Where's the Beef? The History of Plant-Based Meats
From mammoths to meatballs, It’s hard to imagine a time in human history when animals weren't on the menu. The global meat industry is currently valued at $1.4 trillion, with beef alone expected to reach $380 billion by 2025. And yet, meatless alternatives cooked up in a lab by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat could eat into over 10% of the traditional meat market. According to experts at Barclays, that number is estimated to reach $140 billion in the next decade.
So what exactly is driving consumer demand to put Big Beef out to pasture?
Alternative Snacks
While diet is certainly a major part of the trend, the population of U.S. consumers identifying as vegan or vegetarian has only seen an incremental increase over the past few years. Even then, “meat is murder” doesn’t exactly sell well with the American public. What’s really fueling this 21st century protein shake-up is a growing concern that animal agriculture is negatively impacting our climate and adverse health effects from ingesting red meat.
A 2017 study found that the top three meat producers (JBS, Cargill, and Tyson) emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than all of France. A staggering statistic that, when coupled with recent studies linking red and processed meat to colorectal cancer, could potentially spell slaughterhouse for the meat industry. Much like the adoption of non-dairy alternatives such as soy, almond and oat milk (which caused a $1.1 billion loss for the US dairy industry in 2018), American palettes and perceptions are ever-changing. In 2018, over half of Americans stated they were trying to incorporate more plant-based meals into their daily lives, leaving the future of protein open for innovation.
The Beyond Meat burger
The Salad Days of Meat Replacements
Long before Beyond Meat caught the hungry eyes of Dunkin’ Donuts and Tim Hortons, another pair of breakfast barons had launched a meatless movement of their own. Most remembered for the invention of corn flakes, which popularized cereal as an alternative to traditional animal protein-heavy breakfasts, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg created hundreds of different foods at his facility in Battle Creek, MI. With the help of his brother William, the duo are credited with creating “protose”, the earliest form of imitation meat in the western world in 1889. As a member of the mostly-vegetarian religious group Seventh-Day Adventist Church, Dr. Kellogg believed that a diet centered around “bland” foods would lead Americans away from sin. The group believed that animal based foods created animalistic urges within us. Protose was engineered from a mixture of peanut butter, mashed beans, water, corn starch, onion, sage, and salt that was then steamed to create imitation meat - sound “bland enough” for you? There’s a reason why it became popular at sanitariums.
Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé of the meat-packing industry revealed to the American public exactly how their sausage was made (and contaminated), unintentionally heightening the growing vegetarian movement that spawned a variety of new plant-based meat replacements. While wheat-based seitan and soy-based tofu had been popular in the East for centuries, the Adventists who founded Loma Linda Foods in 1931 would go on to produce the first commercially available soy and wheat-based meats available to American consumers. Later on, in 1981, Oregon restaurateur Paul Wenner created the “Gardenburger” after shaping leftover vegetables and rice pilaf into patties - officially introducing vegetarian alternatives to the neighborhood cookout and creating a multimillion dollar company (and industry) in the process. In 2002, Burger King would launch the BK Veggie Burger in partnership with Morningstar Farms, a subsidiary of the Kellogg Company.
It wasn’t until 2013 that Dutch scientists would create the first truly meatless mockup with a lab-grown burger developed from cow muscle cells, fetal calf blood, and antibiotics (yum!). In a live-streamed tasting, the patties were pronounced “close to meat” but “not that juicy” - so not too far off from their fast food counterparts.
Plant-Based Bull Market
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods launched out of Silicon Valley in 2009 and 2011 respectively, both aspiring to do what no veggie burger could accomplish before - take on Big Beef by the horns.
While both companies’ missions remained the same, their differentiation lies in their “secret” blend of herbs and spices: The Beyond Meat Burger is produced from a powder made by extracting protein from yellow peas called pea protein isolate, while the Impossible Burger is made of soy, potato protein and heme. Fun fact: heme is an essential molecule found naturally in living organisms and causes the Impossible burger to appear to “bleed” just like the real thing.
The Impossible Burger (Photo credit: Sarah Stierch)
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so who better to handle animal-free protein than the OG meat titans themselves? Tyson Foods was a former investor in Beyond Meat until they sold their 6.52% stake in the company in April to focus on their own internal plant-based innovations under the name Raised & Rooted. However, their decision to pull their investment off the grill may have been a bit too premature. Beyond Meat went public in May and their stock sizzled past 734% of its initial offering price, opening the door for partnerships with KFC, Subway and even meal kit service Blue Apron.
While Beyond Meat’s beefed up IPO made headlines last summer, Impossible Foods is #1 in the meatless market. The heme-based heavyweight closed an additional $300 million in funding from multiple investors, including the likes of Katy Perry and Serena Williams. Their cell-based “Impossible Burger” received the royal treatment in August of 2019 after partnering with Burger King. The Impossible Whopper rolled out to 7,000 stores and customers claim they “can’t tell the difference”.
