Christie Lagally, a Vegetarians of Washington member, started her career as a Boeing engineer, but she also cared passionately about avoiding animal products, so in 2017, she founded a new Seattle-based company, Rebellyous Foods.  This company aims to develop delicious and affordable vegan products for the food-service sector while creating machinery that can be used by other plant-based companies to help scale their production. 

Kristie Middleton, Vice President of Business Development at Rebellyous Foods at Rebellyous Foods, said: “Americans ordered 2.3 billion chicken nugget servings and 1.5 billion servings of chicken strips. The world’s largest foodservice providers have all committed to getting more plant-based options on their menus, but many foodservice operations don’t have the budget, trained staff, or equipment to cook from scratch. They need easy one-to-one replacements for their most popular options like chicken nuggets and strips. That’s where we come in.”

Over the past 3 years, Rebellyous Foods has ramped up production and been selling their nuggets to commercial food outlets such as hospitals and schools since February 2019, with clients such as Cornish College of the Arts and Swedish Medical Center. More recently the San Ramon Valley Unified School District (SRVUSD) in Northern California partnered with Rebellyous Foods to add vegan chicken nuggets to its lunch program, and the company has just raised $6 million in investment for a production operation that can produce their plant-based nuggets in huge quantities.

But with the COVID-19 epidemic, the business of providing nuggets to cafeterias, schools and hospitals has shrunk, so the company decided to expand into providing consumer packaged goods.  They have made a launch into retail in the Seattle area, with a long list of independent Seattle grocery stores now listed as places where you can purchase family packs of Rebellyous nuggets. If you’re a chicken nugget fan living in Seattle, why not give these new nuggets a try !

Watch a short video about Rebellyous Foods.