MK Kosher is proud to welcome New School Foods, the Toronto based food technology company reinventing what plant-based seafood and meat can be, into the MK Kosher family. It is not often that a certification brings us into the orbit of a company doing something this genuinely new, and we could not be more excited to see where New School Foods goes next, especially now that their products carry MK Kosher certification.
Founded in Toronto by Chris Bryson, New School Foods set out to solve a problem that has quietly limited plant-based meat and seafood for years. Most alternative proteins on the market are made through extrusion, a process that has been around for over a century and tends to produce the same soft, uniform texture no matter what it is trying to imitate. Bryson, who previously built and sold the grocery e-commerce platform Unata to Instacart, noticed that startup after startup was reaching for the same playbook simply because it was fast and familiar, not because it produced a better product. New School Foods looked at that playbook and decided to write a new one entirely.
Rather than force a familiar process to do something it was never designed for, the company built a manufacturing platform from the ground up, one built specifically to recreate the texture of real meat and fish rather than approximate it. The company’s flagship product is a whole cut plant-based salmon fillet, and by every account it delivers on that ambition. It looks like salmon on the plate, with authentic color and marbling. It cooks like salmon in the pan, transforming visually from raw to cooked and working with any method, oven, pan, deep fry, grill, or sous vide. It tastes like salmon, carrying the same omega-3 content, DHA and EPA, as the real thing, without the mercury that comes with it. And it flakes apart at the fork exactly the way wild salmon does, a detail that has proven remarkably hard for the rest of the plant-based industry to crack.
At the heart of New School Foods’ technology is a patented scaffolding process, developed in collaboration with Toronto Metropolitan University, built around a technique called directional freezing. In simple terms, the process aligns plant based ingredients into parallel fibers that mimic the muscle structure of real fish and meat without denaturing the protein. A separate, precisely layered process builds the fat and connective tissue, tuned for texture, melting profile, and taste, so the finished product has the marbling and mouthfeel people actually expect rather than a uniform, extruded texture. The ingredient list stays refreshingly short in the process too, water, potato protein, algal and ahiflower oils, and a small list of natural flavors and colors, with no soy, no gluten, and nothing you cannot pronounce.
The company has grown quickly on the strength of that technology. New School Foods raised over $24 million CAD from a group of investors that includes Inter IKEA Group, Lever VC, Hatch, Good Startup, Blue Horizon Ventures, Clear Current Capital, NewTree Capital, and Protein Industries Canada, along with other federal support. That funding helped the company open a vertically integrated, SQF certified production facility on Dufferin Street in Toronto’s west end, where research and development, formulation, ingredient processing, and full scale manufacturing all happen under one roof. It is, by the company’s own description, the world’s first assembly line built specifically to run this kind of scaffolding process at scale.
New School Foods’ salmon is already served at close to thirty restaurants and venues across Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City, including Bar Avelo, Stefano’s, Joni at the Park Hyatt, ONE at the Hazelton Hotel, Vinoteca Pompette, Andore, Gia, Il Fornello, Hammerhead’s Seafood, and even the Toronto Zoo. The product now reaches the foodservice world at national scale through major distributors including Sysco, Gordon Food Service, and Bondi Produce, putting it within reach of restaurants and institutions well beyond the company’s home city. True to Bryson’s approach, the company has been deliberate rather than rushed about the next step of reaching grocery shelves, choosing instead to build credibility with chefs and diners first.
What makes this especially exciting from where we sit is what sits behind New School Foods itself. The company’s underlying technology now operates under a parent company, NS/TX Industries, short for New School Textures, which has taken the same scaffolding and directional freezing platform and extended it well beyond salmon. NS/TX’s platform has already been validated across beef and pork as well, with formats ranging from whole cut fillets and steaks to bone-in ribs, ground and mince products, and breaded and smoked formats, and the company has more species in active development, including tuna, chicken, and haddock.
NS/TX Industries works with partners in three distinct ways. Through white label manufacturing, brands can produce next-generation alt-protein products at scale inside NS/TX’s SQF certified facility without building their own production line. Through customized R&D partnerships, the company’s food scientists develop tailored formulations built around a partner’s specific species, format, and ingredient goals. And through New School Foods itself, the consumer facing brand, the platform gets tested and proven in the real world, on real menus, in front of real diners, before that technology is offered more broadly. It is a genuinely ambitious vision for the future of alternative proteins, built by a team that clearly understands both the science and the business of getting a new category of food onto people’s plates.
Having a company with this level of innovation choose to build its future under kosher certification is exactly the kind of partnership we love to be part of. For MK Kosher, welcoming a company like New School Foods reflects something we care about deeply, that kosher certification in Ontario should keep pace with the businesses shaping where food is headed, not just the businesses that have always been there. Toronto has become a genuine hub for food technology and alternative protein innovation, and MK Kosher is glad to be growing right alongside it.
Whether you are a longstanding food manufacturer or a company building something the industry has never quite seen before, MK Kosher is here to make kosher certification in Toronto and across Ontario a smooth, positive, and genuinely collaborative process. We believe certification should be a partner in growth, not an obstacle to it, and New School Foods is a perfect example of the kind of forward-thinking company we are proud to stand behind.
To New School Foods and the entire NS/TX Industries team, welcome to MK Kosher. We are excited to watch you grow, and proud to be part of the story.
