Can this 19-year-old tech whiz make nuggets—and an animal-free lifestyle—go viral?
are breaking ground and building new markets for tasty plant-based burgers and brats that taste like the real thing, what can a scrappy startup like NUGGS bring to the table? According to Pasternak, while competing companies make pretty good products, they fall short at capturing the imagination and desires of most Americans, especially younger people.
The people Pasternak really wants as NUGGS customers are people he calls CMV — clean meat virgins. That is, people who have never tried an Impossible Burger or ever thought they wanted to. NUGGS is, well, different. Anthony Salazar, NUGGS’ head of engineering who helped develop the packaging, says he was going for the antithesis of “crunchy granola vegan” — no barns, no happy veggies, absolutely no green.
NUGGS’ social media presence, handled by Alex Michelle, 20, the company’s head of growth, is eye-catching and edgy. Recent Instagram posts have included a nugget in a condom wrapper and golden doodle puppies that resemble nuggets baking on a wire oven rack. Pasternak enthusiastically shows me a post that he says was “banned by Instagram”: an image of a nugget in a dime bag.
NUGGS users – the term seems more appropriate than consumers, somehow – are invited to submit their feedback via the web or Instagram. There is even a phone number, if you prefer to text. The NUGGS website includes already includes“I think when we’re on version 9.6, people will flex that they had, you know, 1.3,” Pasternak muses. “Weird flex, but okay.”
“The first run was like a nightmare,” Pasternak laughs. The flavor was all wrong, the nuggets were “sad little lumps,” the packaging – custom bags they had waited 12 weeks for — was “scary and deformed.” Their soft launch this May also caused problems, as an unexpected number of orders exceeded the supply they had on hand. But Pasternak assures me that they are now prepared for anything.
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