Fooled ya: These burgers aren’t beef at all
Next-gen veggie burgers look, taste like real meat — to the chagrin of the cattle industry
A new breed of plant-based burgers — ones that actually taste like real beef — are poised to add some sizzle to the restaurant industry.
Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, both based in California, are on the forefront of delivering what they say are delicious, healthy burgers made entirely from plants. They could soon challenge existing meat producers and steer more consumers away from meat. But price could stand in their way, even as these new plantbased burgers gain prominence in restaurants and retail stores nationwide.
They already are beginning to make inroads. Last week, a Los Angeles-based restaurant chain, Umami Burger, began offering the Impossible Burger at nine locations. Both makers plan to eventually introduce their products at large-scale burger chains.
The companies have significant backing. Impossible Foods says it has $180 million in investments from supporters such as Bill Gates and Google Ventures, and Beyond Meat also received venture capital from Gates as well as the Humane Society.
The reaction from the beef industry, however, hasn’t been as enthusiastic.
Plant-based burgers are breaking into the market at a time of rising beef consumption, which the Department of Agriculture expects to grow 11.7% by 2025. And many cattle farmers don’t have an incentive to switch to growing plant-based proteins, said Sara Place, senior director of sustainable beef production research at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
Though their products are similar, the two companies are taking different marketing directions. Impossible Foods started
introducing its meatless patty to chefs in New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas last year after spending five years developing the product. Beyond Meat is going straight to supermarkets. It is now sold in about 11,000 stores nationwide, including some Walmart, Target, Whole Foods Market and Kroger locations.
“Impossible Foods is ... seeding their products with trendsetters and influencers and hoping that they’ll go viral,” said food marketing expert Jeffrey Hirsch, founder of marketing firm The Right Brain Studio. “That seems to be a more exclusive, premium, higherprofit-margin kind of strategy, where they’re counting on people to discover (the burger) when they go out and then demand it at the supermarkets.”
Impossible Foods’ burger is made from a base of wheat and potato protein, but its most unique — and patented — ingredient is heme (rhymes with “team”), a molecule found in blood that gives the Impossible Burger its meaty taste and red color. Heme used for the burgers is harvested from yeast rather than animals.
Patrick Brown, who taught biochemistry at Stanford University for 25 years before founding Impossible Foods, said he sees a far larger market for the Impossible Burger than the fewer than 4% of Americans that the Vegetarian Resource Group said are vegan or vegetarian, based on a Harris Poll survey last year. “People who love meat … do not value the fact that meat comes from an animal,” Brown said. “This food is delicious in a way that only meat is delicious, and they want that deliciousness.”
Beyond Meat spent seven years developing its burger, which uses pea protein and beet juice to mimic the texture and ap- pearance of ground beef.
Founder Ethan Brown, who is not related to Impossible’s Patrick Brown, said that he doesn’t see Beyond Meat as a threat to big meat producers. Instead, he wants them to join him in producing plant-based rather than animal-based protein. And some, such as meat industry giant Tyson — which has a 5% stake in Beyond Meat — have already started to listen.
“We are a threat to people who insist that meat has to come from an animal,” Ethan Brown said. “It depends on how open they are.”
Still, one barrier is price. The Impossible Burger currently sells for $16 at Umami Burger. Beyond Meat sells two quarter-pound patties for $5.99.
Another company, Beyond Meat, uses pea protein and beet juice to mimic the texture and appearance of ground beef.