In today’s fast-paced foodservice world, delivering consistent, crave-worthy proteins across every location is a tall order—unless you have the right partner. That’s where Miniat comes in. As a custom meat manufacturer specializing in sous vide meat, we help some of the top 10 U.S. QSR restaurant chains develop fully-cooked, delicious proteins tailored to their exact needs.
Miniat acts as an extension of your culinary team, guiding you through a flexible, collaborative process that transforms your vision into a scalable, signature solution.
The Versatility of Sous Vide
A custom sous vide meat manufacturer like Miniat partners with foodservice brands to develop fully-cooked proteins customized to precise specifications. Unlike one-size-fits-all suppliers, Miniat’s consultative process—rooted in culinary R&D—helps companies achieve consistent flavor, food safety, and operational efficiency across all locations.
Whether a client arrives with a fully defined spec or just a rough idea, Miniat becomes an extension of their team, offering flexibility, innovation, and unparalleled customization from concept to final delivery.
Why Use Custom Proteins?
When consistency, scalability, and differentiation matter, custom proteins give foodservice brands a powerful edge. Custom proteins allow you to:
- Deliver brand-specific flavor at scale across all locations.
- Reduce waste and optimize portion control with precise specs.
- Speed up innovation cycles with early sampling and pilot testing.
Whether you’re launching a new menu item or enhancing a fan favorite, Miniat’s collaborative approach ensures your proteins align with both culinary and business goals.
What Can You Customize with Miniat?
Our customization process is designed to meet you where you are. We begin with a deep discovery phase—often following an NDA—where we reveal your goals, specs, and operational challenges. From there, our team develops and refines samples through iterative R&D until we land on a formula that’s just right.
The following are seven key areas of customization that we will collaborate with you to create your custom sous vide protein.
1. Raw Material Selection
During our initial consultation, we’ll identify the raw materials you need for your new product. Our primary product categories include:
- Chicken: Breast, Thigh, Leg, Wing, Bone-In, Boneless.
- Beef: Rib, Chuck, Round, Loin, Sirloin, Flank, Shank, Brisket, Bone-In, Bone-Out.
- Pork: Loin, Chop, Butt, Shoulder, Ribs, Belly, Bone-in, Bone-Out.
- Lamb: Shank, Rack, Loin, Leg, Shoulder.
- Turkey: Breast, Thigh, Leg, Bone-In, Boneless.
Miniat will negotiate raw material deals, schedule deliveries most efficiently, and proactively strategize to help you get the best price.
2. Trimming to Size
We know an extra eighth-inch of fat on a cut of meat can make or break a dish. We consult with you to understand how much fat content your product needs and how big your cuts of protein should be. Our team of expert butchers will then carve your raw materials to exact specifications.
3. Tenderization
While sous vide meat is always tender, we can employ a variety of tenderizing techniques to ensure your protein melts in your mouth. We can inject marinades into the muscle to guarantee full flavor penetration, or we can tumble the meat to ensure the juices of the marinade soak deep into the protein.
4. Flavor Enhancement
Miniat will develop a custom marinade or seasoning blend, working with an external spice company for more complex blends. If you have a specific flavor profile in mind, we can work with you to create a new blend from scratch based on your feedback or incorporate a recipe you’ve developed into our formulas. Additionally, cooking methods like oil and flame searing can add extra complexities to your proteins.
If you’re looking for cutting-edge flavors, we also work with consumer insight services and data platforms to bolster our flavor recommendations with real data and trends.
Once we feel we have enough information to adequately design a product that meets our standards, we will send samples back to you. We send these samples as early as possible to get your feedback to guide future iterations until we find the perfect formulation.
5. Cook Level
We’ll then help you identify how tender or “rare” you’d like your product to be. Our sous vide cooking approach creates meat that remains tender, juicy, and flavorful with an even doneness from edge to edge. This ensures you can serve the meat as is, serve it cold, or even add grill marks and maintain the premium flavor you expect from Miniat.
6. Further Value Add
If there are any other needs to further process the protein for your dish, we can make those accommodations. We can further process our fully-cooked proteins by dicing, slicing, or shredding before delivery. We can also include bases and sauces in the hermetically-sealed bags that the protein comes in, which can turn into a sauce or glaze for the meat.
7. Pack Size Options
We tailor your order size to the exact amounts you need. Regardless of order quantity, we have an in-house logistics team that can arrange delivery for customers across the United States, as well as offer pickups from our headquarters in South Holland, IL.
Your Partner in Custom Sous Vide Proteins
Miniat isn’t your average meat manufacturer—we’re a strategic partner for brands looking to scale flavor, consistency, and innovation. With a deep bench of culinary experts, advanced sous vide meat capabilities, and a personalized R&D process, we make sure every custom protein is crafted to your exact needs.
