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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Beyond Meat

Does Impossible Foods Have a Training Problem?

Both of my parents were professors, and my wife of ten years does professional development training, so I have developed a very strong appreciation for power of good teaching. Perhaps because I’ve been surrounded by educators my first reaction after being let down by the Impossible burger wasn’t a problem with the product, but it was assuming there was a problem in the way people were taught to cook it.

After years of anticipation to try the meatless burger that “bleeds,” I was extremely disappointed with my first Impossible experience. The problem, in my case, was that the burger was overdone to the point where it didn’t really have a taste. The outside was was a hard shell with a crunch that overrode the rest of the patty. While the inside did have a meat-like texture, it was grey and didn’t “bleed” at all.

And I’m not alone in this. My colleagues Mike and Catherine tried the Impossible burger at a different restaurant, and theirs was overcooked as well. The folks at Ars Technica had mixed experiences, but they too noticed the crust and the dryness of the burger.

As Impossible Burger scales its availability–it’s now available in more than 1,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Hong Kong–how is the company scaling its operations to make sure those burgers are cooked properly?

I talked with the restaurant that served me my Impossible burger and they said that they bought it through a third party food provider who did provide a day of in-person training on how to cook and how to talk about it. The manager at this restaurant said that Impossible burgers cook in about half the time of meat patties, and that my Impossible burger should have been pink in the middle. They went on to say that training one cook doesn’t mean that person trains everyone else in the kitchen properly.

This isn’t just about customer complaints. The question of training is important for two reasons. First, Impossible is among the first wave of companies making meat-like veggie patties at scale. This will be the first experience many customers have with meat-like plant based burgers. If customers are turned off by a bad experience, you reduce the likelihood that they will try another one or adopt it into an ongoing diet (and reducing meat consumption has many benefits for the planet.)

Second, Impossible, which has raised $387.5 million in funding, is essentially handing over the customer experience to a third party that sells lots of items, and may not care. A consumer can have a good experience at a restaurant even though they have a bad meal. If a customer doesn’t like the Impossible Burger, so what? As long as they come back, they can order something else, and the restaurant still makes its money.

This is in contrast to the Beyond Meat burger that I loved, and whose go-to market strategy is to be in the supermarket aisles. Though I felt like I may have overcooked my first Beyond Burgers, I realized that was my fault, and knew how to correct it. So a less-than-perfect first try didn’t stop me from running to the store to buy more.

But I’m less likely to buy another Impossible burger, because I’m counting on the person behind the counter to get it right. I’m hesitant to say that Impossible should follow Apple and build it’s own restaurants–that would be expensive and distract from the company’s core mission–but it would ensure quality and better curate the first time experience with the product.

I reached out to Impossible to find out more about its training procedures, and didn’t hear back in time for publication. If they get back to me, I will update this post.

For now though, the possibility of my ordering another Impossible burger does not look great.

Plant-Based Impossible Foods Raises $114 Million

Perhaps the universe is trying to tell us something this week. The day after 7,000 pounds of raw beef was recalled across nine states, Impossible Foods, maker of a meatless burger, announced that it had closed $114 million in convertible note financing.

The latest money comes from Sailing Capital and the Singapore government-backed Temasek, and brings Impossible’s war chest up to a total of $396 million.

Impossible makes the meat-like, meatless burger that “bleeds” and is sold through restaurants (check out our recent field trip to try one). Impossible burgers are available in more than 1,000 restaurants in the U.S., and company co-founder Pat Brown told TechCrunch that his production facility will be making 2.5 million pounds of its product per month by the end of the year.

Fake meat is having a moment right now as consumers become more conscious of what they eat and the impact it has on the planet. Nielsen research shows that over the last year the plant-based foods category grew 8.1%, hitting $3.1 billion in sales. Plant-based meat sales have grown by 6% in this time.

Impossible Foods isn’t alone in the meatless burger category. Competitor Beyond Meat also offers a (delicious) burger, though theirs is sold in grocery stores. This new generation of beef-like burgers — ones that are plant-based but scientifically formulated to closely mimic meat — are catching on to such an extent that Kraft Heinz had to reformulate its Boca Burger to better adapt to modern tastes.

With five billion pounds of ground beef sold in the U.S. every year, meatless burgers still have a long way to go before they usurp meat ones. But with its new fundraise, Impossible’s mission to reduce the world’s meat consumption just got a little more possible.

Beyond Meat Burgers Blew Me Away

I love cheeseburgers, but the harmful environmental effects of raising beef has all but sapped my appetite for them. Which is why I’m so excited by alterna-meats (or whatever we’ll wind up calling them), and why I was even more excited to see that my local grocer has finally started carrying Beyond Meat burger patties.

Filled with the same adventurous spirit Mike and Catherine had on their recent Impossible foods field trip, I snapped up a package of Beyond Meat burgers and rushed home to do my own taste test.

We’ve written a lot about Beyond Meat. They use pea protein as the basis for their burgers and have celebrity backers like Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio. Their company wants stores to stock their burgers in the meat aisle, which is not without controversy.

