Beyond Meat, a plant-based food company, surges 163 percent after IPO

California-based Beyond Meat skyrocketed in first-day trading, chalking up one of the best market debuts in an IPO-heavy year.
The maker of plant-based beef and pork substitutes opened Thursday on the Nasdaq stock market at $46, after pricing its shares at $25. The stock closed at $65.75, a premium of 163 percent.
Beyond Meat represents a food version of alternative energy, with traditional meat companies such as Tyson Foods hedging its bets as consumer demand grows for more healthful, plant-based alternatives to meat protein. Beyond Meat generated nearly $88 million in revenue last year, more than twice its 2017 output, but it has yet to turn a profit. It has lost roughly $30 million in the past two years.
The company intends to use the more than $240 million raised in the IPO to invest in manufacturing, expand research and development, and bolster marketing.
“From the Wall Street standpoint, it’s all about this really fast growth that is going to translate to strong profitability in the next several years,” said Kathleen Smith, a principal at Renaissance Capital. She attributed the robust demand for the stock to the disruptive nature of the company’s focused product line and the advantage of going public before any other competitor.
The Beyond Meat Burger debuted in October 2016 in the meat section at 51 Whole Foods Markets stretching from Pennsylvania to Ohio, south to Kentucky and east to Maryland and the District of Columbia. Founded by Washington-area native Ethan Brown, the company has such big name-investors as Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Seth Goldman, the creator of Honest Tea and the executive chairman of Beyond Meat.
The products are targeted to both vegans and those trying to reduce their meat intake, giving the company a unique position within the $1.4 trillion meat industry. Pea protein is the main ingredient of Beyond Meat products, which are designed to replicate the taste and texture of animal-based foods.
“We are focused on continually improving our products so that they are, to the human sensory system, indistinguishable from their animal-based counterparts,” the company said in a recent filing with the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Its foods are sold at about 30,000 locations, mostly in the United States and Canada.
The company says it is tapping into broader public awareness about personal health, animal welfare, climate change and environmental conservation. But its reliance on pea protein is seen as a risk factor. Beyond Meat depends on a limited number of raw material suppliers, according to the SEC filing, which could hurt the business if those partners’ operations are delayed or disrupted. Intense market competition, a failure to develop new products and to expand its list of customers are also included among Beyond Meat’s business risks.
Later this year, the world’s largest meat producer, Tyson, is expected to release a line of animal-free products. Beyond Meat also faces competition from other plant-based companies like Impossible Foods, which is partnering with Burger King, and those developing meat products from animal cells, like Memphis Meats.
Goldman, 53, the executive chairman of the Beyond Meat board of directors, owned a 2 percent stake in the company going into Thursday’s public offering. He is still involved in Honest Tea, which he sold to Coca Cola in 2011. “I bet on this really early,” he said, “when it was doing less than $1 million in annual sales.”
Goldman, whose family has been vegetarian for years, invested in the company in 2012 after his wife read an article about Beyond Meat.
“I sent an email to info@beyondmeat.com, and I said I loved the idea of transforming the meat case into the plants protein case in the grocery,” he said.
Goldman, who lives in Chevy Chase, Md., said the company’s investors include a wide range of professional athletes, business people and celebrities: Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams; former McDonald’s chief executive Don Thompson; actor Leonardo DiCaprio; rapper-actor Snoop Dogg; NBA stars Kyrie Irving and Chris Paul; NFL wide receiver Deandre Hopkins; and free climber Alex Honnold, star of the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo.”
Goldman said guidance for sales for the first quarter of 2019 were around $40 million, triple the same quarter last year.
“We are entering into a commodity category, the largest in food, which is meat,” Goldman said. “We are bringing a proprietary branded offering to the largest category of food. It’s a category that hasn’t seen any innovation in decades.”
The company is one in a line of high-profile IPOs this year, including Lyft, Pinterest and Slack. Offerings are expected this year from Uber and Airbnb, among others.


How have plant-based foods been re-branded and positioned for mainstream grocery stores?

Several factors have contributed to the current plant-based trend, formerly vegan. Among them are the rise in wellness culture, scientific findings of increased cancers from eating too much red and processed meats, environmental concerns, and marketing tools used by the vegan community. Concern for the future of world's food supply and the impact of climate change are other factors which have contributed to the plant-based trend. Only documents related to plant-based products are relevant.

Research the reasons behind a specific dietary trend for this question.

What’s in a name? The battle over alternative meat, milk and rice labeling rages on.

Rice Dairy Meat Correction: A previous version of this story said that the Missouri lawsuit was settled, as per a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report. The lawsuit is in the process of being settled. More from Voraciously: These ‘eggs’ are made from mung beans. Could they pass for the real thing? Sorry, vegans. If you don’t eat honey, avocados might be off-limits, too.

If you’ve had any “almond drink” lately, you might have noticed that there’s a semantics battle happening among America’s food producers, politicians and public. At its heart are the questions: How should we label products that imitate other products? Who has the right to use certain words? What do those words truly mean?
Culinary innovation and the lightening of the American diet has given us an abundance of options. If we’re cutting carbohydrates, we can have cauliflower rice instead of regular rice. Folks with dairy allergies can opt for soy milk instead of dairy milk. And vegans and vegetarians — as well as people trying to scale back their meat consumption for health or the environment — have been delighted by the arrival of plant-based burgers that more closely replicate meat than veggie burgers.
But legislation around the country and world aims to block newcomers from being able to use some of those words to describe their products. It’s all in service of reducing consumer confusion and protecting their businesses, say proponents of the milk and meat industries — and recently, the rice industry has joined the fight. The people who make and advocate for plant-based meats and milks, and veggie-based rices, counter that consumers aren’t buying these products because they’re confused and think they’re something else; they’re buying them because they know the products are alternatives, and these consumers want them.
Here’s a briefing on the latest in the linguistic fight for your dinner plate.
Rice
Non-rice “rices” have proliferated in recent years, thanks to the Paleo diet, which popularized cauliflower rice. Other vegetables soon followed: Now, if you walk down the frozen aisle of a grocery store, you can buy rices made of broccoli, sweet potato, beets and butternut squash. A new form of alternative rices has popped up in recent months, too: Legume and chickpea rices are a high-protein alternative rice, from the companies Banza and RightRice. They’re made in a similar manner as chickpea pasta but cut to be rice-shaped — so they’re very similar to orzo.
But in Arkansas, beginning in August, these products can no longer be called “rice.” Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed a bill last month that aims to protect the state’s meat and rice producers. Most of America’s domestically grown rice comes from Arkansas, and producers fear that rice alternatives will harm their businesses.
“This law only affects people who want to deceive the public about how their food originated,” Arkansas state Rep. David Hillman, who introduced the legislation, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. “And if you’re not trying to deceive the public, this will not affect you or any of the outlets who sell these products.”
However, “ricing” is also a verb — “to reduce to a form resembling rice” — and the products are permitted to be labeled in this way. So Arkansans won’t be buying cauliflower rice, but they can purchase “riced cauliflower.” Many large companies, such as Green Giant, already label their vegetable rices this way. Manufacturers selling “cauliflower rice” after the deadline will be fined $1,000 for each mislabeled product. Restaurant labeling was not included in the bill.
Dairy
The dairy industry has long fought against plant-based beverage producers calling their drinks “milk.” As the number of alternative milks continues to proliferate — beyond soy and almond, we’re now seeing oat, hemp, flax, pea, hazelnut, buckwheat, tiger nut and peanut milk — more states have adopted “truth in labeling” requirements that prevent these products from calling themselves milk. Last month, Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) and James E. Risch (R-Idaho) reintroduced labeling legislation called the Dairy Pride Act, which failed to advance in 2017. A common slogan among supporters of these bills: “Almonds don’t lactate.” But producers of nondairy milks say that customers know the difference between dairy and nondairy products. Nondairy milk sales increased 61 percent between 2012 and 2017.
Louisiana is considering such a bill. Shreveport, La.’s KSLA News reported that the state used to have more than 1,000 dairies, but there are now fewer than 100. “If we don’t protect our industry, we won’t have an industry to protect,” Louisiana state Sen. Francis Thompson told the station.
The Maryland Senate recently gave its approval for the state to join North Carolina in a compact to enforce nondairy labeling standards. The legislation still needs to be approved by the governor and House of Delegates — and even then, it won’t be enforceable until other states sign on.
Proposed dairy labeling legislation is “good old-fashioned protectionism,” wrote Paul Shapiro, the author of “Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World,” in an opinion piece for The Post.
Meat
Meat producers aren’t too happy with the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger. The two plant-based burgers are famous for how well they can substitute for meat — they even “bleed” thanks to ingredients such as beets, which replicate the color of a burger’s juices. But industry lobbyists are ramping up their efforts to prevent these companies from being able to use the word “burger.” Last year, Missouri passed a law that penalizes companies that label plant-based products with certain animal meat descriptions, such as “ground beef style,” with fines or jail time. Vegetarian protein companies sued the state, and the lawsuit is in the process of being settled. In February, the New York Times reported that “beef and farming industry groups have persuaded legislators in more than a dozen states to introduce laws that would make it illegal to use the word meat to describe burgers and sausages that are created from plant-based ingredients or are grown in labs.”
“Five or 10 years from now, fake meat will have a product that is viable from a cost standpoint,” Kevin Kester, the former president of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, told The Post. “We have to make sure that everyone plays by the same rules.”
It’s not just an American thing. Last week, a committee in the European Parliament passed an amendment prohibiting plant-based products from being labeled as steak, sausage, escalope, burger and hamburger. The measure will be voted on by the full Parliament after its elections, before being put to member states and the European Commission, the Guardian reports. The measure was opposed by environmental groups, who feared it could discourage plant-based eating.
“We felt that steak should be kept for real steak with meat and come up with a new moniker for all these new products. There is a lot to be done in this front, a lot of creativity will be needed,” Eric Andrieu, a French member of the European Parliament, told the Guardian.
It’s led to a lot of jokes this week about what plant-based burgers in Europe will be called. “Veggie discs” has become the running gag, and it does have a certain ring to it.
Correction: A previous version of this story said that the Missouri lawsuit was settled, as per a St. Louis Post-Dispatch report. The lawsuit is in the process of being settled.
More from Voraciously:
These ‘eggs’ are made from mung beans. Could they pass for the real thing?
Sorry, vegans. If you don’t eat honey, avocados might be off-limits, too.


