Looks like chicken
Substitute-meat makers’ art imitates life.
ETHAN Brown held up one of his ready-to-eat vegetarian chicken strips and peeled off stringy strands that mimicked the moist meat of the real thing.
“That’s the beauty. That’s absolutely everything,” said Brown, founder of Beyond Meat, admiring the filaments of faux chicken at a cafe near the company’s Southern California headquarters.
The company gets close to creating that authentic but elusive texture by blasting soya and pea proteins through an alternating cascade of high heat and high pressure in a stainless steel machine.
The result is mock meat that replicates the genuine product enough to make people forget the tastes of springy tofu turkey, MSG-laden veggie burgers and plasticky facon – fake bacon, for the uninitiated.
So convincing is Brown’s imitation poultry that it has attracted investment from tech giants such as Microsoft Corp’s Bill Gates, Twitter Inc co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Whole Foods Market helped refine the product before rolling it out at its stores last year.
“I thought they were just another boutique business selling overpriced products to wellheeled vegetarians at Whole Foods. But I was blown away when they came to meet me,” Stone said.
“They pitched really big thinking,” he said. “They said they weren’t just going after the meat market; they wanted to be meat. They said their competitors are the people who make chicken.”
Brown, who started out in the energy industry, sees mock meat not only as a much healthier alternative but also as a way to reduce methane and other harmful gases emitted by animals and to ease a meat shortage predicted to occur by midcentury.
Beyond Meat and other makers of such substitutes are chasing increasingly discerning palates by cooking up grub that captures more of the bite and appearance of animal flesh.
Match Meats of St Louis, Missouri, for instance, offers a line of vegan ground meat substitutes.
Field Roast of Seattle takes inspiration from traditional charcuterie to offer vegan products such as Wild Rice Cranberry Fig Roast En Croute and White Truffle Country Pate.
All are fighting for a piece of the meat-alternatives market, which has grown 8% from 2010 through last year to US$553mil (RM1.76bil), according to research firm Mintel.
Janet Corvin, 52, has been a