Nowadays, keeping capital investments in check is critical to managing risk and growth in alt-meat companies. One option: asset-light production lines with lower operating budgets.

Swiss food-tech company Planted Foods manufactures an array of clean label plant-based alt-meats at its facility in Kemptthal, Switzerland.
Alt-meat companies looking to scale up production or experiment with new product lines face a conundrum: Scaling up, with its buildings and utilities and equipment, requires a hefty amount of capital, while VC and private equity funding has all but disappeared.
“The more you can defer that investment, the better,” says Tony Moses, until recently the director of product innovation and engineering for design-build firm CRB Group. “The more capital that a company…