What you need to know about plant-based meat

Will people really want to buy it?

Exactly four years ago today I published a fun deep dive into the world of plant and cell-based meat alternatives. It was an exciting time to analyze - good and bad - the emergence and rapid advancement of companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. I knew the hype was real once I saw A&W and Burger King jumping into the fray.

Since then I’ve kept an eye on the market, ever curious to see how things continue to advance. Today seemed an ideal time to check in on matters. Let’s take a look.

Since this could get rather long, for today’s edition I’m going to focus strictly on plant-based meat. For Thursday, it’ll be cell-based.

Plant-based meat

“Attempts to create plant-based substitutes for meat have been around since the days of tofu: Companies like Beyond and Impossible are simply leveraging new research to make their products more like real meat than ever before. Specifically, much of Beyond Meat’s innovation is built on work conducted on pea proteins at the University of Missouri (along with a bit of beet juice to create a “bleeding” effect). Meanwhile, Impossible Foods was founded by a biologist, Patrick Brown, who attempts to unlock the power of heme in his burgers (that are otherwise made from things like wheat protein, coconut oil, potato protein). Heme is a component of animal blood that supposedly lends Impossible Burgers their meat-like characteristics.” — Mike Pomranz, Food & Wine Magazine

For starters, the two leaders of this market are still Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Not surprising at all. However, though they both continue to dominate this category, let’s just say circustances aren’t as rosy as they once were four years ago.

From Axios: (Feb 4th)

  • Impossible Foods plans to lay off roughly 20% of its workforce amid falling sales

  • Impossible's primary competitor, Beyond Meat, also cut roughly 20% of its workers, and lost several executives, amid its own stock slump.

  • Beyond Meat's sales fell more than 22% in the third quarter of 2022 compared to 2021. In an Q3 earnings call, company executives blamed inflation for consumers' souring tastes on pricier plant-based meats.

Despite this grim news, dozens of others are in this field. Local grocer Vegan Supply, located in Chinatown, showcases a handy list worth exploring.

What’s new

An intriguing upstart from Toronto, New School Foods, made headlines recently with their wild salmon. The company touts that it’s the “only plant-based salmon filet that looks, cooks, tastes, and flakes like wild salmon.”

Part of what many of these companies are looking to do is replicate the texture and feel of whole cuts. This is something both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods has had difficulty developing since they rely on a process called high-moisture extrusion, which effectively pre-cooks the protein prior to sale. This technique works well with ground meat that doesn't require a uniform texture but doesn’t perform with whole cuts like fish or steak.

If this industry is to grow beyond the simplicity scale of burgers and sausages, then real innovation is a must. As evidenced above, enthusiasm for plant-based meat alternatives has fallen considerably.

For New School Foods, their breakthrough stems from seeing things through a different lens.

“What New School Foods came up with is a proprietary muscle fiber and scaffolding platform for making whole-cut meat alternatives with the same colors, flavors, fats, texture, and mouthfeel of traditional fish.

Rather than a high-temperature method, its technology relies on a series of cold-based processes to create a product that starts off looking “raw,” and when cooked, flakes similar to traditional salmon.

“All these cold steps in our process can use off-the-shelf equipment from adjacent industries that use freezing but not for this purpose, and that’s really important because a lot of the stuff that’s trying to be an alternative to extrusion is pretty science fiction, and there’s no scaled up infrastructure,” CEO Christopher Bryson said. “When we’re talking about feeding the world in a relatively short period of time, by using off-the-shelf, scaled up equipment that does high volume, we can very quickly and reliably get to feeding a very large number of people.”

Using this company as one example, developing a new product is expensive and daunting, especially when there is often a litany of reasons for and against this sector.

Why is it important?

  • Analyses of the environmental impact of plant-based meat show that plant-based meat production uses 72-99 percent less water and 47-99 percent less land. Further, it causes 51-91 percent less water pollution and emits 30-90 percent less greenhouse gas emissions.

  • Plant-based meat production does not require any antibiotics. This helps address the broad overuse of antibiotics in meat production. According to the New York Times, between 70 and 80 percent of antibiotics sold are consumed by farm animals.

Jamie’s View

I first learned and became interested in this topic after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Eating Animals. In it, he discusses, in vivid detail mind you, the current food industrial complex.

The skinny: Current production levels of meat are a big problem; it’s inefficient, abusive, and expensive.

Science and business have taken a big step forward with plant-based meat towards finding a solution to our current food system problem. If you can replicate the sensation of eating meat at a fraction of the cost and environmental impact, then doing so seems only logical on a moral, but also, business level.

But how much should our health play a factor here?

There are ethical and environmental arguments regarding plant-based meat alternatives, but building a new way to eat meat, one less or not at all centered on eating dead animals, just for this reason alone, doesn’t negate what we’re eating instead.

A Beyond burger doesn’t give my body the best source of nutrients humans need. It’s high in sodium and has plenty of chemical binding agents my body has trouble processing. Cell-based options may eliminate some of these problems, but that answer remains to be seen. In the meantime, we’ve become a society hell-bent on replicating select foods for a good reason, all the while ignoring the main objective of why it is we eat in the first place. To nourish our bodies with optimal proteins, vitamins, and minerals. Recognizing this will play a role in the adoption and growth of this industry.

“At the category level, we’re seeing volumes for plant-based meats down 22 consecutive months now,” said John Baumgartner, a consumer food analyst at the financial institution Mizuho Americas.

The plant-based industry has certainly changed a lot in four years. Major players' operations believed growth would be exponential. But they quickly learned early adopters were their only customers with expectations that needed to be reigned in. Technological advancements have proven slow and will need further development and time.

Dig deeper: Business Essence recently published a listing of the 10 best plant-based meat companies.