with smoked and cured meats like pastrami and corned beef. They maintain their status; Katz’s Delicatessen brought a one-day pop across the country to West Hollywood’s Bar Next Door last month with its famous sandwiches clocking in at $45 apiece.
But just as the demand for these meat-centric institutions holds strong, so too is the demand for increasingly healthy, plant-forward options ala Mediterranean and Blue Zones diets. Leading the pack is the Mark Cuban-backed Unreal Deli. And if anyone can break the planet’s meat habit, it may just be its founder, Jenny Goldfarb.
Meat 2.0
Goldfarb comes from a family of New York City deli owners dating back more than a century. She says the distinction between plants and meat is just semantics: she serves up plenty of meat, she says. Meaty meat. Butcher-quality deli meat. It just comes from plants.
“Growing up in my great-grandfather’s New York delis surrounded by all those authentic flavors gave me a refined palette, so I knew we couldn’t settle for anything less than delicious,” Goldfarb told Ethos via email. Goldfarb launched Unreal Deli in 2019, getting the ultimate boost for a young business: a Shark Tank appearance and $250,000 in funding from Shark Mark Cuban, who’s still an investor in the brand.
There have been challenges, Goldfarb says. Being a latecomer to the vegan meat category has its pros, like nabbing the Shark Tank deal. But it also has its cons. “When I was on Shark Tank, Mr. Wonderful [Kevin O’Leary] asked me why the other plant-based meat companies wouldn’t crush me like a ‘corned beef cockroach’,” Goldfarb says.
Avoiding the crushing O’Leary predicted may be due in part to having a backer like Cuban. But there’s also the fact that Goldfarb was the first in the space to tackle what’s perhaps the most deli-meat of all deli meats: corned beef. She mastered the flaky and cured taste and texture of the deli classic, presumably by calling in the skills of her deli ancestors. The company now also offers turkey, pastrami, and steak slices.
“I like to think that great-grandpa Morris is smiling to see how we’re bringing that authentic New York deli flavor into the modern age, making this classic part of American food history relevant to the next generation,” Goldfarb says.
That next generation includes legacy brands like Tofurky, which has offered meaty deli slices for years. So has Lightlife, Yves, and Field Roast, among others. And while Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have taken up the lion’s share of media attention and fast-food placement for plant-based meat in recent years, artisan meats (and cheese) are one of the category’s hottest trends.
The Vegetarian Butcher, founded in 2010 by Jaap Korteweg in the Netherlands, has become one of Europe’s fastest-growing vegan meat brands. Korteweg, who transitioned from animal agriculture to plant-based meat production after witnessing the harsh realities of the meat industry, aims to provide sustainable and ethical meat alternatives. “My goal was to become the biggest butcher in the world as soon as possible,” Korteweg told Barron’s.
Minnesota-based The Herbivorous Butcher led the meat-free butcher revolution in the States and continues to attract new customers primarily through its ship-to-your-door national service. “We’re here to bridge the gap so that omnivores can switch over,” Aubry Walch, Herbivorous Butcher co-founder, told the Guardian. “We don’t use funny words for our products. We call them what they are.”
Los Angeles recently got its first crop of vegan butchers. There’s Maciel’s, located in the trendy east-side Highland Park neighborhood. “We see it as a neighborhood butcher-deli,” co-founder Joe Egender told Eater. “You come and get your weekly meats, but also grab some sandwiches and aguas frescas, and hang out a little bit or take it home. We see moms and dads buying slices of turkey for their kids to make school lunches.”
West Hollywood’s Nibel offers luxe charcuterie boxes replete with plant-based meat and cheese. Nibel’s co-founders, Lucas Dudley and Lubomir Jordan, say their commitment to cruelty-free eating and high-quality, small-batch products highlights a broader trend in consumer preferences. “It dawned on us that there was a big deficiency in the vegan charcuterie market,” they said. They’re an example of the new wave of vegan meat producers who aren’t just satisfied with a fast food burger or hot dog. “We have tried and taste-tested almost every vegan cheese and meat there is,” Dudley and Jordan, who are also married, told Ethos. Nibel operates via Instagram, hand-delivering fresh boxes around town. The duo has earned high-profile praise and the demand for their service exceeded expectations. “We knew we were onto something,” they said, “but we had no idea there would be this much interest.”
The trend is also evident inside Erewhon, the premium Los Angeles supermarket chain that specializes in high-end products like Hellenic Farm’s fig salami, tempeh handmade in San Diego, and selections from small-batch cheesemakers like Julie Piatt’s Srimu cheese.
The market for meat-free
The now Unilever-owned Vegetarian Butcher is, far and away, the category’s biggest success story. Korteweg said his work in animal agriculture led him to eschew animal products and start his own plant “butchering.” It was after being asked to store pig cadavers from a swine flu outbreak that he shifted away from meat. “For me, that was the moment to stop it, I’d had enough of that system using animals for meat,” he told Barron’s.
Demand for healthy meat options is booming, even despite recent lackluster sales performances in the U.S.; industry leaders Beyond and Impossible have laid off staff, Beyond Meat’s McDonald’s trial ended after failing to meet sales targets, and cultivated meat, the tech hailed as a silver bullet fix for the industry’s woes, has seen states ban lab-grown meat before it’s even commercially available. Upside Foods, one of only two cultivated meat producers in the U.S. to earn FDA and USDA approval, recently announced major layoffs as a result of state bans on the products.
But growth and demand are continuing — it’s the “S” curve, experts insist. And it’s being driven by the ever-growing flexitarian consumer, especially in the U.S. Those are consumers seeking, for the most part, meaty-tasting meat that doesn’t bring the health, ethical, or environmental issues.
According to Grand View Research, the vegan meat category brought in $6.023 billion in 2020 and should surpass $24 billion by 2030. For Goldfarb, there’s no question Unreal Deli will be part of that. Following a Series A funding round in 2022 led by Cuban and the Getty family, Unreal now has a $50 million valuation.
“We’re just getting started,” Goldfarb says. Unreal has seen very real growth in recent years, with sales surpassing $4 million and placement in thousands of stores across the U.S. “Numbers don’t lie, more and more consumers, mostly those who still eat animal-based meats, are trying out plant-based and looking to cut down on their environmental impact and improve their health with these options,” she says. “According to Packaged Facts, 47 percent of those not yet consuming plant-based meats are interested in trying them.”
O’Leary’s ‘cockroach’ comment, it seems, was made in haste — it is, perhaps, because he overlooked the nuance of personal preference: Goldfarb’s Unreal Deli, Vegetarian Butcher, and the other players in the space offer the consumer another entry point to a growing category. That’s crucial, particularly when the majority of consumers are coming to plant-based food for significant reasons, chiefly their health or the health of the planet.
For Goldfarb, that’s evident with the brand’s recent expansion and some even bigger launches coming that will nearly double Unreal’s retail footprint. But despite all the growth and busyness of running a business, Goldfarb is, first and foremost, a mother committed to a future that desperately needs us to reduce our meat intake today. And, she says, her daughters and their eventual families continue to be her motivation, “I want to leave them a kinder, healthier, and more compassionate world.”
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