Inside the little-known world of flavorists, who are trying to make plant-based meat taste like the real thing

CRANBURY, N.J. — Marie Wright dips four long strips of paper, the kind you’d sniff a perfume sample from in Sephora, into bottles of clear liquid marked Methyl Cinnamate, Ethyl Butyrate, y-decalactone and Furaneol. She holds the four strips together and wafts them, fanlike, under her nose. Suddenly, the lab smells of strawberries.
Wright is the vice president and chief global flavorist for Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world’s largest food processors and suppliers. She’s a former French perfume industry chemist who has created more than 1,000 individual flavors for major food and beverage companies, and she’s now facing one of the biggest challenges of her career.
Consumers are seduced and beguiled by flavorists without even being aware of it. Flavorists are the people who tinker with nacho cheese dust, Hot Pockets and pumpkin spice lattes. They are the tastemakers, driving consumer trends and making food craveable.
Wright and the planet’s 200 or so other flavorists are bringing their alchemy to plant-based meat. It’s the biggest craze the food industry has seen in a long time, driven by concerns about climate change, animal welfare and human health. It is still dwarfed by the $49 billion beef industry; however, the Swiss investment firm UBS predicts growth of plant-based protein and meat alternatives will increase from $4.6 billion in 2018 to $85 billion by 2030.
Despite its swift ascent, plant-based meat is the antithesis of recent trends such as local and farm-to-table dining, representing an embrace of highly processed foods made palatable in a laboratory by technicians such as Wright.
“These are great proteins from a nutritional perspective, but plant-based presents some challenges with tastes that can be unpleasant,” Wright says.
First, there is the masking of the vegetal “green” notes in pea protein and the “beany” notes in soy, often by adding other ingredients and chemicals.
“There isn’t one magic bullet, not one molecule or extract. It tends to be common pantry items like salt, spices, molasses, honey,” Wright says. Vanilla extract is often used for masking because it is known for how it binds to a protein, rendering its own distinctive taste undetectable.
“It sacrifices itself,” she says.
She describes vegetal notes that are more about aromatics. The goal is not to remove these aromas, but to prevent them from being perceived.
“Smell and taste are closely linked in the appreciation of flavor but are independently triggered,” she says. “Taste is composed of the taste sensations perceived in the mouth and odor compounds perceived by the receptors in the nose linked to the olfactory lobe.”
Then comes the insertion of the mineral, musky, charry, “umami” flavors that we associate with meat.
Wright huddles with fellow flavorist Ken Kraut, who works only on the savory side. They swirl little plastic cups of clear liquid, sniffing and tasting. Too yeasty, they say. They want a little less soy and a bit more umami — that elusive, savory monosodium glutamate flavor. Mushrooms provide that, as does Japanese green tea. Meat’s mineralized note can be mimicked by concentrated extracts of broccoli and spinach.
They’ve got a deadline. A big client is coming in the following week to test blended veggie-chicken meatballs, a plant-based burger and a few other proprietary products. Everyone is launching a plant-based burger these days, and as quickly as possible.
“They want to do it in anywhere from six weeks to three months — there’s an urgency, a panic,” Wright says. “Usually, a product is a year to 18 months to complete."
Wright says an ordinary product — a snack bar or a protein drink — might cost a client $10,000 to $200,000 to have ADM formulate a recipe, which the company can then produce in its own processing facilities. Plant-based meat is different.
“This whole area is expensive because it’s fairly high-tech, with a lot of dollars involved in research,” she says. “Something like this, you’re talking $100,000 to $1 million.”
There’s a lot of heavy lifting that goes into making vegan sea urchins out of soy and vegetable oils or sausage links out of lupin beans, a yellow and occasionally bitter legume. The world is agog at plant-based meats that taste uncannily like the real thing, but nutritionists warn that if companies increasingly rely on chemists to insert desirable flavors into food, consumers might temper their enthusiasm for this new raft of better-living-through-science processed foods.
With their pea protein isolates, their gum arabic and yeast extracts, these new foods are the opposite of whole foods, the obverse of transparent sourcing. Some nutritionists and food industry leaders are wondering if the food system is being led astray by foods that need their flavor and appeal inserted industrially.
“It doesn’t resemble the foods from which it came; it has a vast number of ingredients. It fully meets the definition of ultra-processed food,” says Marion Nestle, author and nutrition professor at New York University, about these new plant-based meats. “Are flavorists complicit? They always have been. These are industrially produced food to which flavors and textures and colors are added so it’s attractive. What they do is cosmetics.”
Back at the lab, Wright and the team nudge the burger formula, trying to achieve the aroma and flavors resulting from the Maillard reaction, a chemical process between amino acids and sugars as they reduce that gives caramelizing meat its distinctive seared flavor.
They dry liquids in a spray dryer, tiny droplets sent through a hot chamber in a stainless-steel box, the water driven off to produce powders. They consider the protein, the flavorings and the binders, looking for a mineral, bloody note and seeking appealing top notes that mimic seared sirloin. They go beyond sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness and umami, reaching for a lesser-known “sixth taste” sensation that the Japanese call kokumi, which translates as something like “heartiness” or “mouthfulness.”
Then they take their thoughts into the kitchen.
John Stephanian, ADM’s culinary director, went to culinary school but considers himself a culinologist, where the culinary arts and the science of food meet. He’s plating the plant-based burgers as the flavorists arrive, deep ruddy patties with charry grill marks, tucked onto glossy brioche buns with delicate Parmesan crisps. Wright tastes, appraising. How is the chew? Is it meaty enough?
***
Wright grew up east of London and studied chemistry at King’s College London. She worked in Europe for years, moved to New Jersey and commuted back and forth to South America to set up flavor labs. Salaries for flavorists vary widely, she says, from $50,000 to $500,000. Flavorist is a mentoring profession, with trainees spending years as underlings in places such as ADM’s Academy of Future Flavorists program. It takes seven to 10 years to achieve flavorist status, and 20 to be a senior flavorist, Wright says.
“Learning the materials takes three to four years. Like being a pianist, you have to practice. A trainee may do 20 to 30 versions of a flavor,” she says.
Flavorists work with beakers and magnetic stir bars. They work with gas chromatography mass spectrometry instruments that separate chemical mixtures and identify the components at a molecular level. They paint their pictures with essential oils, resinoids, concretes and absolutes, the building blocks of fragrance and flavor. But mostly, they use their noses and skills of prognostication.
Designing an average of 300 new products a year, flavorists have tens of millions of dollars riding on their senses and gut instincts about the next big thing in the food industry.
“There are so many influences from all over the world. If you’re going to hang your hat on a flavor for next year, you may be wrong,” Wright says.
It’s about reverse engineering, listening to clients’ visions while tracking trends and predicting consumer fetishes and preoccupations.
“Consumers are driving trends. Trends only used to come from high-end restaurants. Now, a lot of trends are coming from street foods,” she says. “The consumer has changed. They’re saying, ‘I’m not going to eat that, and I have a say.’ ”
She points to smaller food companies such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, which have pushed food giants such as Cargill, Tyson Foods, Kellogg and Smithfield Foods into a headlong race to produce signature plant-based meats.
Before the day is over, Wright checks in with a flavorist working on an energy bar flavored with salted caramel, then with a team in the mint lab working on a gum that both cools and tingles. She tastes a nitro coffee, deciding whether it should be flavored with Madagascar or Ugandan vanilla — the former classic and beany, the latter sweeter with a hint of milk chocolate.
And about that burger. Nondisclosure agreements prevent her from naming the company behind this plant-based burger, but the meeting is a success, the company’s team staying for two days to hash out the details.
“They liked aspects of it, and they also wanted some changes in the fat delivery. They wanted a bit more of that bloody, minerally note and more of that seared taste, as well as that melty quality you get with animal fat,” Wright says.
“A few years ago, they didn’t have to taste so fantastic, but now we can really replicate a meat product without meat," she says.
Clients often provide nutritional and price guidelines, with the ADM team working within constraints such as calorie counts or projected retail cost. Once the formulation has been approved, the client gets the recipe, frequently having it produced and packaged by a co-manufacturing facility. Wright and her group don’t produce the finished, packaged product. They invent the formula.
With food technology and the culinary zeitgeist moving so swiftly, predicting what will resonate with consumers is tricky — even with Wright’s expanding toolbox of ingredients and food technologies.
“It’s a huge area of investment,” Wright says. “If it doesn’t taste delicious, people are not going to buy it.”