Kroger and Nestle have announced their own plant-based meat alternatives as well. Even perennial vegetarians, Kelloggs, launched their own brand, Incogmeato, under their Morningstar Farms brand.
Frankenstein’s Lobster
While beef and burgers may be king in the developed world, 3.2 billion people on earth rely on fish for over 20% of their animal protein intake. One third of the world’s oceans are overfished and, as a result, fish farming and aquaculture have become the fastest growing agricultural sectors over the past 40 years. While innovations to create larger and faster-growing fish to address the ongoing shortage have had positive short-term applications, fish farming may cause further damage to the environment and put disease and invasive species into the wild.
Aquaculture installations known as “fish farms” produce much of the seafood we eat today.
Surprisingly, compared to the many land-based meat alternatives, only a handful of companies are investing in the new economy of scales. Atlantic Natural Foods, a subsidiary of Loma Linda Foods (remember them?) introduced their own fish-out-of-water imitation: the aptly-named Tuno. This fishless option is available on Amazon and many big name grocers with the primary goal to promote sustainability and alleviate the strain placed on global fisheries. Tyson Foods has cast a wide net on it’s plant-based alternatives through its venture arm by investing in the shellfish stand-in New Wave Foods. With shrimp being the most consumed seafood in the world, the startup makes a substitute from plants such as seaweed and soy protein. New Wave has plans to tackle crab and lobster next.
But “Chicken of the Sea” it is not, so you won’t see the largest seafood chain in the world hopping on the meatless wagon anytime soon. The idea (and taste) of plant-based fish alternatives can be a bit tough to swallow, with Red Lobster CEO Kim Lopdrup declaring, “Yes, we have looked into plant-based seafood — it was terrible. And no, we’re not introducing it.”
Flex Appeal
The USDA estimates that the average American ate approximately 222.4 pounds of red meat in 2018 - the equivalent of 890 McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. That's five times the recommended amount of red meat for a balanced diet! While few people are cold cutting meat entirely to stay healthy, a growing number of Americans are embracing a new regimen known as flexitarianism. While the term is more commonly used by marketers to define the trending segment, flexitarianism is hardly groundbreaking and some don’t even recognize themselves as a participant - the practice aims at reducing the amount of meat you eat or eating meat only with certain meals.
A study conducted by OnePoll found that 59% of US consumers eat plant-based meals at least once a day, fueling the growing number of products being introduced in the global plant-based meat market. 37% of respondents reported that they’ve reduced how much meat they consume, with nearly three quarters stating they did so for health related reasons. With so little meat alternatives available for vegans and vegetarians in the past, plant-based diets faced a dogmatic barrier of entry for the common herbivore - a vacuum that Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods and countless others are fighting to fill.
To Infinity and “Beyond”
So, how much healthier is a plant-based burger anyway? Well, we wouldn’t recommend you Supersize your meal just yet. Compared to the standard 80% lean beef burger option, there isn’t much of a difference in terms of saturated fat and caloric content - you’re better off just ordering a turkey patty instead. Chase Purdy at Quartz points out that because these meat substitutes are created in a lab, they are technically processed foods and thus should steer away from their “natural organic” marketing. Beyond Meat’s sacred anti-cow faced backlash in June after a report from the World Health Organization cited a potential link between consuming heme and gut-forming carcinogens. That same month, a consumer group investigation expressed concerns with a chemical “hexane” used in Beyond Meat’s production process. A representative of Beyond Meat quashed the claims, stating, “There are no other solvents and that process at no time involves the use of or exposure to hexane in any way.”
Don’t have a cow just yet. Plant-based burger patties are gluten, antibiotic, and cholesterol free. Religious groups with rigid dietary restrictions, like the Orthodox jewish community, are now able to consume alternative meats (some even for the first time) thanks to Impossible’s Kosher-approved patty. Regarding its carbon “hoofprint”, there’s no denying the impact that meatless alternatives could have on the climate. It was found that the Impossible Burger’s footprint is 89% smaller than it’s cattle counterpart. In addition, there was 96% less land use and 87% less water use in the production of the plant-based burger.
Greener Pastures
The total land area occupied by animal pasture for agriculture amounts to 26% of the earth’s surface (forgoing the areas covered in ice). As the earth’s population continues to increase, so will deforestation to make room for more livestock - bringing with it further strain on our freshwater preserves, trees and atmosphere. Just because Americans consume the equivalent of nearly 900 burgers a year doesn’t mean you have to supplement each one with a plant-based alternative. Embracing a flexitarian lifestyle can have a lasting effect on your personal health as well as the planet. In other words, continued mass-consumption of beef, pork, poultry, fish and other livestock is not a sustainable means to an end - perhaps the answer lies in a few Unicorns grazing in Silicon Valley (sans the horse-meat, of course).