Meet the Founder: High Time Foods on how to make a plant-based meat product stand out from the masses

But it’s not just to get into fine dining spots that High Time Foods’ founders Aakash Shah and Damian Felchlin developed their plant-based meat product. “From the start, we wanted to be solving a global protein need,” Shah tells AFN . Keep reading for more on how Shah’s [ AS ] entrepreneurial path got him from India to Boston and how his company is trying to build truly global appeal into their plant-based meat product. But I realized that food was something I was always drawn to, so I kicked off working with an early-stage food tech company in India.

I was able to work a lot with the founders and interact a lot with with other stakeholders in the food and foodtech space. Throughout this experience, I worked very, very closely with meat and a lot of different types of food offloaded at our restaurants.

I kicked off reading about the impact of meat on water and on the amount of energy that it takes [to produce]. Chennai is a city that is always very, very hot, and there is a huge water crisis in the city all the time.

When I saw firsthand the amount of water we used, and the amount of water meat requires, it became a very strong feeling for me. At Babson College in Boston, that was around the same time I came to the US to do my MBA. It’s very well known for entrepreneurship, and a lot of food businesses have come out of there.

I was able to speak with a lot of stakeholders in the alternative protein space. On top of that, for a country like India, if the frozen [food storage] infrastructure exists, it is not at all perfect. Meat isn’t stored in the exact way that it’s supposed to be, there is no refrigerated truck that is delivering it.

We were also reading more about how many people in the world actually have access to refrigeration and found out that it’s not a very huge number. We realized if we want to be a business that is going to be a leader in delivering protein, having a product that is refrigerated might not be able to solve that purpose.

As we all know, meat production is not going to be able to survive the global appetite for protein. If a product is shelf stable, it can actually be used on a global scale.

What we’re really trying to do is show that how this can be used for different cuisines and settings. It took us a lot of time to be able to actually understand and fix our supply chain and get good component providers, good manufacturers to work with us. We had to sell them the concept that this is mainstream and this is this has huge potential and this is not just a small business.