In a crowded field of big-name IPOs, Beyond Meat emerges as the surprise MVP

As investors eagerly watched a crowd of tech unicorns rush toward initial public offerings this year, few could have predicted that A-list brands such as Uber and Lyft would be eclipsed by a company that makes mock meat out of peas.
Beyond Meat, whose plant-based versions of beef and pork can be found at Whole Foods Markets and T.G.I. Friday’s, has seen its stock shoot up 250 percent since its Nasdaq opener on May 2. Its rise is all the more stunning against the turbulence that has gripped U.S. markets for weeks. By comparison, the two ride-hailing companies — the most anticipated debuts of the year — have lost billions in valuation since their launches. Uber stock is down nearly 12 percent since its May 10 debut, and Lyft is off 22 percent since March 29.
Now, nearly a month after its market debut, Beyond Meat is valued at $5 billion, and analysts seem to think this is just the start.
“Beyond Meat is a true disrupter and innovator,” JPMorgan Chase analyst Ken Goldman wrote in a note to investors this week. “We think plant-based meat can exceed $100 billion in sales in 15 years, with Beyond taking 5 percent.”
Founded in 2009 by vegan and Washington-area native Ethan Brown, Beyond Meat strives to make products that are “indistinguishable from their animal-based counterparts,” according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But its appeal is about more than just creating a believable meat substitute, the company says. Beyond Meat is positioning itself as an ethical alternative for the climate-concerned and health-conscious in the $1.4 trillion meat industry.
Though skeptics question whether mass-market demand for fake meat can be sustained, the projections are optimistic: Barclays recently predicted meat alternatives could capture as much as 10 percent of the global protein market. The appetite is strongest in Europe, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of global sales for plant-based meats in 2017, according to Allied Market Research.
“By eating our plant-based meats, consumers can enjoy more, not less, of their favorite meals, and by doing so, help address concerns related to human health, climate change, resource conservation and animal welfare,” the company said in its SEC filing. “The success of our breakthrough innovation model and products has allowed us to appeal to a broad range of consumers, including those who typically eat animal-based meats.”
A possible partnership with McDonald’s could catapult Beyond Meat further. The fast-food chain is looking to include a vegan burger on its menu, and its chief executive, Steve Easterbrook, told CNBC on Wednesday that McDonald’s is already testing meat alternatives in Europe. Beyond Meat’s stock spiked 13.4 percent after his comments, closing at $97.50 that day.
Jefferies analysts told investors this week that Beyond Meat is well-positioned to partner with McDonald’s and that a deal could boost its stock price by as much as 30 percent.
Goldman, the JPMorgan analyst, expects Beyond Meat to sign up with a major fast-food chain by year’s end. He noted that Don Thompson, former chief executive of McDonald’s, now sits on Beyond Meat’s board.
The Beyond Burger, a plant-based burger primarily made of pea protein, debuted in the meat section of 51 Whole Foods markets in October 2016. Today it’s carried in 30,000 locations, mostly in the United States and Canada, and the product line has expanded to include “crumbles” akin to ground beef and sausage. But deals with three European distributors will soon take its products overseas, and the company announced Tuesday it is partnering with Zandbergen to build a manufacturing plant in the Netherlands by early 2020.
Last year, Beyond Meat generated nearly $88 million in revenue, more than doubling its output from 2017. Now, with the $240 million raised by its IPO, the company said it plans to boost manufacturing, research and marketing. It also hopes to replicate the success of the nondairy milk industry, which has grown 61 percent in the past five years and commands 13 percent of the traditional milk market with almond, soy, oat and other offerings. In 2017, nondairy milk sales surpassed $2 billion.
“The success of the plant-based dairy industry was based on a strategy of creating plant-based dairy products that tasted better than previous nondairy substitutes, packaged and merchandised adjacent to their dairy equivalents,” Beyond Meat wrote in the filing. “We believe that by applying the same strategy to the plant-based meat category, it can grow to be at least the same proportion of the approximately $270 billion meat category in the United States.”
But the meat-alternative field has become crowded of late. There’s a glut of plant-based protein companies, including Impossible Foods, which garnered attention after the success of the Impossible Whopper, a vegetarian version of Burger King’s headline sandwich. Even meat and poultry companies are making the leap, with juggernauts such as Tyson preparing to release a line of animal-free products.
Beyond Meat’s reliance on pea protein also presents a potential threat to the company: It has just one supplier of the protein, and supply interruptions have already caused delivery delays. And the price of the protein could fluctuate based on environmental factors, such as weather and farming conditions, that would force Beyond Meat to raise prices.
As of now, Beyond Meat has no written contracts with its co-manufacturers, which take the pea protein and turn it into beeflike products, meaning the partnership has no legal backing. But the company says it is taking steps to nail down formal contracts with manufacturers, diversify its supply chain and lock in prices.
The company has enjoyed ample time in the limelight, thanks in part to a number of high-profile investors: Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams; Thompson, the former McDonald’s CEO; actor Leonardo DiCaprio; Snoop Dogg; NBA stars Kyrie Irving and Chris Paul; NFL wide receiver DeAndre Hopkins; and free climber Alex Honnold, star of the Oscar-winning documentary, “Free Solo.”


Veggie burgers were living an idyllic little existence. Then they got caught in a war over the future of meat.

Tofurky wasn’t keeping cattle ranchers awake at night.
For decades, veggie burgers were the token offering to vegans at the backyard barbecue, and Tofurky was the Thanksgiving benediction to the meat-free loved ones in our lives.
But as plant-based meat goes from an afterthought to a financial juggernaut that aims to change how most people eat, the opposition has suddenly awakened: Many of the country’s 800,000 cattle ranchers have declared war on newcomers Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, which use technology to make products that hew closely to the taste and texture of meat, and now “first-generation” veggie burgers and similar products are caught in the crossfire.
In 2019, officials in nearly 30 states have proposed bills to prohibit companies from using words such as meat, burger, sausage, jerky or hot dog unless the product came from an animal that was born, raised and slaughtered in a traditional way. Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming have already enacted such laws. In Missouri, the first state where the ban took effect, violators incur a $1,000 fine and as much as a year in prison. Mississippi’s new law is sweeping: “Any food product containing cell-cultured animal tissue or plant-based or insect-based food shall not be labeled meat or as a meat product.”
The states, in most cases backed by cattlemen’s associations, claim consumer confusion as the driving force for the laws. The newest offerings, they say, cross a line when they make unsubstantiated health claims (many have long lists of processed ingredients and are high in sodium) and when the packaging is unclear.
“Beyond Meat Beefy Crumbles has a picture of a cow on the front and says ‘plant-based’ in very small lettering at the bottom,” said Mike Deering, a cattle rancher and the executive vice president of the Missouri Cattlemen’s Association. “I’m a dad and I’m going through the grocery store before one of my boys has a meltdown, and [if] I pick up that package that says beef with a picture of a cow on it, I’m going to buy it.”
This isn’t quite a David vs. Goliath fight. The cattle associations have enormous political power, and several of the top veggie brands such as Morningstar Farms and Boca are owned by food giants such as Kellogg and Kraft Heinz. Notably, the major meat processors — Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, for instance — aren’t taking sides, relying on the ranchers for traditional meat but also investing heavily in these new alternatives they believe consumers increasingly desire.
The future of ranching faces a big threat if plant-based meat, thought to be much better for the environment, becomes a mainstay of the American diet.
Traditional animal agriculture is looking to the lessons learned by the dairy industry, which saw cow’s milk sales dwindle by $1.1 billion last year, much of that business scooped up by alternative milks such as almond and oat. And as the stock price of Beyond Meat, which went public this year, has soared, some of the biggest retailers and restaurants in America have got on board with plant-based alternatives.
In September, Impossible Burgers roll out in grocery stores. Subway has announced meatless meatballs, Carl’s Jr. and sister company Hardee’s have gotten on the meatless meat wagon, Dunkin’ introduced its Beyond Sausage breakfast sandwich and Burger King expanded the reach of its Impossible Whopper to all franchises.
On July 22, Tofurky joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union, the Good Food Institute (a nonprofit that promotes plant-based meat) and the Animal Legal Defense Fund to file a lawsuit claiming Arkansas’ new labeling law, which went into effect July 24, violates the First and Fourteenth amendments.
“If we lose, there’s something wrong with our judicial system,” said Tofurky chief executive Jaime Athos. “The first thing to get out of the way is that people are confused. It’s all [the cattlemen’s associations] can come up with to censor speech.”
He said there is mandatory court-ordered mediation because the two sides have failed to reach an agreement. If Tofurky loses, plant-based meats will have to be repackaged to reflect approved nomenclature, an expensive endeavor for a national company that sells to all 50 states. The bigger issue, Athos said, should focus on the emerging science about the benefits of a plant-based diet.
“The meat industry’s chickens are coming home to roost. Their industry was propped up by agricultural subsidies and misrepresented the true nutritional value and necessity of meat in the American diet,” he said. “We know better. These are not healthy things.”
Despite being dragged into the fight, Athos said he’s not miffed at what’s transpired.
“When it comes down to it, we’ve undertaken a monumental task and we now have partners to help us achieve those goals,” he said. “What a great thing to be able to live your values. What we’re seeing with plant-based is the conversation shifting from ‘why’ to ‘why not.’ ”
There are reasons for Athos to be sanguine. Tofurky has seen year-over-year double-digit growth that has been limited only by production capacity, he said.
“There’s no question we’re seeing more attention to the category,” said Michele Simon, executive director of the Plant Based Food Association, which advocates for the leading plant-based food companies. “ … To have a company like Tofurky have an easy time talking to Walmart? This wasn’t the case five or 10 years ago.”
Morningstar Farms, which has been around for more than 40 years, has shifted from being just in grocery stores to being in restaurants, universities, schools, cafeterias and hospitals, with nearly 25,000 locations and with 7,500 new restaurants projected by 2020.
While parent company Kellogg doesn’t disclose specific sales data, it issued a statement saying the plant-based surge led by Impossible and Beyond has been beneficial, driving more consumers to meat alternatives. Morningstar has announced its entire portfolio will be vegan by 2021 (plant-based cheese and egg will be added into the mix), while Boca, owned by Kraft Heinz, went through a major brand refresh with new recipes and retro-cool packaging updates in 2018.
For Jan Dutkiewicz, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University who teaches a class titled “Modernity and the Slaughter House,” these first- and second-generation plant-based companies make strange bedfellows, with widely discrepant agendas.
“Tofu and seitan have been around for centuries. These were not on the mainstream radar — the stuff hippies eat. For Tofurky and Morningstar, customers were more vegans and vegetarians, not mainstream consumers. They weren’t trying to compete with meat on taste,” he said. “Impossible and Beyond are not an outgrowth of Tofurky. Their aim is to mimic meat as closely as possible. They are trying to supplant meat entirely.”
The investment capital involved is different, too, Dutkiewicz said, “by orders of magnitude.”
Plant-based items that closely mimic meat are seen as a promising new revenue stream for most big meat and food companies. These giants are beginning to reposition themselves as “protein companies.”
Earlier this month, Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the world, announced it would launch a plant-protein line under the Pure Farmland brand. Maple Plant-Based Breakfast Patties, Simply Seasoned Plant-Based Protein Starters and six other products will debut in stores in September. Tyson Foods is debuting its own meatless-protein line. Perdue has launched blended meat-and-veg chicken nuggets, tenders and patties. Nestlé is rolling out a plant-based line, and Hormel’s Applegate has debuted blended meat-and-mushroom burgers.
The top item on the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s list of 2019 policy priorities is to hash out a regulatory framework for plant-based and cell-based meat, a responsibility that will slide back and forth between the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
According to Deering, some of the hubbub really relates to the anticipated launch next year of cell-based meat, that is meat, poultry and seafood products derived from muscle tissue grown in a lab with cells harvested from a living animal. Ranchers fear that insufficient labeling will not distinguish between traditional animal agriculture and these products that do not yet have a track record for safety and human health.
“We are at the mercy of the market, at the mercy of the weather,” Deering said. “We represent some of the most resilient people on the planet who can compete any day of the week and twice on Sunday. This is about consumer protection.”
Also earlier this month, the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a nonprofit that lobbies on behalf of the fast food, meat, alcohol and tobacco industries, placed ads in the Wall Street Journal and New York Post highlighting many of the ingredients in fake bacon and fake sausage, pointing out that many of the plant-based meat options are highly processed and suggesting this might fly in the face of what folks think of as “healthy.”
“People see veggie burgers on the menu and think it sounds like it’s chopped-up salad,” said Will Coggin, managing director of CCF. “Despite what the name leads people to believe, ‘plant-based’ meats are made in industrial facilities, not gardens. Fake meat companies are trying to promote a ‘health halo’ over their products, but consumers should know that imitation meat is highly processed and in some cases has more calories and sodium than the real thing.”
Dig deeper: Wellness + Marketing
Want to explore how the concept of wellness has been marketed into a lifestyle? Check out our curated list of stories below.
Get smart about fitness science
The 10,000-steps-a-day mantra is not based in science. It was born from a marketing campaign for a pedometer invented in 1965 by a Japanese professor of health science.
Debunking
Many trainers and exercise brands promote exercise myths that distort how people should think about caloric intake and exercise.
Context matters: What shapes our ideas
The nutritional hierarchy of what animal protein is best for us isn’t always inclusive of differences in how it is raised, caught or processed.
Context Matters: Understanding pain management in the U.S.
The Department of Health and Human Services is examining acupuncture as an alternative pain management treatment that could help prevent opioid abuse.


