David W. Jones
Founder
Thrilling Foods

I have been a cook pretty much all my life. My commercial cooking experience was in college as a “Prep” in the kitchen of one of Bob Sikora’s Bobby McGees restaurants in Dallas, Texas. For a kid who loved and lived cooking so much that he made his first apple pie solo at the age of five, cooking such massive quantities was a new experience. I often had to prepare the restaurant’s recipes standing on a small ladder to get up high enough just like when I was five climbing onto a chair to reach the flour and sugar. On that ladder at McGees I stirred a giant soup cauldron with a canoe paddle. Forget about adjusting seasonings when the volume is so vast. The recipe had to be perfectly followed at that volume, no tweaking. This was not the kind of cooking I was used to and I swore that cooking for the masses was not going to be in my future.
Yet here I am in my sixties, attempting to provide a healthy and harm free, crispy, meaty bacon that will satisfy not only vegans and vegetarians, but more importantly, curious “flexitarians” and resolute meat eaters. This effort began back on a floating home in Portland, Oregon during Covid. My partner Marci is vegetarian, and I was a Texas born carnivore. In deference to her when we moved in together, I promised not to bring meat into the house. I thought it would be a great new cooking challenge, a way to eat healthier and with less harm to the planet and its inhabitants. It was going well enough except that of course, I soon began to miss bacon. I had mastered how to cure traditional pork bacon during an extended stay in Europe., so with a lot of time on my hands I figured all I needed was something meat-like to cure! After a lot of searching and researching I settled on tofu due to its historic record as a health food, and because soy protein contains all the amino acids a human requires.
After a year or so of learning to master the art of making tofu and then diverging from that tradition to learn what you can and cannot do as far as additives such as fat and flavors, I had a product I felt was worthy of salt and smoke curing. The first trial run of those properly cured tofu-like slabs I’d made convinced me that I was onto something. Once I ate a few strips my bacon cravings were completely satisfied. Soon neighbors I shared it with were wanting to buy it and a few local grocers got interested as well. Today, with my son in law Jared Hansen as CEO, we sell Thrilling Foods Bakon from Maine to Hawaii and struggle to keep up with growing demand from grocers, restaurants, and online sales. The happy ending here is that the world will eat a vegan bacon that reduces harm to them, to our environment, and our porcine friends if you can make it taste great.