Vegan Corned Beef Deli Slices in U.s. Stores
Entrepreneur Jenny Goldfarb has a new brand of corned beef on the market — but where's the beef?
The Woodland Hills resident is the force behind Unreal Deli, a startup that makes plant-based versions of the meats her great-grandfather served in a New York deli, corned beef and roast turkey, with more to come.
Goldfarb has scored some notable successes since she launched the brand in 2018, placing the product in restaurants and grocery stores and competing on the ABC reality series "Shark Tank," getting more than twice the investment she was seeking from billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
To Goldfarb, it's affirmation that her mission to get people away from eating animal products is on the right track.
"Plant-based is here to stay, and it's growing by the minute," she said in a phone interview.
Goldfarb was a full-time mom before Unreal Deli. But she has a degree in business, work experience in the tech industry, and some media savvy. Her husband Eric is in the entertainment industry with editing credits on several reality series, including "Big Brother," "The Amazing Race" and "Naked and Afraid."
What Goldfarb didn't have was a culinary background. But she found the motivation when she decided to forsake "the standard American diet" after watching online videos depicting cruelty to animals convinced her to become a vegan.
"It broke my heart. After it broke my heart, I felt like I was literally taken for a ride to believe that this was normal, healthy, sensible, humane," she said.
"I went to my meat-and-potatoes husband. I said 'We can't eat this way anymore.' My husband was like, 'You're not even that great of a regular cook.'
"It was a long and painstaking process with a lot of lousy meals my husband and two young kids had to eat along the way."
Swimming with sharks
Goldfarb began kitchen experiments that led her to start a website called Count Your Colors in 2018. It features "simple recipes inspired by the plant kingdom." Unreal Deli, founded later in the year, was the next step.
Her great-grandfather got into the deli business in New York City's Lower East Side after he came to the United States from Romania. Craving some of those foods, she created her own recipes for authentic-tasting deli meats, reducing vegetables into a slurry, "like a smoothie," and then mixing it with grains and baking it.
Friends encouraged her to market her products. She rented space in a commercial kitchen and then took samples of the corned beef to delis in the Los Angeles area, all the while pregnant with her third child.
Some of the delis were impressed and added her plant-based meat to their menus. And then chains such as Quiznos and Veggie Grill became got on board.
After Whole Foods Market began selling Unreal Deli sandwiches in the summer of 2019, Goldfarb stopped doing the cooking and began looking at serious expansion.
She put in an application to appear on "Shark Tank," an ABC reality series on which entrepreneurs pitch their startups to a panel of investors, the "sharks" who are looking to make a killing on new ideas.
The show taped in September 2019 at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City. She was on the lot for preparation the day before the taping and met other contestants.
"There are a lot of very colorful people, as you can imagine. No one's making like chips for computers. They're making like crazy hats in 2,000 colors. They have wild people there, a lot of characters."
She got some advice on how to prepare from one of them.
"He goes, 'Have your kids fighting while your baby's crying in your arms and your husband's asking you financial questions.' And if you can answer those, you'll be great in the tank."
When the "sharks" asked her why she was on the show when she could get much more money from Silicon Valley, where plant-based foods is a "super-hot space," she said, "Because one shark dollar is worth five regular dollars. That's why."
She had a couple of one-liners ready, including her closing line. "This business is a cash cow. We're making cash and we're saving cows."
In the episode, which aired in November 2019, she asked the sharks for $100,000 but instead got Cuban to invest $250,000 for 20% of the company.
"I'll be the poster child for it. We'll hustle," Cuban told her on camera.
She said that Cuban also told her that he also had a great-grandfather from Romania who worked in a Lower East Side deli, but that exchange got edited out.
"When he said, that, I thought, 'Wow, this was meant to be.'"
But four months later the novel coronavirus pandemic hit, knocking the stuffing out of the restaurant industry and reducing her business with chains like Quiznos.
"Basically all the places that wound up crumbling during COVID were where we got really big at."
Goldfarb decided to pivot, placing her vegan deli meats in supermarkets such as Kroger, which includes Ralphs in Southern California, and Gelson's. She said locations number in the thousands.
"Now we have food services bouncing back, eating in restaurants, and a lot of chains looking at us, and the grocery game coming on real strong."
Mendocino Farms began serving an Unreal Reuben sandwich as a seasonal item but has since added it to its permanent menu, according to chief executive officer Kevin Miles.
"When our chef first discovered Unreal Deli, we knew we had to make some room on our menu," he wrote in an email.
Goldfarb is intent on expanding in all directions. She'll be adding vegan steak slices to her lineup in May, selling pre-made sandwiches in markets, and opening virtual kitchens in five Quiznos locations in Los Angeles and Orange counties around the end of the month.
"We're going to make a full line of Unreal Deli subs, basically. Everything's going to be 100% vegan, the cheese, the meat, the sauce, the veggies, obviously. Quiznos is providing the bread. Basically everything they do for their meat they're going to do for our line."
A new normal
The Goldfarbs have three daughters: Willow, 8, Pippa, 7, and Autumn, 20 months, who was born two months before "Shark Tank." Of their mother's products, the girls prefer the Unreal turkey.
Autumn has been raised on a vegan diet, but Willow and Pippa have memories of cheese.
"It comes up every now and then. Why are they eating that cheese pizza? I know it looks really good. Their mommies haven't seen the videos that your mommy has seen. They'll make their own decisions when they get older, but for right now I want to raise them with a big moral compass, and voting with their dollars that right way.
"The more that we make it normal, the more it becomes normal."
Goldfarb said she doesn't view high-profile plant-based meats such as the Beyond and Impossible burgers as competition.
"There's a lot out there that are very much made in a lab. We really like having ours more like natural vegetable based.
"I'm a fan of what we're doing, but to be totally honest with you, I really want to put slaughterhouses out of business more than I want to sell my own product.
"But what I'm trying to say is I believe this kind of plant-based food needs to feed the world."
Information: unrealdeli.com
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Source: https://www.dailynews.com/2021/04/12/unreal-deli-gives-vegans-a-plant-based-alternative-to-corned-beef-and-other-sandwich-meats
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