Plant-based ‘dairy’ products aren’t new. Neither is the U.S. dairy industry’s hostility.

Paul Shapiro is the author of “Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World.”
Stroll through your local supermarket and it won't be hard to see why some in the dairy industry are, well, having a cow. Milks and cheeses from soy, almonds, coconuts, cashews and even flaxseeds are decidedly in. Cow's milk isn't in danger of being put out to pasture, but consumption in the United States has been in a steady slide
since the 1970s and the dairy aisle is getting crowded.
With interest in drinking cows' milk waning, especially in Western Europe and the United States, and the popularity of plant-based milk rising, the Netherlands-based Rabobank in May advised dairy producers to diversify with investments in their alternative-dairy competitors. The major agribusiness lender noted: "Global retail sales growth for dairy alternatives has soared at a rate of 8 percent annually over the last ten years."
The dairy industry is fighting back against the plant-based competition. One weapon is a campaign to prevent Big Dairy's rivals from using coveted terms such as "milk" and "cheese" on product packaging. Under intense industry lobbying, the Food and Drug Administration may soon issue new guidance — the agency on Sept. 28 issued a request for comments "on the labeling of plant-based products with names that include the names of dairy foods such as 'milk,' 'cultured milk,' 'yogurt,' and 'cheese.'" Last year Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) introduced the Dairy Pride Act "to require enforcement against misbranded milk alternatives."
Critics of employing the words "cheese" and "milk" to describe plant-based products would maintain they are simply defending the traditional understanding of what those terms mean. Tell that to Benjamin Franklin. In 1770, according to Smithsonian.com, Franklin sent to America from London a few dried beans that he said were used by the Chinese to make "a cheese." The beans were almost certainly soy, the magazine said in March, and "cheese" was likely the translation of what a Spanish traveler to China, according to Franklin, had described seeing: "tau-fu." (Francis Bacon was nearly a century and a half ahead of Franklin in
describing
 nondairy milk, writing in 1626 that "there be plants, that have a Milk in them when they are Cut.")
By the mid-19th century, soybeans were being introduced for cultivation in the United States, and in 1897 the term
"soy-bean milk" appeared for the first time in a U.S. government publication. Also in the late 19th century, the physician and inventor John Harvey Kellogg (yes, that Kellogg) began experimenting with making vegetarian foods, including using nuts for meat substitutes. In the 1940s, the term "soy meats" began appearing in U.S. food industry publications.
Still, America was slow to embrace plant-based meats and milk products. The 20th century was replete with hopeful introductions of alternatives that never quite caught on. In recent decades, though, food-production processes have steadily improved, turning out cow-free products that are ever more appealing to the American palate. Whether out of concern about health, climate change or animal welfare, people are finding manifold reasons to eat lower on the food chain.
Yet no change in the status quo comes without incumbent pushback. Beyond the FDA's contemplated action and Baldwin's Dairy Pride Act (longer version: Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, Milk, and Cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday Act), which is still in a Senate committee, state lawmakers are also seeking to protect the barnyard lobby. This year, North Carolina moved to "prohibit the sale of plant-based products mislabeled as milk." Missouri recently enacted a state law requiring that only "harvested production livestock or poultry" can be marketed as "meat."
To hear these lawmakers tell it, American consumers must be awfully confused. Or dim. Do shoppers really need to be protected from the mistaken belief that almond cheese comes from cows or that a veggie burger involves ground beef?
The dairy industry's hostility to plant-based foods has a long tradition. In a Depression-era protest in Wisconsin against margarine, which was sometimes made from coconut oil, one demonstrator held up a sign that said: "Don't look for prosperity if you expect the American farmer to compete with the cocoanut cow." The battle against margarine had been going on for decades: Rose Eveleth, writing for Slate in July, noted that, in 1869, American dairy farmers sounded the alarm about "counterfeit butter," as one Wisconsin congressman put it while proposing to tax margarine producers into oblivion. By 1900, 30 states had made it illegal to dye margarine yellow. Some stipulated that it be dyed pink.
As foolish as mandatory pink margarine sounds in 2018, similar ill-conceived efforts to thwart plant-based foods abound today by appealing to tradition. But you don't have to be as smart as Ben Franklin to recognize that these efforts are in keeping with a rather different American tradition: good, old-fashioned protectionism.


Tyson, America’s biggest chicken producer, now makes a plant-based ‘nugget.’ Is it any good?

