Entrepreneurs: Meet Meatless Farm founder Morten Toft Bech as his plant-based start-up closes in on $75m raise

Looking slightly sheepish, Morten Toft Bech, the softly spoken 45-year-old founder of booming vegan burger-maker Meatless Farm, said: "If you ever want bragging rights for how easy it is to raise money, be in plant-based right now.”

The Leeds-headquartered start-up, which makes pea protein-based meat alternatives, is set to complete a $75 million (£54 million) fundraising round in March. It is going well. It follows a $31 million (£24 million) successful funding round last September.

The company launched in 2016 and grew by nearly 200% last year. Just last month it began supplying high street chains Pret and Leon - with patties for Leon’s Love Burger, and with the balls inside Pret’s new signature Meatless Meatball hot wraps. 

(Toft Bech explained that half the company’s moniker is missing from the Pret partnership, because they are in the process of “slowly taking away the farm in the name”.)

The Danish-born entrepreneur started out in finance, living and working in London for 15 years before leaving to launch a fintech start-up with a friend.

He believes the combination of financial know-how and having prior experience running a start-up “really helped” Meatless Farm rise so fast. He moved to Leeds to launch because for the price of an office in London, up north the team could rent an entire building.

Toft Bech plans to use the anticipated new cash to fuel the company’s global growth.

Meatless Farm now employs more than 100 people across offices in Leeds, Amsterdam, Tribeca and Singapore. Its products are stocked across major UK supermarkets, and in the US on the shelves of high-end retailer Whole Foods. It recently opened a factory in Canada, is about to launch in Israel, and has further expansion planned in the US for 2021.

"We're still a start-up, but we're one of the veterans. It shows how fast the whole thing is developing,” he said. “Both in retail and food services it's coming on - just a few years ago they didn't know where to place plant-based stuff in the aisle."

The company was founded not from ethical zeal - “we aren’t about everyone being vegans, we just want people to reduce meat consumption” - but as a result of the founder wanting to find more decent meat alternatives for his children, so they did not have to eat as many beans.

It took two years of factory visits, experimentation and financing plans before Meatless Farm products launched in 2018. It was a good time to emerge onto the meat-free scene. When it launched, the start-up was taking on "sleepy generation one companies" like Quorn, Toft Bech said, but now every major UK supermarket is on the hunt for new meat alternatives.

Today the founder also sees "an enormous opportunity in the restaurant space", as "within a few years people will need to have 40% of the items on their menu being plant-based... And not a salad - good, tasty food."

The growth in the sector since Meatless Farm launched has been astronomical.

When Beyond Meat - the major California-based meat-free burger maker (the patties you find inside Honest Burger buns) - listed on the Nasdaq in May 2019 with an IPO price of $25 per share. They saw an 135% gain on opening day, and reached $240 per share within 12 months - giving the plant-based giant a market cap of $14.8 billion.

Alternative meat is set to account for around 10% of the $1.4 trillion-a-year global meat market by 2029, according to research from Barclays. A recent report from Allied Market Research estimated that the global demand for meat-alternative products hit £4.1 billion in 2020, up from £2.9 billion in 2015.

"In terms of European companies [in plant-based meat alternatives] trying to be a global player, we are the only one,” Toft Bech said. "When we launched into the US, we saw the stock of Beyond Meat tumble by a couple of million on that day.”

Despite the much larger investor pool in the US, Toft Bech is glad he is based in Europe. "We don't waste money. Being based in Europe has helped with that, because EU start-ups start from lower valuations.