Can this 19-year-old tech whiz make nuggets—and an animal-free lifestyle—go viral?
Pasternak, who says he has kept to a mostly animal-free diet for several years, spurns the “V words” and the “PB word” — vegan, vegetarian, plant-based — as elitist, confusing and alienating. He favors the term “clean meat” — clear, direct, emphasis on “meat.”
Let’s be clear, NUGGS are not the only animal-free nuggets on the block. Morningstar Farms, Applegate Organics and Boca are just some of the companies offering chicken-less nuggets available in supermarket frozen food sections. But squint at the packages, and they blur into one continuous gentle haze of leaves and peas, greens and soft browns. All of them present a similar aura of wholesomeness, wellness, healthy choices.
And NUGGS probably won’t appeal to clean-eating devotees. Although a five-piece serving has 22 grams of protein and is gluten-free, the ingredient list includes MSG, as well as sodium pyrophosphate, titanium dioxide and methylcellulose. Author's screenshot of @nuggs Instagram Just as the apps on your phone are continually updated with bug fixes and new features, Pasternak sees creating a better nugget as a fundamentally iterative process, one where the product is constantly tweaked in response to user experience and feedback. Where most traditional CPG companies go to great lengths to avoid reformulation, NUGGS are meant to be constantly “updated.” The version of NUGGS you order today may not be the same as the ones you order three or four months from now.
But mass-producing food is very different than building an app. You can fix a line of code in an afternoon, or an hour; altering the formula of a food product can be much more complex and time-intensive. Scaling-up production presents its own problems. Pasternak tells me that while they had a “pretty good” prototype in the test kitchen within four months, making the jump from lab to factory was a different story.
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