NotCo and Kraft Heinz Enter into a Joint Venture for a Foodtech Company

The Kraft Heinz Not Company LLC | Photo Courtesey

TheNotCompany, Inc or NotCo, as we all know it, has arrived in the United States to stay. In 2020, the Chilean unicorn started operations in there and entered more than 400 stores. This week they announced an alliance with The Kraft Heinz to give life to The Kraft Heinz Not Company LLC: a company that seeks to innovate in plant-based products and thus “reinvent global production”.

This joint venture will be located in Chicago and will have research and development facilities in San Francisco. It will be controlled by Kraft Heinz but will leverage the strengths of both. On the one hand is NotCo’s technology, which is based on Giuseppe. This is a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) development that finds combinations of plants to replicate animal products and make them more sustainable and tasty. 

Kraft Heinz, on the other hand, has a portfolio of well-known and scalable brands ready to develop plant-based versions of globally known products. In this way, both companies want to accelerate the adoption of plant-based foods. 

“We believe the technology that NotCo brings is revolutionizing the creation of exquisite plant-based foods with simpler ingredients,” said Miguel Patricio, CEO of Kraft Heinz.

Key Time for More Plant-based Products

Just a couple of weeks ago we talked about the raising of an investment round for Nude, a Brazilian foodtech that offers oat milk and is growing there by leaps and bounds.

However, there are still few players in the Latin American market for plant-based products. The strongest is NotCo, which was crowned a unicorn in mid-2021 and has a presence in Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and the United States. 

Its arrival came at a key moment for the United States. Retail sales of these products grew 27% during 2020, with 57% of all households consuming at least one such food.

With the arrival of The Kraft Heinz Not Company LLC, which will be led by Lucho Lopez-May as CEO, we will have to keep an eye on the changes that this joint venture will produce in the plant-based products market, as well as the new product portfolio that this alliance will leave behind.

You may also be interested in: Q&A |”The potential of foodtech in LatAm is huge, but it needs more investment”; Enrico Robles, Endeavor

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