Why cheap protein is hard to make

Open the menu at almost any North Indian restaurant and chaap is on the same page as paneer tikka and chicken tikka. Same marinade, same tandoor. So it has to earn its place against both, and for the kitchen buying it that comes down to cost. Gram for gram of protein, at November 2026 wholesale prices, our plain chaap rolls cost a buyer less than half as much as paneer or chicken breast. If they didn't, nobody would put chaap there. I went through the numbers behind that in what a gram of protein costs in India.

Western plant-based meat went the other way. It launched above the meat it was copying and stayed there. In 2025, US shelf prices were still about 76% above conventional meat per pound, and US sales fell 10% that year, according to GFI's 2026 State of the Industry report. Beyond Meat's revenue went from $464.7 million in 2021 to $275.5 million in 2025, and its own annual report lists premium pricing against animal protein as a reason shoppers trade down to cheaper protein. Europe is more mixed and global sales still grew, so I wouldn't call it a failure. But in the US it has stalled, and price is a big part of why.

Chaap never had that choice. It has long sold below meat. So the question for us was never how to bring the price down after launch. Once we dropped the Western playbook, the price was fixed before we built the chaap line, and the job was to make something good enough under it.

Here's the bit that surprised me. A firm, chewy protein is actually the easier thing to make. Push it dense and it holds together, slices clean, survives whatever you do to it. Chaap can't be that. It has to be soft and juicy, soak up a marinade overnight, take a sear in about a minute on a hot tawa or in the tandoor, and then sit in a gravy without falling apart or turning rubbery. Kitchens notice every one of those things, and a cook who gets a bad batch tells the owner that same evening.

Now do all of it at a price below paneer. That rules out the easy fixes, imported isolates and the like, and leaves you with commodity ingredients wherever possible and a process that has to do the work those expensive inputs would have done. Ours is maida-free and more than half soya on a dry basis. A plain roll comes in at about 20 g of protein, about 6.6 g of fibre and under half a gram of fat per 100 g. Getting those numbers and the softness into the same product, the same way every week, took us years.

Market chaap is wrapped by hand onto a stick, and a good roller is genuinely skilled at it. Hand work grows one person at a time. A line grows by repeating the same design. Ours starts as a fibrous sheet off the high-moisture extruder, and a line we built in-house cuts it, rolls it continuously and glues it so the roll holds without a stick. Two granted patents cover that: #568286 for slicing and rolling high-moisture protein sheets into chaap rolls, granted in 2025, and #597337 for the continuous rolling and gluing process, granted in 2026. How that line came together is in why we took the stick out.

Why go to the trouble? Because the customer who grows chaap is a QSR chain, and a chain needs the tikka at its hundredth outlet to look and cook like the one in the kitchen where the menu was written. Same diameter, same bite, same cook time, so the SOP on the wall actually works.

We started building the high-moisture extrusion side in 2022. Rudrapur opened in 2023, and in 2026 we added a retort line so the same chaap can go into pouches and cans. Written down like that it looks tidy. It wasn't. Everything took longer than I planned, the rolling especially, where the early rolls wouldn't hold their shape and we ended up building our own machines because nothing we could buy would handle a sheet that soft.

It isn't a cheap kind of plant either. GFI's public model puts a two-line high-moisture extrusion plant (2022 model) at about $18 million. That's their model, not our spend. GFI India has also written about how few manufacturing-scale extruders the country has. Money gets you the machine. It doesn't get you a chaap a tandoor cook will accept, and that part is years of trials.

Walk any North Indian market and you'll find chaap, at the stall, at the dhaba, at the chain down the road. It is largely unbranded. It doesn't even show up in the numbers: the 2025 Ipsos report for the Plant Based Foods Industry Association put India's plant-based food market at about Rs 300 crore and left chaap and soya chunks out. Paneer is at a similar stage: packaged brands are still a small slice of what's sold. Most chaap is made by small local units and sold loose. The brands that want to package it need someone who can make it to a spec, every week.

A brand also has to get that chaap to kitchens far from the plant, and that is where shelf life helps. Our frozen chaap lasts 18 months, and the canned one skips the cold chain entirely, which counts for a lot in towns where cold chain is patchy. We make for 30+ brands across our lines already. The basic facts about the company sit on one page.

None of this is glamorous. Chaap has to cost less than paneer and chicken on the menu, and that turned out to be the hardest thing we make. When the price is fixed, the difficulty moves into the factory. That's where we've spent the years since 2022.