Crossover Meats 2024: Meat Solutions that Fight Food Inflation

DeliveryRank introduces Michelle Adelman, Co-Founder & CEO of Crossover Quality Meats, a pioneering force in the realm of ground meat innovation. With a mission to deliver better-for-you options, Michelle leads a team dedicated to crafting delicious, affordable, and environmentally conscious meat products. Utilizing a patented recipe, Crossover Meats reduces environmental impact by 50%, all while maintaining the same mouth-watering taste and texture consumers love. Michelle's vision extends beyond profit margins, aiming to give consumers what they want while championing sustainability efforts. As a vegan entrepreneur committed to food security and environmental stewardship, Michelle challenges conventional norms in the meat industry, embodying a unique blend of purpose and innovation.

Michelle, Crossover Meats aims to revolutionize ground meat by creating products that are better-for-you, delicious, affordable, convenient, all-natural, and environmentally sustainable. How do you ensure that your products meet all these criteria while maintaining the taste and texture that consumers love?

It starts with our patented process and recipe that was developed based on research at Stanford University on the molecular make up of meat.  Fundamentally, meat is made of lean muscle protein, fat and blood (hemoglobin).  The lean muscle gives ground meat its texture, the fat its flavor and juiciness, and blood the color, iron nutrition and slightly metallic taste. The Stanford research has resulted in two companies:  Impossible Foods which recreated these three elements from plant material and Crossover Meats where we replace the lean muscle portion with whole cuts of chicken breast, leaving the fat and blood components the same.  This results in a product that has all natural, simple meat ingredients that taste just like delicious 100% ground meat.  Because we use chicken breast as the majority ingredient, we cut the saturated and trans fats (better for you!), the environmental footprint and decrease the cost.  Our current products are in a convenient cook from frozen burger format that enables busy professionals and families to get dinner on the table in 10-12 minutes.

Your patented recipe uses wholesome chicken to replace the lean protein in ground beef, pork, and lamb, reducing the environmental impact by 50%. Can you tell us more about the process of developing this recipe and how it contributes to sustainability?

Diving into studies, you will find livestock farming of ruminant animals such as cows and sheep, as well as pork has a much larger impact on land, water and methane (CO2) emissions as compared to chicken.  Since we are replacing a large portion of the protein in our ground meat products with poultry it results in a 50% reduced environmental impact on all metrics: land, water and CO2.

Other studies also show that consumers are increasingly focused on the sustainability of their purchases, with more than 50% of consumers influenced by environmentally friendly products, and 80% of consumers taking the sustainability of a product into consideration before making a purchase. Since our burgers are all natural, real meat products that taste exactly like 100% beef, pork or lamb burgers that people know and love, so there is no compromise on taste or having to pay more for sustainability. 

Interestingly in the recent North American Meat Institute annual Power of Meat 2024 survey showed a number of key factors that also play in our favor. 87% of consumers are concerned about meat prices. Unlike Boomers, Millennials and Gen X are now consuming more chicken than beef or pork.  By using wholesome chicken to replace the lean protein in ground beef, pork and lamb we are able to reduce the price of ground meat while still delivering high quality ingredients, better nutrition and great taste.  

As a woman-owned company, how does Crossover Meats approach innovation in the meat industry, and what unique perspectives do you bring to the table?

Perhaps more importantly than being woman-owned, we are new to the meat industry – therefore we can look at consumers and the industry with a fresh lens.  Our focus starts with the consumer.  Consumers right now are facing high meat prices and food inflation; they have busy lives where making home cooked meals and healthier choices are challenging versus buying prepared and processed foods; and where while sustainability is important, often it comes with trade-offs like higher prices or reduced product quality.  We like to think of Crossover Meats as the “no compromise” solution:  giving consumers delicious, all natural ground meat products that are affordable, convenient, better for you, and better for the environment.

Despite being owned by a vegan, Crossover Meats focuses on creating meat products. How do you reconcile this with your commitment to food security and environmental impact?

As a farmer, entrepreneur and vegan, I am passionate about helping to build a healthier and more sustainable food system.  I’ve spent the better part of the last 12 years investing to build pioneering, sustainable food companies in fresh produce and protein.  I became vegan years ago primarily because of health and sustainability concerns resulting from industrialized farming.  

Part of my approach to building businesses is focusing on solutions that are highly scalable and support local supply chains.  I am a big believer that plant-based foods are important part of the food ecosystem.  While there are great plant-based products on the market now that replicate the taste of traditional meat, the combination of price, behavior change and long ingredient decks are proving to be a barrier to rapid market adoption with only 1.3% of all retail meat sales now being plant-based.  

Crossover Meats provides a delicious, real meat solution to bridge the gap as our food system evolves.  We are able to give consumers an all-natural product with simple ingredients that tastes and performs just like 100% red meat products while enabling consumers to save money and enjoy their meat while reducing their saturated and trans fats, and protecting the environment.

Crossover Meats is not your typical meat company. How do you differentiate yourselves from traditional meat producers, and what inspired you to take a different approach to creating meat products?

Crossover Meats aims for our patented process and recipe to pervasive in the meat industry.  While we are launching with our branded products (online and in retailers in California and at Giant Food on the east coast), we see opportunity for collaboration across the industry.  We want to help farmers who are focused on doing the right thing the right way be more successful and profitable.  

There are opportunities to collaborate with cattle ranchers, chicken producers, sausage makers, foodservice chef’s and retailers to use our technology to create products unique to them.  That will hopefully make our products widespread in the industry creating better health for consumers and sustainability for the planet.  We believe that once people have had their first bite and learn a bit more about our mission, our products could make huge strides for the meat industry and bring real change to making meat healthier and more accessible to consumers while improving our planet without compromises.

If you would like to find out more about Crossover Meats, please visit https://www.crossovermeats.com/