Sundial Foods—a California-based startup behind a novel protein-structuring technique for meat alternatives—has closed down, but sold its IP to an undisclosed large food company based in Europe.
The firm—listed as ‘deadpooled’ on market intelligence platform Tracxn—filed a certificate of surrender (a document filed to dissolve a corporation) with the Secretary of State in California on December 19, 2024.
Founded in 2019 by Jessica Schwabach (CEO) and Dr. Siwen Deng (CTO), who met at U.C. Berkeley’s Alternative Meats program, Sundial Foods took part in the Nestle R&D Accelerator program in 2020, and secured funding from the food giant as part of a $4 million seed round in November 2021.
The firm—which secured a $5,000 grant from Delaware’s fourth Startup302 competition last spring—generated some buzz in 2022 with the launch of its plant-based chicken wings in select restaurants in New York and San Francisco. The wings, made from a short list of ingredients including chickpeas, sunflower oil, and nutritional yeast, featured crispy edible “skin” made from a protein-lipid film to lock in moisture.
CEO Jessica Schwabach told AgFunderNews: “Our journey as Sundial Foods is over, but our IP has found a new home. The fundraising environment has been really challenging in the past few years and while we strongly believed in the mission, we started to see that to operate as a venture backed startup trying to build everything on our own was not really the best way to scale our technology.
“And so when this opportunity came along for a much larger food company that already has a distribution network, the resources and the ability to build the production and focus on markets where plant based is well-received, that seemed like a good opportunity to say, OK, they’ll be able to take it further than we can.”
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