Better Nature Raises £1.1M to Challenge Chicken With Its Supercharged Tempeh as No.1 UK Brand

August 5, 2025

Better Nature, the London-based tempeh brand, raised £1.1 million from angel investors in August 2025, with 70% of the round coming from existing shareholders — a strong signal of investor confidence at a time when the broader alternative protein category has been under significant funding pressure. The capital will fuel Better Nature’s largest-ever marketing campaign — a direct challenge to chicken’s dominance as the UK’s most widely consumed protein — as well as international expansion and product innovation. Better Nature was launched in 2019 by Elin Roberts, Chris Kong, Driando Ahnan-Winarno, and Fabio Rinaldo.

The plant-based protein market has had a turbulent few years. After the rapid growth of meat analogue products like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods created a surge in alternative protein investment, category sales have declined as consumers rejected highly processed products with long ingredient lists and questioned whether they were meaningfully healthier than the meat they replaced. In this context, tempeh — a whole-food fermented soybean product with roots in Indonesian food culture — occupies an unusual and increasingly favourable position. Unlike meat analogues, tempeh is minimally processed: it is made by fermenting soybeans with a beneficial mould culture, producing a dense, nutty, protein-rich cake that contains the soybean’s original fibre, vitamins, and the additional probiotics generated by fermentation. At 44g of protein per pack, Better Nature’s tempeh matches roughly 1.3 chicken breasts — with the addition of fibre, gut health benefits, and antioxidants.

Better Nature has positioned itself against chicken rather than as a general plant-based alternative, a strategic choice that reflects both the size of the addressable market and the genuinely functional equivalence of tempeh as a protein source in most cooking applications. The £3.2 billion UK chicken market is the largest meat category by volume in Britain, and the brand’s argument — that tempeh is a superior protein in terms of nutritional density, sustainability, and animal welfare, and is a practical substitute in any dish where chicken is used for its protein rather than its flavour — is substantiated rather than polemical. Co-CEO Elin Roberts and Chris Kong both appeared on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Europe 2025 list.

Better Nature’s commercial performance at the time of the raise was exceptional for the alternative protein category. The company recorded 128% year-on-year sales growth in Q2 2025, holds 38.1% of the UK tempeh market by volume, and is the sole tempeh brand in Asda with full-estate distribution. Its Organic Tempeh is the best-selling tempeh SKU in Tesco. Internationally, revenue in Germany grew 330% year-on-year in Q2 2025, making Better Nature the leading tempeh brand in that market, with recent expansion into Austria and two further markets in development.

The brand donates 1% of sales to a partner charity addressing malnutrition in Indonesia — the country whose culinary tradition gave the world the product at the centre of Better Nature’s mission. This structure reflects the co-founders’ conviction, articulated through Dr Driando Ahnan-Winarno’s Indonesian heritage and decades of scientific expertise in tempeh, that commercialising tempeh at scale should also benefit the communities that have stewarded the food tradition it comes from.

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