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Seth Tibbott, founder of Tofurky (and accomplished juggler?) delivers the keynote address at this year’s Maine Veg Fest on Oct. 26. Photo by Beth Lily Redwood Tofurky is a multimillion dollar, global business and a household name, even among folks who’ve never tried the plant-based meat.
But it didn’t start out that way. Courtesy of Maine Animal Coalition WHAT: 19th annual Maine Veg Fest, featuring food from the Totally Awesome Vegan Food Truck, The Greenhouse by SAO, Veggie Life, Tootie’s Tempeh, Midcoast Vegan, Shire’s Premium Plant-Based, Al’s Green Kitchen Macs and Maine Flavor. Demo on making tofu at home.
Speakers on making dairy-free cheese, animal sanctuaries, and more. WHEN: Saturday, Oct. 26, 11 a.
m.- 3 p.m.
WHERE: East End Community School, 195 North St., Portland MORE INFO: mainevegfest.com On Oct.
26, Tofurky founder Seth Tibbott comes to Portland as the keynote speaker at the 19th annual Maine Veg Fest, where he takes the stage at 1 p.m. to talk about how he, a self-described hippie living in a treehouse with no business experience, transformed $2,500 into a major brand sold in supermarkets around the world.
Tibbott will also talk about the history of plant-based meats and discuss “some of the new, exciting products” he’s tried at trade shows and other insider events that could show up in local supermarkets soon, he told me via Google Meet from his home office in Trout Lake, Oregon. He’ll focus on the story of the Tofurky company, where his stepson, Jaime Athos, now sits in the CEO’s seat. Today, Tofurky is sold in the original roast form, along with an array of deli slices, chicken pieces and sausages.
The tale begins in 1980 when Tibbott was a recent college grad, a wandering naturalist and a vegetarian who’d managed to save $2,500 through ultra-frugal living. While Tibbott lacked business acumen, he had something equally important: the ability to spot what’s missing. What he saw as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s was a hole on mainstream supermarket shelves now filled by plant-based meats.
Ronald Reagan had just beaten Jimmy Carter in the race for the White House. During Reagan’s presidency, many environmental education programs that employed young naturalists were defunded. Tibbott saw the writing on the wall, and he switched careers.
He founded Turtle Island Foods, which sold tempeh, later Tempehroni, and eventually launched Tofurky. Tofurky founder Seth Tibbott stands in front of the company’s first tempeh incubator, which was a refurbished commercial refrigerator, in 1980. Courtesy of Tofurky With hard work and dogged, stubborn persistence, Tibbott pushed through discouraging circumstances for more than a decade before he found success.
When the company began selling tempeh in 1980, most Americans had never heard of it. In the 1970s, Tibbott had visited the famous vegan commune The Farm in Tennessee, home to a soy dairy and a tempeh shop. He’d become convinced the traditional Indonesian soy cake would be the next big thing.
In particular, as he tells it, “the next granola,” which had made the leap from counterculture shops to mainstream grocery stores during the 1970s. Tempeh didn’t follow suit. “I started out with all this hope that tempeh’s going to be like granola,” Tibbott told me.
“Then after 10 years of struggle and living in a treehouse and everything, it seemed even less likely any product I had would blow up.” Tibbott, who enjoys a joke at his own expense, added, “Then I failed to get out of business. So I failed at that, too.
” Little did Tibbott know he was about to stumble upon his breakthrough product. Not long before Thanksgiving, 1994, Tibbott was reading the Sunday Oregonian newspaper, and noticed its funny pages were “filled with jokes about tofu and turkeys,” as he writes in his 2020 memoir “In Search of the Wild Tofurky.” The jokes were on the vegetarians, as usual, but the comics hinted at something stirring in the cultural zeitgeist.
The jokes were all circling around that hole on traditional grocery store shelves. Days later, Tibbott was at the Higher Taste vegetarian deli in Portland, Oregon, delivering tempeh when he noticed the business was taking orders for stuffed tofu roasts. A lightbulb went off.
Turtle Island soon joined forces with Higher Taste and when Thanksgiving 1995 rolled around, they were selling a reformulated roast they called Tofurky. The product was an instant success, with consumers, distributors and the mainstream media. Almost overnight Tofurky became a part of the national conversation.
All these years later, Tofurky continues to get a big spike in attention each year around Thanksgiving. In fact, the portmanteau of tofu and turkey had been trending for years by 1995. “The name Tofurkey was in the lexicon of natural foods,” Tibbott told me, recalling that he enjoyed Tofurkey sandwiches (spelled with an “e”) at a Portland, Oregon, cafe during the early 1980s (he checked with them before launching Tofurky).
In Maine, tofu maker Island Works Tofu was promoting its recipe for Tofurkey (also with an “e”) in 1980 as a way to increase tofu sales. Tibbott gravitated to the name Tofurkey, but all those around him thought it wasn’t serious enough and cautioned against it. Still, Tibbott sensed the potential of the goofy name that was fun to say and was already making inroads into the national vocabulary.
Once Turtle Island ditched the “e” and started selling the reformulated roasts, “The name really caught fire,” Tibbott told me. “For the first 10 years of the Tofurky brand’s life, it showed up in all the major U.S.
newspapers, on four Food Network episodes, on all the morning and late-night talk shows, in radio interviews, and on local and national nightly news broadcasts many times,” Tibbott writes in his memoir. “As impressive as that is, what made the brand such a cultural icon was all the times it showed up in the mouths of fictional characters.” Three decades later, the Tofurky talk continues.
Last Thanksgiving, The Washington Post profiled the company with a story titled, ”Inside the making of a Tofurky holiday roast,” and a New York Times story about Thanksgiving games supplied one where a question asked “What’s better: light meat, dark meat or Tofurky?” Ahead of Thanksgiving 2024, Tofurky is now an established part of the American Thanksgiving meal. A Tofurky roast. Courtesy of Tofurky Aunt Jean’s Slow Cooker Tofurky Roast with Cranberry Onion Sauce Seth Tibbott shared this simple family recipe which is how he likes to make a classic Tofurky roast.
He prefers chunky cranberry sauce in the recipe. 1 (1.9 ounce) package dry vegetarian onion soup mix 2 cups vegetable broth Garlic powder, to taste 1 (14-ounce) can cranberry sauce 1 Tofurky roast Empty the packet of soup mix into a slow cooker and add the vegetable broth and garlic powder.
Add the can of cranberry sauce, stirring to mix. Place the Tofurky in the center of the pot. Frozen Tofurky: Cook on high for about 3 hours turning and basting the roast with the sauce every half hour or so.
Thawed Tofurky: Cook on high for about 2 hours turning and basting the roast with the sauce every half hour or so. Slice the Tofurky thin and pour sauce on top to serve. Enjoy.
Avery Yale Kamila is a food writer who lives in Portland. She can be reached at avery.kamila@gmail.
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