Digging Deeper...

Since Impossible Foods CEO Patrick Brown told Forbes Magazine in November that his company is getting ready to launch an Initial Public Offering (IPO) sometime next year, it might be a good time for this column to take a deeper dive into faux meat. You can also obtain more information and additional insight about alternative meat products from Beef Checkoff. Kansas Beef Checkoff also has produced several videos on the topic, including “One Simple Ingredient,” which can be found at on YouTube.

Dennis McLaughlin, McLaughlin Writers LLC – Sources: The Counter, September 2021; Wired Magazine, September 2017, December 2021; Forbes Magazine, November 2021; Slate.Com, 2017; International Food Information Council, Food Insights, 2021; Mike Pomeranz, Food and Wine Magazine

Engineering The Impossible Burger

 A couple of years ago, Wired Magazine characterized the Impossible Burger as “not quite impossible, but definitely unlikely.” But Impossible Foods is upbeat, and hopes to seize the moment with an IPO or SPAC (Special Acquisition Company) listing that could value the startup at $10 billion. It already has a public valuation of around $4 billion; and since its founding in 2011 it has raised $1.5 billion in real money from the venture funds of billionaires like Bill Gates and Hong Kong magnate Li Ka-Shing of Horizon Ventures. It’s alternative meat products, which use commodity soy as the main ingredient, are currently sold in more than 20,000 stores worldwide.

Additionally the faux meat industry as a whole is stashing away a “currency” potentially more valuable than cash: Activism. Over the past several years consumer research has explored peoples’ perceptions of environmentally sustainable and healthy diets. Food Insight reports there has been “an uptick in interest in alternative eating patterns including a plant-based food diet.” These and other alternative eating patterns, says Food Insights, an information hub created by nutrition and food safety experts at the International Food Information Council (IFIC),  has led to an increased interest in consuming alternative meat products made from plants and cell cultures. A big motivator for many folks is the idea they can enjoy meat-like products, protect the environment, and advocate for animal welfare. All in one bite.

In the next ten years, these alternative meat products have been forecast to reach a global worth of $140 billion. About a decade ago, what appeared to be a mad scientist’s endeavor, that Slate Magazine called “gruesome” in a 2017 article (because some startups were using fetal cow blood serum in their process to create real-meat-tastes), is being picked up by larger companies. Cargill introduced a plant-based hamburger patty last year firing a competitive shot across the bows of Beyond Meat and Impossible Food. Other meat companies like Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods have also entered the plant-based meat market. 

 While alternatives to conventional meat products are getting some shelf space in grocery stores and supermarkets, the traditional beef, poultry and pork industry isn’t going away. It’s true that plant-based and cell-based counterfeit meat cuts are increasingly available and advocates argue that plant and cell-based meat options herald a movement that will change human eating habits.  

But real meat producers and processors have plenty of muscle mass (so to speak) to meet the challenge of faux meat. It will remain dominant in the protein market. Based on their acquisitions and investment in plant and cell-based meat production, any developments and advances in “fake meat” science and technology, commercialization, marketing, and consumption will probably have the tried-and true expertise, savvy, and experience of the old guard meat industry.

Where’s The Beef?

Plant-based substitutes for meat protein have been around for a long time. Tofu, anyone? “Companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are leveraging new research to make their products more like real meat than ever before,” says Mike Pomranz, who covers the food and wine business for several leading magazines and other media outlets. Much of Beyond Meat’s innovation is built on work conducted on pea proteins at the University of Missouri, “along with a bit of beet juice to create a bleeding effect,” Pomeranz wrote recently in Food and Wine magazine. 

Various consumer research has shown that a lot of vegetarians and people who adhere to limited-meat diets still crave the flavor that real meat offers. Biologist Patrick Brown, founder of Impossible Foods,  

has been trying to replicate the taste of meat by, well, creating real meat. Which brings us to the  question: Where’s the beef in plant-based and cell-cultured/lab-produced meat? Or at least the taste and texture.