First there was the egg, then the chicken (or was it the other way around?). Whichever it was, the chicken nugget — that crust-enveloped chunk of bird that’s become a staple of dinners served on high chairs and in fast-food clamshells across the land — definitely came after that. And now, like a rapper shortening his name, there’s just the nugget, the plant-based version of the familiar, dunkable finger food.
Vegetarian nuggets have been around for years, of course, but there’s a potential disrupter in the game: Tyson Foods, the world’s second-largest poultry processor, recently introduced a new chicken-less line called Raised & Rooted. The nuggets are made with pea protein, the coolest kid at the veggie party these days, and the company claims they’ve got both a “cravingly crispy batter” and a great taste.
The decision to dub such veggie-based products simply “nuggets” is an interesting one. “Nugget” is practically synonymous with chicken — and McDonald’s is the reason.
Allow me to drag you down an etymological rabbit hole for a moment, will you?
The term “chicken nugget” seems to have been in occasional use before the fast-food giant debuted its McNuggets in 1983, but it was hardly a household one. The phrase pops up here and there in the annals of chicken history: A 1967 promotion by the National Broiler Council (now the National Chicken Council) introduced a recipe for nuggets that called for boning breasts and cutting them into pieces to “roll in seasoned crumbs.” And a Mrs. Thomas Young of Searcy, Ark., won the 1971 National Chicken Cooking Contest with a concoction called “Dipper’s Nuggets.”
But the nugget turned juggernaut only after McDonald’s named its battered poultry product the McNugget. (The inventor of the snack that came to be known as the nugget, a Cornell professor named Robert Baker, actually called it a “Chicken Crispie” or a “chicken stick.”)
By 1986, America was full-throttle nuts for nugs. A Washington Post story about the craze was headlined “Nugget Mania” and described the chicken chunks as “the hot dog of the ’80s.”
And they’re still popular, with countless variations (dinosaur-shaped! air-fried! maple-waffle seasoned!) to be found in grocery freezer cases. Not that they are universally loved — along the way, they’ve taken more hits to their reputation than Lindsay Lohan. They’re often made a symbol of the obesity epidemic and America’s dysfunctional relationship with food. And urban legends about what’s actually inside that crust has prompted the National Chicken Council to post a defense of the product. (Anytime you have to remind people that “there is no pink slime” in your product, you know there’s a PR problem.)
Which brings us to the nugget’s latest chapter: the plant-based option. Now that Big Chicken is going meatless, we set out to try the new guy on the plant-based block. We tasted the new nuggets along with a few other veggie options for comparison — and for the poultri-vores among us, there also were Tyson’s classic, real chicken nuggets to remind us of the Platonic ideal.
So are Tyson’s newest nuggets up to scratch? In short, cluck no. Here’s what our panel had to say:
Raised & Rooted Nuggets
Alas, the hyped newbie was most of our testers’ least favorite — even at first sight. “He’s so pale,” lamented one.
Several pointed out a strange chemical flavor that had us canceling this wannabe bird. “Fake smoke? No, just no,” opined another. “Is something burning?” someone asked. And its consistency, which included a couple of nuggets with chunks inside them that popped out from the rest of the filling (“a nugget inside a nugget — whoa and ew”), was just as unpopular. “The ‘chicken’ looks like some kind of brain foam.”
But not everyone was a hater; the nugget did get one first-place rating from a taster who praised its “peppery breading” and “nice and crispy” character. Just be careful not the sleep on this one — even its fan didn’t enjoy the Raised & Rooted version when its temperature dropped: “It’s gnarly when it cools.”
Morningstar Farms Chik’n Nuggets
From the company that’s been making faux, soy-based meats for 40-plus years, this nugget didn’t elicit strong opinions from many of our tasters, who collectively gave this an “eh, pretty good.” Most found this to be a little softer than the real thing, but it was generally tepidly liked.
“Okay,” one taster summed up. “Would eat again,” said another.
Quorn Meatless Nugget
This was the breakout star of our tasting, the Beyoncé to Tyson’s Kelly Rowland. Which seemed unlikely, since the first ingredient in this product is something called “mycoprotein,” which is a more palatable moniker for “fungal protein.”
This nugget did turn out to be the fungi at the party, though, with tasters liking its pepper-flecked crust (“almost homemade”) and its “meat-like attack” on the palate. Some faulted the texture as “gummy,” but that’s actually pretty much the way a real chicken nugget goes down, as we were reminded by the original version we tasted (shown below). “Honestly, the interior texture is better than real chicken,” said one.
Alice Crites and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
More from Voraciously:
McDonald’s gets into the veggie burger game, testing a Beyond Meat patty in Canada
The key to White Claw’s surging popularity: Marketing to a post-gender world
We did it, America. We ate Popeyes out of chicken sandwiches.


E.U. rejects proposal to ban labeling plant-based foods as veggie ‘burgers’

Veggie burger enthusiasts can rejoice after the European Parliament on Friday rejected a measure to ban use of the term “burger” for plant-based alternatives.
While a seemingly small-world debate — among vegetarians, whether a mushroom in place of a patty counts as a veggie burger on a menu is itself another controversy — the ruling could have big implications for the businesses feeding a burgeoning appetite for plant-based meat alternatives.
On Friday’s table was a proposal to keep meat labels — such as burger, steak and sausage — off non-meat substitutes in the 27-nation European Union.
Europe’s meat industry backed the ban, arguing that consumers could be confused by the messaging and mistakenly buy a vegan rather than animal-based box of burgers. The E.U. has already banned labeling as “milk” or “butter” nondairy products based on alternatives such as soy.
COPA-COGECA
But European environmentalists pushed back, arguing that using terms such as veggie “discs” or “fingers” could deter would-be consumers looking to reduce their meat consumption.
“Consumers are in no way confused by a soy steak or chickpea-based sausage, so long as it is clearly labeled as vegetarian or vegan,” Camille Perrin, senior food policy officer at the Brussels-based European Consumer Organization, said in a statement. “Terms such as ‘burger’ or ‘steak’ on plant-based items simply make it much easier for consumers to know how to integrate these products within a meal.”
She continued: “There is no doubt Europeans need to shift to more plant-based diets, both for their health and the planet. The best would be for consumers to cook more with legumes such as beans and peas instead of meat, but not all have the time and skills to do so.”
The proposal was one amendment within a package of agricultural measures. Another that did pass bans terms such as “yogurt-style” or “cheese-style” for nondairy imitation replacements. The larger farm bill was to be voted on later Friday.
Elena Walden, Europe’s policy manager for the Good Food Institute, a U.S.-based organization that promotes plant-based alternatives, criticized the latter ban in a statement as “further undermining the E.U.’s sustainability commitments.”
The European Parliament has issued an array of regulations around food labels, from Parmesan cheese to champagne, that European producers must follow.
ING Think, a global research firm, published a report Thursday estimating that sales of meat and dairy alternatives in Europe grew by nearly 10 percent over the past decade. The study estimated the market’s share would rise to 7.5 billion euros ($8.8 billion) by 2025, up from 4.4 billion euros ($5.2 billion) in 2019.
“The sheer size of the meat and dairy market and the small base for plant-based alternatives mean that, even at the current growth rate, it would take until the mid-2050s before sales of ‘plant-based meat and dairy’ could surpass sales of meat and dairy,” the report concluded.
Michael Birnbaum in Brussels contributed to this report.


Coming to grocery shelves in 2019: Mushroom/meat mixes, pea protein and banana milk

Enjoy Life Foods Lo-Fo Pantry Paleo and Whole30 labels localliving@washpost.com

Banana milk, cassava flour and pea yogurt may sound exotic, but I predict they’re going to be in your shopping cart in 2019. These are just a few of the items that caught my attention at the annual Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo, an event that brings together more than 13,000 nutrition and food professionals to learn about new research and product innovations. As consumers look for more creative and convenient ways to enjoy a plant-based diet, we’re going to see more products in that category. Plus, diets such as paleo, Whole30 and low-FODMAP will become mainstream. Here are the nutrition and food trends you’ll see in the new year.
Plants in animal-based foods
Consumers are craving more plant-based foods for their health and a desire to help the environment, but not everyone wants to go vegetarian or vegan. That’s why working plant-based ingredients into animal-based dishes is a trend to watch.
One example is combining mushrooms with ground meat for flavorful, healthier and more environmentally friendly recipes. Earlier this year, more than 350 independent restaurants developed their mushroom-blended take on the classic burger in the James Beard Foundation’s Blended Burger Project. Sonic Drive-In became the first fast food restaurant to serve a blended burger made with 35 percent mushrooms, resulting in a burger that’s less than 350 calories and offers phytochemicals and antioxidants that could help reduce the risk of chronic disease. The Sonic Slinger was offered for a limited time in the spring and proved so popular it was served for a limited time in the fall and is back as part of a new promotion, according to Scott Uehlein, Sonic’s vice president of product innovation and development. In 2019, expect to see more restaurants offering up mushroom-and-meat blends, as well as more recipes for the home cook that combine plant-based ingredients with meat.
Bone broth as a base for plant-based soups is another example of the animal-based and plant-based worlds combining to offer the best of both worlds. Bone broth has been trending upward for the past couple of years as a key component of both the paleo and Whole30 diets. It’s thought to have potential benefits for digestive health, and at the very least, contains some protein. Instead of sipping on straight bone broth as in years past, this year you’ll see it used as a base for classic and creative soups. Companies such as Pacific Foods have introduced bone broth-based organic soups with the addition of plant-based ingredients such as kale and beans for more staying power and nutrition.
Pea protein
People who prefer plant-based protein would like higher amounts that are quick and easy to prepare and eat. Vegetarian Traveler has introduced portable, shelf-stable blends of roasted peas, soybeans and chickpeas to easily add 15 to 17 grams of protein to salads, stir-fries and more.
Companies such as Dr. Praeger’s have created protein-rich veggie burgers, nuggets and meatless sausage by using pea protein, along with other simple ingredients such as vegetables and avocado oil. Their All American Veggie Burger serves up an impressive 28 grams of protein and four grams of fiber.
Special diets
We’ve reached the point where what was once referred to as a “special diet” seems to be the norm. Products that are “free from” certain ingredients and that carry diet claims will be even more commonplace in brick-and-mortar and online grocery stores.
Low-FODMAP products
For the estimated 12 percent of American adults suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, a low-FODMAP diet may help manage symptoms. “FODMAP” stands for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols, types of carbohydrates that for a minority of people can cause gas, bloating and other digestive issues. The list of potentially problematic foods includes commonly eaten items such as apples, dairy, beans, wheat, garlic and onions.
Starting a low-FODMAP diet used to mean closely reading labels, but now there are low-FODMAP third-party certifications from Monash University and the FODMAP Friendly Food Program, both based in Australia.
Enjoy Life Foods
Lo-Fo Pantry
Even large brands such as Campbell Soup are getting in on the low-FODMAP trend. They’ve introduced Prego Sensitive Recipe
 Italian sauce which doesn’t contain high-FODMAP onions and garlic.
Paleo and Whole30 labels
More products are carrying special diet claims on their labels such as “paleo” and “Whole30 friendly.” Although almond flour and coconut flour will continue to be popular for both diets, consumers are looking for the next grain-free flour — and some want a nut-free option because of allergies. That’s why Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods has introduced cassava flour made from whole cassava root. Cassava flour has a neutral flavor and fine texture, so it works well in a variety of cooking and baking applications. Expect to see more recipes featuring cassava flour on Pinterest and your favorite cooking blogs.
More dairy-free alternatives
Dairy-free milk alternatives such as almond milk, oat milk and pea milk continue to be popular.
In 2019, I think, banana milk will be a top choice. Not only is banana milk naturally sweet, meaning there’s no added sugars, a cup of banana milk has as much potassium as a small banana. Brands such as Mooala Bananamilk are also going to be fortified with calcium to match the amount in cow’s milk.
The dairy-free yogurt category will continue to experience significant growth this year, according to a market research report from Packaged Facts. In 2019, you’ll see a wider selection of yogurt alternatives made from peas, soy, coconut, almonds, cashews and more.
localliving@washpost.com


