This Vintage Brand Known For Canned Meat Alternatives Has Been Operating For More Than 120 Years

Store-bought prepared vegetarian and vegan foods may seem to be a thoroughly modern concept, but one company has been producing canned meat alternatives for well over a century. And its origins are tied to religion, a falling out with a famous medical doctor, and a city in Southern California. Loma Linda Foods is best known for its canned meat alternatives like vegetarian and vegan hot dogs, Tuno, a tuna alternative, and other faux meats, but it started out as a bakery for a Seventh-day Adventist-run health sanatorium in Loma Linda, California. One of the tenets of this Protestant offshoot involves vegetarianism and healthful living.

It started in 1905 as the Sanitarium Food Company after Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, of Corn Flakes fame (which he created as a digestive aid), broke with the Seventh-day Adventists. Kellogg's Battle Creek, Michigan, sanitarium had been producing health food, and with the break, its followers required a new source. The new company started out selling items like bread, crackers, and fruit cookies, made with whole grains. "The Loma Linda Bakery is a part of the Sanitarium idea or system of healthful living and rational cure of disease carried on at Loma Linda," declared a 1910 ad in the San Bernardino County Sun. "Pure food carefully prepared and well digested is one of the first requisites for continuous good health." By the 1930s, it had become Loma Linda Foods and began expanding into soy-based products.

Loma Linda Foods was ahead of its time with its vegetarian and vegan meat alternatives that the company was producing by the 1930s, such as Soy Mince Sandwich Spread. During World War II, when soy became a worldwide wartime staple, the company sold soy milk, tofu, which is made of coagulated soymilk, and even a soy-based coffee substitute.

Loma Linda Foods was owned by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, the church's governing body, until 1989, when the church sold its meat-alternative product line to Worthington Foods, a similar brand also associated with the Seventh-day Adventists. An Adventist doctor, George Harding III, started Worthington Foods in 1939. In a twist of fate, Loma Linda Foods — which launched after Dr. Kellogg's split with the church way back at the turn of the century — ended up under the Kellogg Company when it bought Worthington Foods in 1999.

Today, Loma Linda is still around and is owned by Century Pacific North America, a subsidiary of the Philippines-based company Century Pacific Foods, Inc., which purchased the brand in 2025. In its long life, Loma Linda went from a church-owned bakery to a trailblazing canned meat-alternative brand run by a giant Southeast Asian food company.