(WSB photos)

By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor

When Rebellyous Foods moved to West Seattle four years ago, they were producing three tons of plant-based “chicken” every month. And they told us they were looking for “roommates” to help fill the huge space they’d leased in The Triangle.

Now they’re manufacturing 20 times that volume, and they’ve outgrown the space – their production happens in another facility, and their HQ will likely move when their lease runs out next year, though founder/CEO Christie Lagally says they have hopes of staying in West Seattle. We visited Rebellyous Foods HQ recently to see how they’ve grown.

Their biggest customer, buying the lion’s share – or perhaps we should say the rooster’s share – of their product: Schools. They sell “Kickin'” plant-based “chicken,” specially formulated to meet nutrition requirements, to more than 100 districts around the country (though not Seattle Public Schools, Lagally notes). That’s 90 percent of their sales, with the rest to retailers, mostly around the Northwest

Despite that production boom (5 days a week at Orca Bay Seafoods in SODO), ready-to-cook plant-based “chicken” nuggets, patties, and tenders aren’t what Rebellyous Foods is really all about. As Lagally had told us in 2019, her company is a technology company – inventing more efficient ways to produce the “chicken.” Much of what they’re doing inside the SK Food Group building is so super-secret, we weren’t allowed to photograph it.

Lagally says it’s all about the dough. (In two respects, in fact – Rebellyous Foods recently announced it has “raised a $9.5 million equity round” to build what it’s inventing.) Their technology enables the dough at the heart of their plant-based “chicken” to be made without backbreaking work. Most of what they’re doing at the West Seattle HQ is research and development – in one room they have production equipment both secret and (below) not-so-secret:

The whole point is to bring plant-based “chicken” into “price parity” with its flesh-and-blood counterpart. And Lagally says Rebellyouse Foods is not looking to own the market – not the market in their consumable product, anyway, but rather, in the technology – “production solutions” – so the revolution can spread further. “Our mandate is to be a production company, not a brand company.”

What they’re creating will “dramatically lower the cost of making plant-based meat,” Lagally – a former aerospace engineer – is confident. It will require 90% less labor, but she’s adamant that is not just a money-saving feature, but also a matter of “human safety.”

Banners on the wall celebrate the names of what they’ve been working on – the Mock 1S was a “small-scale version” of their dough-making system, Lagally explains, followed by the Mock 2, which is what she expects will achieve the goal of “price parity.” (You can read more about it on their website, where it’s touted as having a variety of advantages including energy efficiency.)

Since they’re prototyping technology, they’re 3-D-printing some of the parts they need – we wandered through one room where mechanical-design engineers were busy at workstations with a few of the printers nearby. They’re among Rebellyous Foods’ 19 current employees. Most of them are in R&D or production, Lagally says. Her company won’t be manufacturing the production equipment, but she expects it’ll have quite the market: “People do want meat replacement” – 20 percent of the meat sold now could be replaced by plant-based products, according to “think-tank research” she cites.

So the next time you pass by that big building in The Triangle, just south of the Y – remember there’s a revolution going on in there. (Rebelly-ion, they’d say.) And if you haven’t tried their products yet, you can go here to find a store that carries it (including nine in West Seattle).