Is it really possible that plant-based foods such as the Impossible Whopper are healthful?

localliving@washpost.com

With many American consumers interested in reducing their consumption of animal products without becoming vegetarian or vegan, the food industry has come up with a new craze: plant-based. Look around your grocery store, and you’ll see a growing number of dairy, egg and meat substitutes bearing this label.
But the industry has taken liberties with the definition of “plant-based.” Rather than focusing on whole foods such as vegetables, fruits, legumes and nuts, which is what health professionals mean when they recommend “plant-based eating,” food manufacturers are developing ultra-processed burgers out of pea or soy protein, methylcellulose and maltodextrin, and liquid “eggs” out of mung bean protein isolate and gellan gum. Then they crown this ultra-processed food with an undeserved health halo.
Fast-food companies have joined forces with the manufacturers. Impossible Foods veggie burgers are on the menu at Burger King and White Castle; Beyond Meat is offering options for Subway’s meatless meatball subs, Dunkin’s meatless sausages, Del Taco’s burritos and Carl’s Jr.’s meatless burger, and has just partnered with KFC to test out vegan fried “chicken”; and vegan JUST Eggs are being used in breakfast sandwiches at Tim Hortons. (Note: These items might not be available at all locations.)
Plant-based ultra-processed products such as these are formulated to taste like the real deal. Thus, consumers can feel virtuous or principled for choosing plants over meat without sacrificing too much flavor. But is there any value to plant-based products that have been crushed, extruded and shaped into facsimiles of the foods they are replacing? Let’s look at that question through several lenses — considering nutrients, how processed the food is and how producing the food affects the planet.
When I was in nutrition school, the health value of food was mostly calculated based on the presence of desirable nutrients, such as fiber and vitamins, and on the absence of negative nutrients, such as sodium or trans fat. If you compare ultra-processed plant-based foods and similar animal-based foods solely on their nutrients, you’ll find they are roughly the same.
Plant-based foods are purposely formulated to mimic animal-based foods, so plant-based milk is enriched with calcium and vitamin D to mimic cow’s milk, while veggie burgers are rich in protein and made with iron and zinc to imitate beef. But they aren’t always made to reduce the presence of less-healthy nutrients. Sometimes, the processed plant-based food will have more sodium than the processed animal-based food, and sometimes the animal food will be higher in calories or saturated fat. And vice versa So, it’s sort of a tie. Consider this: A Burger King Whopper has 660 calories and 980 mg sodium, while the virtuous vegan version has 630 calories and 1080 mg sodium. Not much of a difference, right? You’d be better off making a burger at home, where it can be prepared to yield fewer calories and less sodium — whether it’s vegan or not.
Interestingly, this nutrient-focused method of evaluating foods has fallen out of favor, because it doesn’t give us the big picture. Health practitioners spent years vilifying fat, then sodium, and most recently sugar, and none of these factors alone seem to be the problem. It’s the whole diet that matters. Instead of a singular nutrient focus, many researchers evaluate the healthfulness of diets based on how processed their foods are, because studies show that’s what has the greatest impact on human health.
To determine how processed a food is, researchers use the Nova food classification system, which separates foods into four categories: unprocessed or minimally processed foods (fruits or eggs, for example); processed culinary ingredients (such as salt or butter); processed foods (usually two or three ingredients, such as in canned vegetables or salted nuts); and ultra-processed foods (industrial formulations with five or more ingredients, including sugar, fat, salt, protein isolates, flavor enhancers, stabilizers and preservatives). Thus, a whole apple is unprocessed, applesauce with sugar is processed, and apple cereal bars are ultra-processed. Note: All are “plant-based foods.”
The average American consumes 58 percent of daily calories from ultra-processed foods. This high intake — even of foods that originally came from plants — is associated with a higher risk of metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular disease and some types of cancer. On the other hand, plant-based diets composed of whole foods (and specifically not ultra-processed plant-based foods) are associated with a lower risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. It’s always better to choose whole foods when possible.
Finally, some people opt for plant-based foods because they abhor animal cruelty or want to help decrease their environmental impact, especially with respect to greenhouse gas emissions and water use. Studies show greenhouse gas emissions are highest for meat and other animal products and lowest for most grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes. Pundits are quick to point out that food is a tiny contributor to greenhouse gases overall and that most studies don’t take recent efficiency improvements by animal farmers or organic farmers into account. But overall, the weight of the research supports the notion that plant-based eating is better for the environment. Once you take food processing into account, the advantage becomes less clear. Bottom line: It’s better to choose whole foods rather than ultra-processed foods, even when both come from plants.
Using the term “plant-based” on fast food labels is just another attempt by marketers to re-brand junk food. True plant-based eating doesn’t mean opting for an Impossible Whopper in the drive-through or scrambling up some 15-ingredient “egg alternative.” It means a diet that includes nourishing options such as black beans, broccoli and brown rice. We’re always looking for some magical way to eat junky food and achieve health. Don’t be fooled by this plant-based pretense.
localliving@washpost.com


From lab to table: Will cell-cultured meat win over Americans?

Alt-meat is having quite a moment.
California-based Beyond Meat, one of the world’s biggest plant-based meat companies, this week had the strongest stock market debut of any company this year. Ikea announced a meatless version of its Swedish meatballs. And Burger King said it will roll out a version of its signature Whopper made with Impossible Burger, Beyond Meat’s chief competitor, nationwide by the end of the year.
But conventional animal agriculture faces an even bigger threat than plant-based patties. This one comes from petri dishes.
Companies in the United States and abroad are moving quickly to bring to market hamburgers and other meat, poultry and seafood products derived from muscle tissue grown in a lab with cells harvested from a living animal.
U.S. regulators will introduce rules for such products later this year, and companies say they are poised to launch their first commercial products within the same time frame.
Like the introduction of genetically modified foods before it, cell-cultured meat has the potential to transform how the world eats. And as with genetically modified foods, there probably will be pushback.
Plant-based meat, while growing in popularity, still largely appeals to the tiny fraction of Americans who are vegetarians and vegans. If lab meats can replicate the taste and texture of traditional meat — at a lower cost and with fewer downsides — it would be a game-changer for global nutrition.
“If only half of it becomes remotely true, it will be one of the most important advancements of the century,” said Kristopher Gasteratos, founder of the Cellular Agriculture Society, an international nonprofit organization using donations to advance cellular agriculture.
This prospect is launching a three-way battle over the future of meat, with factions jockeying to shape government regulation, consumer tastes and the debate over the social and environment implications of widespread adoption of alternative meats.
Traditional American animal agriculture, a $176 billion business in 2017, wants to preserve its fundamental business while, in some cases, it dabbles in the future. (Giants such as Cargill and Tyson have invested in alt-meat companies.)
The plant-based meat companies, currently getting all the buzz, must convince the world they’re not just for vegans and vegetarians.
And the futuristic lab-based meat companies, which perhaps hold the most promise to disrupt the food industry, have to unpack the science for consumers and nudge people past the ick factor.
The recent burst in enthusiasm for alternative meat products is striking because industry experts for years have been skeptical about whether they would find acceptance.
“When they introduced plant-based products, restaurateurs said it looked really promising, but the reorder rate is really slow,” Don Close, senior animal protein analyst in North America for Rabo AgriFinance, said in an phone interview. “It’s a negligible percentage of overall sales, and the amount of traction they are getting from the public is small compared to the media attention.”
Beyond Meat’s lively IPO was a strong indication of public sentiment; so too was this week’s announcement that Impossible was experiencing a shortage of the ingredients it uses to make its plant-based meat and probably would not be able to meet demands at restaurant chains including White Castle and Red Robin.
Plant-based meat alternatives have exploded as a result of two conflicting trends: growing demand for meat and growing fears about meat.
Animal agriculture is an expanding economic powerhouse worldwide driven by growing demand in developed and developing countries. But it is also a source of great concern about public health, worker safety, animal cruelty and climate change.
The World Health Organization and the British medical journal the Lancet this year warned of the dangers of red meat. On Friday, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said that, for environmental reasons, he wanted to phase out processed and red meat served from city hospitals, schools and correctional facilities.
Gardenburger and Tofurky launched their veggie burgers in the early 1980s. But the concept leaped forward over the past decade with innovations such as Impossible Burger’s introduction of “heme,” a protein from the roots of soy plants that provides a meaty taste.
The result is a patty with the mouth-feel of the real deal, something to which earlier plant-based burgers could only aspire.
The changes to meat could be even more sweeping once cell-based meat arrives on the market — but like plant-based meat, it will take time.
Gasteratos talks about a revolution — but he is patient in his time frame. He predicts lab-grown meat will replace 50 percent of the global meat consumption by the middle of this century.
By the end of the century, Gasteratos predicts, intensive animal agriculture will be phased out entirely and all meat will be grown in factories.
Speaking at a recent conference of ranchers and meat experts in College Station, Tex., Gasteratos cited global population growth projections and increasing per capita meat consumption among countries with growing middle classes against a backdrop of climate-related changes likely to shift or shrink arable land.
“I don’t believe plant-based has any revolutionary capacity,” he said. "I don’t support it. People like eating animal flesh; they have a psychological disinterest in eating plant-based. And I have yet to meet someone who can make a cell from another kingdom that can taste like an animal cell.”
According to Gasteratos, cell-based production uses a live animal’s adult muscle stem cells, raising them in a nutrient-rich environment until they take on the look and shape of the desired meat.
The first lab-grown burger was presented at a news conference in London in 2013, its tissue grown in a lab at Maastricht University in the Netherlands at an estimated cost of $1.2 million per pound. Now the United States has at least nine cell-culturing companies, among 26 worldwide and with potentially more shadow companies gearing up in China.
This year, Israeli-based company Aleph Farms said it had gotten the cost down to $100 per pound, and industry insiders say American companies are getting the cost to $50 per pound.
Leading American companies now say they plan to launch their products before the end of 2019, slightly ahead of schedule. The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture are expected to finalize rules regarding inspection and labeling this fall.
Eighty percent of early products will be “unstructured meat” — ground beef and the insides of a chicken nugget as opposed to a T-bone or chicken wing. With this country dispatching 50 billion hamburgers annually, wresting one of those away from traditional agriculture, or from plant-based companies, would be big business.
The barnyard lobby — representing the meat, livestock and poultry industries — has moved swiftly, launching lawsuits in 20 states to restrict the use of the term “beef."
“Cell-cultured meat manufacturers must not be permitted to use the term ‘beef’ or any nomenclature associated with traditional livestock production,” the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association wrote last year in a letter to the USDA.
Danielle Beck, senior director of government affairs for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said Big Beef is eager to avoid the dairy industry’s ongoing kerfuffle over milk. The FDA has chosen not to take enforcement action against the proliferation of nut milks, soy milks, oat milks, among others, using the term milk on their labels. From Beck’s perspective, these products should be labeled as “imitation milk.”
“Our producers are looking at the struggles of the dairy industry, and they are being proactive because we don’t want to end in the same way. Every single product needs to be distinctly identified in the marketplace,” she said.
Cell-based meat producers could also face resistance from consumers — although Erlinde Cornelis, a marketing professor at the business school at San Diego State University who studies consumer psychology, argues that younger diners are unlikely to be queasy about alt-proteins’ fabrication.
For people who have grown up with the specter of climate change, adoption of plant-based or cell-based meat over traditional animal agriculture is easy. Though there are bound to be skeptics, she said the overall appeal of moving from land-based animal agriculture to the lab was undeniable.
“Plant- and cell-based will appeal to different markets,” Cornelis said. “Actual meat is an old technology. It’s almost ignorant, if you know how much of our resources it takes; it’s like typing on a typewriter when you have speech-to-text technology.”


