We worked on a vegan chicken bite for four years, improving the recipe with new ingredients; each time aiming to perfect a more authentic taste. Despite our newfound vegan Cumberland sausage innovation, mimicking a chicken nugget was a challenge in terms of achieving authentic flavour and texture; it became a recipe built on wet extruded textured proteins, carefully blended yeast flavours and precise emulsion.
By early 2021 we were able to compete with products readily available in the retail market and so a customer collaboration began. Initially, the Customer had a recipe of its own, built upon a wheat gluten concept and produced by hand in a small production kitchen.
Given the nature of the recipe, we were unable to meet their expectations. The Customer however, keen to push towards its new brand launch date, but aware of the challenges their product was facing in transition from kitchen to the factory, asked us for recipe development.
Our four-year developed and perfected core vegan chicken nugget was proposed with the Customers own newly developed coating; launch commenced in January 2022.
Due to extraordinary volumes required, the NPD team managed the transitions of the recipe to our Frostkrone Group colleagues in Germany for manufacture. The product was successfully launched in the UK across two major retailers with plans for Europe, USA and eventually worldwide.
