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Plant-based meat is no longer a niche product, but an established part of vegetarian and vegan diets.
A change is intended to strengthen sales, but sounds worrying.
Plant-based meats—think the Impossible Burger or Quorn “chicken” nuggets—typically contain a long list of strange-sounding ingredients: pea protein, potato starch, coconut oil, mycoproteins, and more.
These ingredients have turned off some consumers and raised concerns about the highly processed nature of the average veggie burger or fake piece of bacon.
Meat in meat-free meat?
But now some startups are planning to add another component to the mix: animal fat.
Some companies are growing fat in the lab and hoping to combine it with wheat protein and spices to create a particularly meaty form of plant-based bacon.
Others use animal byproducts from traditional meat production and mix them with plant-based ingredients to create ground steak cuts.
Vegan meat, meat substitute type beef is fried in a frying pan with fat.
© Bihlmayerfotografie/Imago
The shift could change the identity of plant-based meat, which has previously been seen primarily as an option for vegans and vegetarians.
But advocates see it as something special: a tasty way to bring plant-based meat away from the small share of consumers who don't eat meat and into the mainstream.
“It's fundamentally difficult to make plants taste like meat,” says Saba Fazeli, co-founder of startup Choppy, formerly known as Paul's Table, which incorporates fat into plant-based meat.
"I'd say it's impossible."
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Why plant-based meat has a difficult time
In the late 2010s, it looked like plant-based meat was taking over the world.
Shares of Beyond Meat, which makes a plant-based burger colored red with beet juice, rose to over $200 per share in 2019.
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But after the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the market collapsed.
In 2022, sales of plant-based meat in the United States fell 8 percent compared to the previous year, and the stock prices of companies that were once Wall Street darlings plummeted.
Food analysts say the taste of plant-based meat isn't that good yet - and even though meat consumption accounts for about 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, most consumers make their choice based not so much on sustainability but rather on cost and of taste.
“People may want to change the world and live a sustainable life, but at the end of the day they only want to do that if they can eat produce that tastes really good,” says Ed Steele, co-founder of London-based startup Hoxton Farms.
New Product Development Executive Chef Josh Hatfield cooks plant-based pork belly at Hoxton Farms Kitchen in London on November 21.
© Jose Sarmento Matos/The Washington Post
The need for fat
For some companies, the solution is to incorporate one of the most flavorful components of real meat: fat.
“Fat is an incredibly important part of the sensory experience of food,” says Priera Panescu, senior plant-based meat scientist at the nonprofit Good Food Institute.
Fat coats the tongue and allows the flavors to linger much longer than they would otherwise.
It also carries scents and helps enhance the aroma of a freshly fried steak or chicken breast.
In one form or another, animal fat gives burgers their juice and pastries their flaky crust.
The most commonly used fat alternative in plant-based meats currently is coconut oil.
“While coconut oil is better than some other vegetable oils for plant-based meats, it’s really not like animal fat,” says Panescu.
Coconut oil has a much lower melting point than animal fat - meaning it melts too early during cooking, giving plant-based meat a greasier consistency.
Plus, it doesn't coat the mouth in the same way.
Without fat, the taste of plant-based meats is “incredibly disappointing,” says Steele.
His company is growing lumps of pork belly fat in a London lab - fat that could ultimately provide the juice for a plant-based meatball.
In California, the start-up Mission Barns has taken a similar approach: It grows pork fat in the laboratory that can be processed into plant-based bacon, meatballs or sausages.
“We believe this is the biggest missing piece,” said Eitan Fischer, the company’s managing director.
The companies also claim that lab-grown fat has advantages over traditional lab-grown muscle tissue.
Growing meat remains prohibitively expensive - while most companies don't publicly disclose their costs, lab-grown or "cultured" meat is estimated to cost hundreds of dollars per pound.
That's largely because the process requires a variety of expensive medical equipment, from bioreactors to the soup-like nutrients pumped in to feed the growing cells.
Lab-grown fat still requires some of this equipment, but it requires different, cheaper nutrients than regular muscle cells.
“You don’t need expensive proteins, just very cheap sugar and very cheap oils,” says Fischer.
“It doesn’t take much to convince a fat cell that it’s time to store more energy.”
Some fat with plants
Hybrid protein products have been around for a long time - major food companies like Perdue Farms have experimented with offering proteins that are mostly meat with some plant-based proteins mixed in, sold under optimistic names like "Chicken Plus."
But the new companies are turning this process on its head: They are developing products that consist of around 90 percent vegetable proteins and only 10 percent fat.
This fat doesn't even have to be grown in a lab.
Fazeli's company Choppy incorporates meat industry byproducts - such as fat, collagen and broth ingredients - into plant-based products.
For most vegetarians and vegans, their products would be a no-go.
But Fazeli and his co-founder Brice Klein aren't necessarily looking for vegetarian buyers.
In the plant-based meat space, "we've taken this kind of 'field of dreams,' 'build it and they will come' approach," says Klein.
“We have poured billions of dollars into this space and the number of people eating the product has not changed.
Over the past 20 years, the share of U.S. consumers who identify as vegetarian or vegan has remained relatively stable at less than 10 percent.
For this reason, Klein argues that trying to eat a completely plant-based diet could be a waste of time.
“We are more interested in the mass market audience,” he said.
Their prepackaged plant-based products - with added fat - are sold in some grocery stores in California and Utah.
Most companies offering cultured fat are still awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration.
Will these new products work?
That is hard to say.
Some of the problems with plant-based meats - consumer distrust because of long ingredient lists, high processing costs and higher costs - could also carry over to the new food blends.
The food industry still has to prove that a meat alternative can take a significant share of the market for chicken, pork and beef.
But the meat industry's enormous land requirements - combined with sky-high carbon emissions - require a change in our eating habits.
“The way we produce food is not sustainable,” says Faraz Harsini, senior scientist for cultured meat at the Good Food Institute.
“There must be alternatives.”
About the author
Shannon Osaka
is a climate reporter who covers politics, culture and science for The Washington Post.
Before joining the Post, she was a climate reporter at the environmental nonprofit Grist.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 5, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.