Burger King’s Impossible Whopper tastes even better than the real thing

ST. LOUIS — The Gateway Arch, that soaring stainless-steel rainbow hard by the Mississippi River, stands as a 630-foot monument to an idea that was controversial even in 19th-century America: that this Midwestern city would serve as a starting point to a new life out West, where people could escape the problems of their past.
If all goes according to Burger King’s master plan, St. Louis could again serve as a gateway to a new life, this one with less beef in the American diet, which in turn could help reduce the many environmental impacts that raising cattle has on our vulnerable planet. The fast-food chain is testing its Impossible Whopper in the greater metro area here, and if the meatless hamburger proves a success in St. Louis, Burger King will roll out the sandwich to all of its 7,200 locations nationwide.
Such an expansion would make mock-meat hamburgers available in almost every corner of the country, far more available than they are now at smaller chains such as Red Robin, White Castle and Carl’s Jr. Burger King could give millions of Americans who crave a hamburger the option of purchasing one that, unlike the crumbly vegetarian patties of the past, reportedly looks and tastes much more like beef.
So is the Impossible Whopper any good? Answering this question was my mission in St. Louis, a city (perhaps) selected as a test market precisely because it’s not located on the East or West coasts, where a large segment of the population is already attuned to the environmental and animal welfare issues animating meat alternatives like the Impossible Burger. That was Adam Kreger’s theory, at least. He’s a student at the School of Law at Washington University in St. Louis, where he’s studying animal rights. He was, like me, waiting on an Impossible Whopper.
I was there, of course, to sample the burger and decide whether Burger King has a hit on its hands, one worth replicating in stores across the land. It’s admittedly an odd, illogical task: judging whether a company should do its part to save Earth based on how good a product tastes. It’s sort of like deciding whether you should recycle plastic based on your opinion of a bottle’s design. That thing is uuug-ly. Toss it on the streets!
The choice should be obvious, right? You pick the option that does the most good.
But business doesn’t operate that way. No company will invest in a product that consumers don’t want, even one with such a potential upside for the environment. The early word from St. Louis, however, is encouraging for both Burger King and, at least in this particular instance, the future of planet Earth. Consumer demand is high for the Impossible Whopper, according to several employees I spoke with over the counter. Some locations have sold out of their supply and have had to reorder cases of the patties produced by Impossible Foods.
At a Burger King in the Academy neighborhood, the store has already sold out of its supply, twice, in the week or so since the Impossible Whopper was introduced, said assistant manager Nikiesha Harvey. People have been calling and coming in from all parts of the country to order one, or a dozen, some as far away as California and Florida, she said.
“I couldn’t tell the difference, and I was shocked myself,” Harvey said about the Impossible Whopper (which runs $5.59 in the St. Louis market, a full dollar more than the standard Whopper). She even served one to her husband and son, who couldn’t taste the difference, either.
Part of this trickeration can be attributed to Impossible Foods, the San Francisco Bay-area start-up that this year rolled out a new formula for its plant-based patties. The company has substituted soy protein for wheat protein to give the patty a more beeflike texture. It has also added methyl cellulose, a plant-based binder, to make the burger juicier. And this is in addition to the not-so-secret ingredient, heme, which Impossible Foods produces by injecting the DNA of a soy plant into genetically engineered yeast, which is then fermented.
All this science is concealed in a patty that doesn’t look too far removed from the ground-beef version, especially after both are run under Burger King’s signature charbroiler. Both beef and plant-based patties are branded with black parallel stripes, the grill marks that are as much a part of Burger King’s identity as that royal mascot with the perpetually creepy smile. I should note the chain also offers a vegan, mayo-less Impossible Whopper, whose patty is cooked in a microwave to ensure no meat particles from the charbroiler contaminate it. It’s an ashen-looking patty, unappetizing on its face, though tasty enough within its Whopper confines.
It may take a genius to create an Impossible burger, but it doesn’t take one to understand why the mock meat fools so many: The bar is set extremely low. As I’ve noted before, the beef in fast-food burgers represents only a fraction of the sandwich’s total weight, about 30 percent for the Whopper. Most of what you taste in a Whopper is not ground beef. It’s a combination of sweet bun, fatty mayo, ripe tomato, raw onions and that famous “grill flavor,” which a Burger King representative told me last year was natural to the flame-grilling process, not artificially added.
Few Whopper devotees probably do this, but the next time you try one, break off a hunk of the ground beef and taste it. The meat is so overcooked and juiceless that, if not for the grill flavor, the patty wouldn’t have much to recommend it. Whatever beef flavor remains is residual, an echo of the animal fat that’s all but rendered out. It’s a grill-flavored protein disc, which the Impossible version has no problem mimicking. In fact, I’d argue the Impossible Whopper patty, all by itself, has more flavor than the meaty one.
I was reminded of this during a side trip to White Castle, where the chain sells an Impossible Slider. At a location in the St. Louis suburbs, I placed an order of four original sliders and four of the Impossible knockoffs, each slipped into a tiny branded cardboard sleeve, generating the kind of waste usually reserved for family picnics. I ordered the sliders with griddled onions and pickles only, no cheese, to better taste the patties.
The White Castle crew told me three times that it would take an extra 10 minutes to prepare the Impossible Sliders — “maybe longer,” noted the cashier — because they were understaffed. I said that wasn’t a problem, but when the mini-burgers were ready, the Impossible Sliders were almost naked underneath their pillowy buns. A few lonely caramelized onions clung to the bottom of the patties. Without the sweet pungency of those browned onions — and, obviously, without Burger King’s grill flavor — the Impossible patties were the main attraction, a mixed blessing. The mock meat is thicker than the original White Castle patty, this thin, sickly slab that looks as if it was sliced off a processed loaf. The Impossible patty is also an umami bomb, like soy sauce in solid form.
The Impossible Slider is a stark reminder that, no matter how savory the plant-based patty may be, it’s still not beef.
After eating more than a dozen Impossible-branded burgers in St. Louis — including Red Robin’s thick-cut version, which had none of the chin-dribbling juices you desire from a big, sloppy grilled hamburger — I’ve come to the conclusion that the producer of this meat alternative is a master illusionist. After one bite, you swear the Impossible patty tastes just like beef. After a second bite, you begin to sense the illusion behind the science. After a third, you’re ready to invest in the whole enterprise. With time, the illusion becomes its own alternative reality: The product is close enough to beef that your brain is willing to fill in the rest of the flavors, even if somewhere in the dark recesses of your cerebral cortex, you know it’s all a lie.
America, get ready for the Impossible Whopper. I suspect it will be coming your way soon, once it passes through St. Louis.
More from Voraciously:
The best way to grill a burger keeps it off the grate
Americans are drinking more ‘gourmet’ coffee. This doesn’t mean they’re drinking great coffee
What’s in a name? The battle over alternative meat, milk and rice labeling rages on.


