Dairy-identical milk and vegan mycelium meat are just a few products recently launched at Sprouts Farmers Market, a hotspot for innovative foods.
Milk and meat are grocery staples and at Sprouts Farmers Market, these items are getting innovative vegan makeovers. Last month, dairy-identical brand Bored Cow made its national retail debut at the grocery chain’s nearly 400 locations across 23 states.
What’s different about this brand? Instead of exploiting cows to make dairy, Bored Cow—the flagship brand of Tomorrow Foods—uses animal-free whey made by Perfect Day, a California food tech company working to make conventional dairy production methods obsolete with its precision fermentation technology. This base creates a functional vegan milk that steams, froths, and tastes identical to dairy milk.
Making functional dairy milk without animals in this way is a win for the environment as well. When compared to conventional and organic dairy milk, Bored Cow’s original flavor uses 96 percent less land, up to 67 percent less water, and emits up to 44 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Sprouts is now stocking Bored Cow—which is loaded with calcium, B12, and Vitamin D—in Original, Chocolate, Vanilla, and Strawberry flavors. “We couldn’t think of a better partner to bring Bored Cow to brick-and-mortar than Sprouts,” Tomorrow Farms CEO Ben Berman said in a statement. We feel Sprouts shoppers are strongly aligned with our mission, and share in our passion for sustainable, plant-powered products.”
“Whether you’re a longtime dairy drinker or a plant-based milk enthusiast, you’ll be thrilled with the taste, nutrition, and functionality of Bored Cow,” Berman said.
Sprouts’ (vegan) meat department
Founded in 2002, the first Sprouts Farmers Market store opened in Chandler, Arizona, and the company expanded rapidly in the following years, opening stores in California, Colorado, Texas, and other states. Sprout’s mission is to make healthy living affordable and accessible for everyone and its approach to elevating emerging companies is turning it into a hotspot for vegan innovators.
In addition to adding Bored Cow to its dairy case, Sprouts recently became the debut national retailer for Meati, a Colorado-based innovator in the vegan meat space. In March, Sprouts began stocking Meati’s vegan chicken and carne asada steaks—which it makes from mycelium, the fast-growing root systems of mushrooms.
The benefits here are also vast. Instead of raising animals for meat, the company is able to grow the equivalent of hundreds of cows with just a teaspoon of mycelium spores into hundreds in a matter of days at its new Mega Ranch facility—where it aims to produce 45 million pounds of mushroom meat annually.
Meati worked with Sprouts to test its vegan meats in select Colorado stores, which proved quite popular, before rolling out nationally.
And Meati is not the only new vegan meat brand at Sprouts. California-based, premium plant-based meat company Abbot’s Butcher just touched down at Sprouts, bringing its plant-based chorizo and chopped vegan chicken into the retailer’s refrigerated case.
“Launching with Sprouts is an incredibly exciting step for us,” Founder & CEO Kerry Song said in a statement. “There is an undeniable shift taking place in how consumers are thinking about their food, and they are actively seeking out food made with ingredients that truly nourish their bodies.”
Sprouts is a grocer they trust to feed themselves and their families, and we are honored to be a part of that,” Song said.
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