After securing funding to scale up production last year, The Plant Based Seafood Company, a seafood analog product venture formed by the owners of the Van Cleve Seafood Co., is focusing on U.S. retail expansion this year.
The company’s Mind Blown Coconut Shrimp, Dusted Shrimp and Dusted Scallops will be on shelves by 1 March, followed by the launch of Mind Blown Lobster and Crab Cakes sometime in the spring, Co-Founder and CEO Monica Van-Cleve Talbert told SeafoodSource.
“We will be launching in a retail chain of 150 stores in April – the name of retailer is coming soon – and with a national distributor,” she said. The Plant-Based Seafood Co. will focus on "key markets" like San Francisco and Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; and Dallas and Austin, Texas.
In addition, the company is expanding into online marketplaces such as GTFO It's Vegan, and will add on several other online partners in the second quarter.
It has also partnered with Pod Foods, a tech-enabled wholesale distribution company that leverages a transparent, B2B marketplace and end-to-end logistics network, the company said on its website.
“Their customers are perfectly aligned with our award-winning plant based seafood products and have already shown a lot of excitement about putting them on their shelves,” Van-Cleve Talbert said.
Last year, Van Cleve obtained a pre-seed investment from Hatch, a global fund dedicated to investing and accelerating sustainable innovations in the seafood industry.
At the time, Van-Cleve Talbert declined to reveal the funding amount, defining it only as “significant.”
“Since August, we have secured large scale manufacturing that will allow us to scale nationally which is what we are focused on now,” she said.
Photo courtesy of Plant Based Seafood Co.