Think of Earth, not just your stomach, panel advises

The nation’s top nutritional panel is recommending for the first time that Americans consider the impact on the environment when they are choosing what to eat, a move that defied a warning from Congress and, if enacted, could discourage people from eating red meat.
Members of Congress had sought in December to keep the group from even discussing the issue, asserting that while advising the government on federal dietary guidelines, the committee should steer clear of extraneous issues and stick to nutritional advice.
But the panel’s findings, issued Thursday in the form of a 571-page report, recommended that Americans be kinder to the environment by eating more foods derived from plants and fewer foods that come from animals. Red meat is deemed particularly harmful because of, among other things, the amount of land and feed required in its production.
“Consistent evidence indicates that, in general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with lesser environmental impact than is the current average U.S. diet,” the report says.
[ Top nutrition panel: The American diet is killing us ]
Many scientists say animal-based foods are a poorer choice for the environment because they are associated with significantly larger carbon emissions than their plant-based counterparts. (Jayme Halbritter/AP)
The environmental recommendations are part of a report meant to provide the scientific basis for the next version of the Dietary Guidelines, the federal government’s publication on what to eat. The Department of Health and Human Services and the Agriculture Department will issue the guidelines later this year.
Those agencies could ignore the panel’s recommendations, but major deviations are rare, experts and former panel members said.
Overall, the committee’s report amounts to a scientific update regarding what is known about healthy eating. Although Americans don’t necessarily heed the dietary guidelines ahead of each meal, the guidelines are influential and can help dictate what is on the menu of school lunches and how foods are labeled.
The panel found that Americans are consuming too much salt, added sugars and foods rich in saturated fats. And for the first time, the panel addressed concerns about coffee, saying that there is strong evidence that moderate consumption is not associated with long-term health risks. The panel also reversed decades of warnings about eating foods high in cholesterol, such as eggs and liver.
[ So can I binge on eggs now? Here’s what you need to know. ]
But the decision by the advisory panel to link the dietary guidelines to the environment will probably stir the most controversy.
In December, Congress approved language that expressed “concern” that the advisory committee was “considering issues outside of the nutritional focus of the panel” — alluding to the environmental discussions.
The nation's top nutritional panel released its report recommending changes to the U.S. dietary guidelines. Here are the main takeaways of what you should and should not eat.
Moreover, Congress said at the time, the final Dietary Guidelines should “only include nutrition and dietary information.”
The advisory panel’s report prompted immediate criticism from Congress — as well as a warning from Rep. Robert B. Aderholt (R-Ala.), chairman of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the budget for the Agriculture Department.
“Chairman Aderholt is skeptical of the panel’s departure from utilizing sound science as the criteria for the guidelines,” according to Brian Rell, a spokesman. “Politically motivated issues such as taxes on certain foods and environmental sustainability are outside their purview.”
He warned that the panel committee would “keep this in mind” as it considers funding the agencies this spring.
Meat industry lobbyists also attacked the recommendation, asserting that the panel was stacked with health experts who know too little about environmental science.
“The Committee’s foray into the murky waters of sustainability is well beyond its scope and expertise. It’s akin to having a dermatologist provide recommendations about cardiac care,” Barry Carpenter, the chief executive of the North American Meat Institute, said in a statement.
He added that the recommendations “appear to be based on personal opinions or social agendas.”
In the past, federal bureaucrats have come under lobbying pressure from groups that discovered their particular product had been targeted for opprobrium by the Dietary Guidelines.
Americans are eating less meat than they have in the past, but they are still eating too much, according to the panel’s experts, and all that meat consumption is having detrimental effects on the environment.
Many scientists say animal-based foods are a poorer choice for the environment because they are associated with significantly larger carbon emissions than their plant-based counterparts. Animals generate a lot of methane, and the production of meat products requires large amounts of feed, fertilizer and fuel, all of which put stress on the environment.
Numerous studies have documented the outsize impact. A study published last year in the journal Climatic Change reported that meat eaters contributed more to global warming than do fish eaters, vegetarians and vegans.
Red meat in particular, which the committee says Americans need to scale back on for health reasons, has been linked to a larger carbon footprint than other meats. For instance, on a per-kilogram basis, beef is associated with more than twice the carbon emissions of pork, nearly three times that of turkey and almost four times that of chicken, according to the Environmental Working Group.
Red meat is also a comparatively inefficient source of calories and protein. The World Resources Institute has estimated that poultry, pork, shrimp, fish and eggs are all much better sources of those two nutrients relative to the amount of feed and land required to produce them.
“It’s pretty much a consensus view among global environmental scientists that we would be better off if we ate less meat,” said Timothy Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University who focuses on agriculture and climate change.
Miriam Nelson, a professor at Tufts University and one of the committee’s members, said the panel is not saying that people should become vegans.
“But we are saying that people need to eat less meat,” Nelson said. “We need to start thinking about what’s sustainable. . . . Other countries have already started doing this — including sustainability in their recommendations. We should be doing it, too.”
Read more:
How cholesterol went from ‘public menace’ to ‘not a nutrient of concern’
How many eggs a day is okay? Your questions, answered.


A meatless burger that bleeds vegetable juices just debuted at Whole Foods

It was the steak dinners, Ethan Brown says, that changed his life. He had embarked on a career in the clean-energy industry, a path befitting an environmentalist out to save the world. But the incongruity he perceived among his colleagues, who would lament environmental problems while eating beef, pushed Brown — a vegetarian since age 18 — in a different direction. A Beyond Burger patty contains 20 grams of vegetable protein, mostly from peas, while lacking gluten and soy. If you prick a Beyond Burger, does it bleed? Yes, the company says, though its blood is pulverized beet juice. Beyond Meat took a completionist approach to its hamburger doppelganger: The Beyond Burger had to look, smell and feel like meat. Humans have been genetically manipulating fruits and vegetables for thousands of years through selective cultivation. Once we started cultivating wild plants, fruits and vegetables got a lot more colorful.

It was the steak dinners, Ethan Brown says, that changed his life. He had embarked on a career in the clean-energy industry, a path befitting an environmentalist out to save the world. But the incongruity he perceived among his colleagues, who would lament environmental problems while eating beef, pushed Brown — a vegetarian since age 18 — in a different direction.
“We would go to conferences and sit there wringing our hands over all these [energy] issues, and then we’d go to dinner and people would order huge steaks,” Brown told Popular Science in 2013.
Brown left the energy industry and founded a start-up called Beyond Meat in 2009, building on the work of University of Missouri food scientist Fu-hung Hsieh, a pioneer in “high moisture extrusion of fibrous meat analog” — making fake meat taste more like flesh, in other words. Beyond Meat achieved early hype with its Beyond Chicken strips, designed to obliterate memories of limp tofu dogs or crumbly veggie burgers. Observing the strips shred into ligament-like strands at Beyond Meat’s factory in Columbus, Mo., Food Network star and author Alton Brown remarked to Wired in 2013, “It’s more like meat than anything I’ve ever seen that wasn’t meat.”
Beyond Meat bills its latest creation, the Beyond Burger, as the most meat-like non-meat feat yet. It has been on sale for a single day — on Monday, in a Whole Foods in Boulder, Colo. — and is already being compared to, as the New York Times puts it, the “holy grail” of ersatz animal protein: A plant burger upon which a human carnivore would happily snack.
A Beyond Burger patty contains 20 grams of vegetable protein, mostly from peas, while lacking gluten and soy. If you prick a Beyond Burger, does it bleed? Yes, the company says, though its blood is pulverized beet juice. Beyond Meat took a completionist approach to its hamburger doppelganger: The Beyond Burger had to look, smell and feel like meat.
Humans have been genetically manipulating fruits and vegetables for thousands of years through selective cultivation. Once we started cultivating wild plants, fruits and vegetables got a lot more colorful.
This was no easy task. Animal meat is not a uniform product, but plants, on the other hand, don’t come marbled with fat or sprout gristly connective tissues. (Even lab-grown beef patties, a different beast from Beyond Meat’s burger, have struggled to mirror the heterogeneous chow you’d buy from a butcher.) It was up to researchers like Stanford University structural biologist Joseph D. Puglisi, a scientific adviser to Beyond Meat, to devise a way to deposit plant fat in layers. “We were able to get fat distributed throughout a patty — but in meat, fat is distributed in sheets,” he told the New York Times.
Beyond Meat’s ability to replicate meaty layers out of plant matter is among the company’s greatest trade secrets — what puts it in a different category, perhaps, than the long line of faux meats that have come before. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders and a Beyond Meat backer, described the company’s fake chicken to Fast Company as having a meaty mouth feel. “It feels fatty and muscly and like it’s not good for you when you’re chewing it,” Stone said in 2012. “For a long-time vegan, it’s a little bit freaky.”
(How closely a bite of the fake chicken, au naturel, mimics the real bird is a matter of debate; when tucked in a wrap, however, the game seems to change. New York Times’s Mark Bittman wrote in 2012 that Beyond Meat’s Brown fooled the food columnist “badly” in a taste test.)
This may seem like a lot of noise over mashed peas, unless you care about what Brown described in an interview with Business Insider last year as his four horsemen: animal welfare, climate change, human health and natural resources. Livestock — thanks to factors like cow burps — are a significant contributor of the greenhouse gas methane. Because crops take up about half as much space as livestock, a recent study in the journal Nature Communications concluded that a global vegetarian diet would be the most feasible way to feed 2050’s estimated population without expanding today’s farmland.
Livestock farms have direct detrimental impacts on human health as well. Due to widespread antibiotic use in livestock, the Centers for Disease Control estimates that 20 percent of antibiotic resistant infections originate from food. The demand for meat produced cheaply and quickly, too, may lead to poor working conditions; as one worker in the poultry industry told Oxfam America, the individual allegedly had to wear diapers on the job because bathroom breaks were verboten.
Brown says his goal with the Beyond Burger is nothing less than redefining meat to include plant protein, urging Whole Foods to sell the vegetable patties alongside their flesh-and-blood equivalents. On Facebook, some vegetarians expressed discomfort about the Beyond Burgers’s close proximity to what one commenter described as “little cellophaned packets of death.” The company defended its power play for the meat aisle, as it wrote on Facebook, as “the opening shot in our bid to transform the meat case into the protein case.”
If such a complete transformation is the goal, the company will need to send in reinforcement burgers — the first batch sold out in an hour, according to Beyond Meat’s Twitter feed.
The burgers cost $5.99 for a pack of two patties. Beyond Meat says it plans to expand to Denver and Washington, D.C., soon, and beyond Colorado over the summer.