It comes from animal blood, specifically from a compound called heme.  Brown believes heme gives ground beef its color and metallic taste from the iron in the heme molecule. Pomeranz adds, “Heme is a component of animal blood that supposedly lends Impossible Burgers their meat-like characteristics.”

“Engineering a beef burger from scratch requires more than just heme, which Impossible Foods bills as its essential ingredient,” Wired Magazine first reported in 2017. “Ground beef features a galaxy of different compounds that interact with each other, transforming as the meat cooks. To piece together a plant-based burger that’s indistinguishable from the real thing, you need to identify and recreate as many of those flavors as possible.” 

That’s accomplished with gas chromatography mass spectrometry technology. The process heats a sample of beef, releasing aromas that bind to a piece of fiber. The machine then isolates and identifies the individual compounds responsible for those aromas. “So then we have kind of a fingerprint of every single aroma that is in beef,” says Celeste Holz-Schietinger, Ph.D., vice president Product Innovation at Impossible Foods. From that fingerprint, she explains, the company can figure out how to make each of those particular flavor compounds. According to Staci Simonich, Ph.D., associate dean of Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences, this sort of deconstruction is common in food science, a way to understand exactly how different compounds produce different flavors and aromas. “In theory, if you knew everything that was there in the right proportions, you could recreate from the chemicals themselves for a specific flavor or fragrance,” she says.

Dealing with texture is another biotech challenge. Impossible Foods isolates individual proteins in the meat. “Then as we identify what those particular protein properties are, we look at plants for plant proteins that have those same properties,” says Dr. Holz-Schietinger. Plant proteins tend to taste more bitter, so Impossible Foods has to develop proteins with a cleaner taste. That research has produced a mix of ingredients: wheat protein to give the burger firmness and chew; potato protein which allows the burger to hold water and transition from a softer state to a more solid state during cooking. For fat, Impossible Foods uses coconut with the flavor sucked out. And then of course you need the heme, which drives home the flavor of “meat.”

Faux Future?

Making something that accurately mimics the taste, look, feel, and smell of meat is actually not all that complex. So say the Impossible Meat scientists. Making the early burgers were much more complex, Dr. Holz-Schietinger says, because her team didn’t fully understand it all.  Experiments with cucumber and malodorous durian fruit didn't pan out, she notes, nor did trying to replicate the different connective tissues of a cow. “Now we understand which each component drives each sensory experience.”

But there are other complexities attached to taking faux meat mainstream, especially cell-cultured meat. Food safety groups have not been happy. Among other things, they are upset that GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”) Notices filed with the FDA are voluntary, not mandatory. 

Another problem is cost. Pioneers of lab-grown meat (not to be confused with plant-based meat alternatives) claim that costs for cell-cultured are poised to plummet drastically. They point to two new studies (Fall 2021) from CE Delft, a Dutch consulting firm, concluding that cell-cultured meat could be cost competitive within a decade. A recent BBC story reported the cost of production had dropped from $325,000 a pound to just $11.36, and cell-cultured meat could be on peoples’ plates in five years. Peter Verstrate, head of Netherlands-based Mosa Meat told the BBC, “I am confident that when it is offered as an alternative to meat people will find it hard not to buy our product for ethical reasons.”

Not So Fast

A study released this past September by The Counter, an independent, nonprofit news service investigating the forces shaping how and what Americans eat, more or less said that such optimism and  enthusiasm is nonsense. Entitled “Lab-Grown Meat Is Supposed To Be Inevitable; Science Tells A Different Story,” the lengthy report observes that “splashy headlines have long overshadowed inconvenient truths about biology and economics. Now, extensive new research suggests the industry may be on a billion dollar crash course with reality.” 

The paper is available at https://thecounter.org, and Digging Deeper will review it in depth in an upcoming Council newsletter.