After roughly nine months of tinkering and teasing, Chilean-based The Not Company (NotCo) is finally ready to share its vegan meat goodness with the world. But it isn’t rolling out the first line of its product alone—Papa John’s Pizza in Chile will carry it!
NotCo’s first vegan meat product, fittingly called Not Meat, will soon pop up in over 100 Papa John’s locations across that country. This is certainly unconventional for a product rollout, but no doubt sharing the spotlight with the pizza conglomerate means having access to a distribution network that most startups can only dream of.
The pizza to look out for is called The Vegan Royal. In addition to featuring NotCo’s Not Meat, the menu item will also be covered with gooey Follow Your Heart vegan cheese. Ironically, here in the States, Papa John’s received a grade of F from PETA on its vegan-friendliness.
“If nothing changes, by 2030 we will have a 15% chance of being able to feed our population,” NotCo states on its website. “What happens if we change animal production to plant production? Well, we would have a 100% chance of being able to do it.”
Not Meat is the fourth vegan product released by NotCo. Previous ones include Not Ice Cream, Not Milk, and Not Mayo. Currently, its products can only be found in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.
OK, American Vegans, It’s Time We Stepped Up
Everyone should be happy for our brothers and sisters in Chile who get to indulge in this delicious love connection between NotCo and Papa John’s. However, we can’t help but feel a bit jealous.
More than 45 pizza chains now have vegan cheese, and many offer other tasty animal-free toppings, such as vegan pepperoni, chorizo, and sausage. But for the chains that still don’t offer any vegan cheese or meat options for their pizzas, we must ask them to get with the times by offering vegan choices:
