Pulling the Pork

By David Menconi

In 2017, Lee Cooper ’85 wasn’t looking for new challenges. An engineer by trade, he’d just sold Valworx, an industrial valve-manufacturing company he had founded. He was still decompressing from that.

But it was around then that Cooper, 58, a vegetarian for more than 30 years, noticed that plant-based meat equivalents were skyrocketing in popularity. Since he lived in Cornelius, N.C., smack dab in the middle of America’s barbecue belt, Cooper had a lightbulb moment: plant-based barbecue.

There was a lot of tinkering, trial and error, months and months of it.

Thus was born Barvecue, a vegetarian variation on down-home Southern food. Made from whole soybeans and textured wheat protein with sweet potatoes, apple cider vinegar, canola oil, nutritional yeast, spices, tomato puree, molasses and brown sugar — all non-GMO, and wood-smoked — Barvecue is designed to appeal beyond vegetarians and vegans to omnivores, carnivores and “flexitarians” who want to dabble in lighter meat alternatives.

Cooper runs the business side of the operation as chief executive officer. His partner Zac Werner, a vegan chef, handles the cooking.

“There was a lot of tinkering, trial and error, months and months of it,” Cooper says. “We’re now on our third major version. We started out just in Zac’s kitchen and then bought a facility and upfit it for this.”

Barvecue’s sauce is tomato-based, and there is a naked version if you want to use a different sauce. There’s also a gluten-free option. The product launched in 2018 and things have gone well enough that the company moved into a bigger production facility in summer 2021.

As production scales up, Barvecue is expanding into retail outlets and grocery stores, some as far away as Vancouver, British Columbia. It also sells online through its own website (barvecue.com) and other retailers. Helping that growth is the impressive amounts of capital Cooper has been able to raise from investors, more than $3 million.

“Our tagline is ‘Barvecue For Everyone,’ and we want to create a great-tasting, great-textured product for people beyond just vegetarians,” Cooper says. “I would encourage everyone to give it a try.”