Founder · Operator · Plant-Based Pioneer
Kerry Song
She quit finance, read one ingredient label too many, and built the cleanest plant-based meat on the shelf.
Kerry Song, in the kitchen she reverse-engineered
She quit finance, read one ingredient label too many, and built the cleanest plant-based meat on the shelf.
Kerry Song runs a plant-based meat company out of Costa Mesa, California, and she will tell you the whole thing started with a grocery aisle that disappointed her. She wanted a veggie burger she could feel good about. What she found instead were ingredient lists that read like chemistry sets: gums, synthetic flavors, fillers she couldn't pronounce. So in 2017 she decided to make the thing she couldn't buy.
That company is Abbot's, originally Abbot's Butcher. The pitch is almost stubbornly simple. No gluten. No soy. No gums. No artificial or "natural" flavors. No preservatives. Just chorizo, savory "beef," and slow-roasted "chick'n" built from plants and a short list of things you'd recognize in your own pantry. It is, as of this writing, the only plant-based meat to earn the Whole30 Approved stamp - a program famous for rejecting almost everything.
Today the brand sits on shelves in thousands of retailers, Sprouts and Publix and Target among them. It did not start there. It started at a farmers market in Venice, with Song handing samples across a folding table and watching faces.
Watching faces is, in a sense, the whole job. A plant-based product does not get a second chance with a skeptic. The first bite either changes someone's mind about what a meatless taco can be, or it confirms every low expectation they walked up with. Song built the company for that single moment of doubt, and decided early that taste, not virtue, would be the thing that won it.
Song's resume does not move in a straight line, and that seems to be the point. She studied economics at Princeton. She worked in finance at Morgan Stanley and Citigroup, the kind of jobs that look like a destination rather than a detour. Somewhere in there she went to Tanzania and helped run a grassroots HIV/AIDS prevention campaign. Then she spent five years as a brand strategist for Tony Robbins, learning how stories move people and how people change their habits.
Each of those chapters left fingerprints on Abbot's. The finance years gave her the discipline to scale a physical product without lighting cash on fire. The Robbins years taught her that a brand is a promise people make to themselves. And the Tanzania work hints at a person who tends to go looking for something bigger than the next quarter.
She has been plant-based since her college days, drawn first by a deep compassion for animals. But compassion and chemistry are different problems. When she finally sat down to build a product, she ran into the obstacle every food founder hits: a recipe that tastes incredible in a test kitchen can fall apart the moment you try to make it at scale without the usual stabilizers and gums.
Song refused the shortcut. She wanted craftsmanship in a category that had mostly settled for convincing. Getting the texture of chorizo right, with clean ingredients and no chemical crutches, became the technical heart of the company. It is the reason the products taste the way they do, and the reason they took as long as they did.
I wanted to bring craftsmanship to the plant-based protein category.
The name is a small piece of Los Angeles geography. Abbot Kinney was the conservationist and developer who dreamed up Venice, California, canals and all, and his name now marks one of the city's most famous streets. Song lived nearby. So Abbot's became a double nod: to her Venice home, and to a man who built something idealistic and a little improbable on the edge of the Pacific.
In January 2024 she trimmed the name. "Abbot's Butcher" became simply "Abbot's." New packaging, a louder focus on wellness and education, a "food as medicine" framing. The recipes, she was careful to say, did not change. The chorizo you liked is still the chorizo.
To win an early account she walked into Mother's Markets' corporate office in person rather than wait for a callback. Scrappy beats patient.
"Our customers are the ones changing the world," she says. "We are just part of their journey." The founder as supporting cast.
"Growth without being thoughtful about the way you are growing is only going to set you up for greater challenges ahead."
Most of what makes Abbot's distinctive is subtraction. Song built the brand around the things she took out, and the texture she refused to compromise to do it.
Song calls herself an INTJ, and the rest of her routine reads like one. She runs almost every morning, treats the ritual as stress relief as much as exercise, and ends most evenings with family, a corgi, and a bowl of coconut cream sorbet. Lofi hip hop somewhere in the background. Avocado on brown rice crackers with flake salt when she needs a snack. Hot sauce on most things.
She does not pretend to clock out. "My work and my personal life are wholly integrated," she has said, and given that her lunch is usually a salad built on her own product, she means it literally. The integration is not a slogan. It is what the days actually look like.
What carries through every version of the story - finance, Tanzania, Robbins, the farmers market, the Costa Mesa office - is a person who would rather make the thing than complain about its absence. The grocery aisle let her down. She built the shelf she wanted. The rest is texture.
The 2024 rebrand pointed the company somewhere broader than the freezer case. Song talks now about "food as medicine," about education and wellness content sitting alongside the products. The ambition is to make Abbot's a household staple, the default rather than the alternative.
Her own framing keeps the bar honest. The goal, she says, is to prove that food can be both healing and delicious - that you do not have to pick. For a brand whose entire identity is built on refusing to compromise, it is a fitting place to be headed.
It is also a quietly contrarian bet. Plenty of plant-based brands chased scale by mimicking the bleeding burger and leaning on lab-built precision. Song went the other direction, toward fewer ingredients and slower growth, trusting that a category obsessed with imitation would eventually reward the company that simply made good food. Whether the broader market agrees is the story still being written, one shelf at a time.