Unlike earlier incarnations of “veggie burgers,” which often just substituted beans, soy, or tofu for beef and called it a day, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are trying to replicate the experience of eating meat. So have they succeeded?

Hell yes they have.

Beyond Meat burgers probably won’t fool any die-hard carnivores (they don’t “bleed” like Impossible burgers), but if you don’t have to have beef, this is an excellent substitute. When I sampled them, I found Beyond Meat burgers flavorful and light, with a pleasing texture that was beef-like.

Which is good, because Beyond Meat burgers are not cheap. It was $6.49 for just two patties. Despite Beyond Meat’s marketing demands, their burgers were located in the meat alternative section in the freezer aisle, instead of in between the ground beef and sausage links.

Frozen, they look just like thick beef patties. As they cook, they don’t brown very much, staying pretty rose-colored. I cooked my patties frozen, which, in retrospect, was a mistake. It required a longer cook time to warm the middle and I feel I may have overcooked the outside. Next time I’ll thaw them out fully before putting them on the stove.

Once cooked, I covered my burger with cheese and slid it on to a bun. I decided to eat it without any ketchup or mustard or other added flavorings to get the best sense of its taste. Beyond Meat definitely has that umami flavor, but the word that lingers most as I think back on eating it is… springy. The burger felt light and delicate — without being fragile — but it also had this elasticity to it. This gave it more of a meat texture, though it didn’t feel as dense or heavy as beef.

The biggest sensation I got from my experience eating a Beyond Meat burger was excitement. I loved every bite. And I can’t wait to make another one. I’d like the price to come down a bit, if only to entice more people to try it, but I’m sure that will come. Until then, I’m just happy to be eating cheeseburgers without any guilt.

What’s in a Name (for Lab-grown Meat)?

A classic Portlandia sketch is one about the organic chicken served in a restaurant. In it, Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein ask a server increasingly specific questions about the origins of the poultry they are about to order.

If you thought choosing between organic, grass-fed, free-range, GMO, and locally sourced animal proteins was tough, just wait a few years, because the rise of lab-grown meats is going to add an entirely new layer of complexity to what and how we label our meat choices.

Portlandia - In the restaurant

Lab grown meats aren’t even widely available yet, but they’re enough of a concern that the United States Cattlemen’s Association (USCA) filed a petition with the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, asking for new beef labeling requirements.

From the USCA’s petition:

USCA requests that FSIS limit the definition of beef to product from cattle born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner. Specifically, FSIS should require that any product labeled as “beef” come from cattle that have been born, raised, and harvested in the traditional manner, rather than coming from alternative sources such as a synthetic product from plant, insects, or other non-animal components and any product grown in labs from animal cells.

The USCA wants to make sure that anything labeled “beef” or “meat” in your grocery store or restaurant comes straight from a once-living cow, without a stopover in a lab.

But you can understand why the USCA might have a, well, beef with these newcomers, as lab-grown meat has received a lot of investor interest recently. Just last week, Tyson Foods announced it had invested an undisclosed sum of money into Memphis Meats, which also counts Cargill and Bill Gates among its investors. Then there’s SuperMeat, the Israeli company that raised $3 million last month for its lab-grown chicken. And lest we forget, Leonardo DiCaprio invested in Beyond Meat last summer.

Before we go any further, let’s pause to accept--and then set aside--the larger moral and philosophical issues that we will have to wrestle with as lab-grown meats become more mainstream. Those are very real, and deserve their own blog post. But before we can even start to have a serious discussion about those issues, we need to solve the basic question about what names we’ll even use.

First, there’s the big question of what we call the entire category. “Lab meat” or “cultured meat” or “clean meat” are options, and each come with their own set of implications. For example, does “clean meat” mean everything else is “dirty?”

From there, things get more complex. Even among just Memphis Meats and SuperMeat, there will different labeling issues. Both currently use animal serum to grow their lab-cultured meat, but both are also working on methods that don’t require any animal byproduct. Each version will require their own label to give conscientious consumers more informed decisions (and to provide a marketing hook). Then there’s Beyond Meat, which isn’t meat at all but made from pea-protein—but is sold in the meat aisle at the grocery stores.

Now imagine going to the store to buy a burger in a couple of years. Your options will be ground beef from once-alive cows, animal serum-based lab meat, non-animal-serum lab meat, and plant-based patties that “bleed.” One can only imagine how new sub-categories will pop up to match existing labels such as “organic,” “non-GMO,” and “local.”

And that doesn’t even touch on the animal proteins being grown from other animals such as SuperMeat’s chicken and Finless Foods’ lab grown fish.

It’s a lot to think about, and we won’t solve it all here. In fact, it’s a topic I’m sure we’ll be discussing a lot here as new products come to market, names are tested and customers begin to show their preferences.

Personally, I’m excited for the expanded options and can’t wait to try them all. But what do you think? How should new lab-grown meats be labeled? Does the USCA have a legitimate point? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Building Wine and Meat Molecule by Molecule

“Engineering wines to perfection molecule by molecule.” That’s the tagline of Ava Winery, which is creating synthetic wines without grapes, yeast, or even fermentation.

Mardonn Chua and Alec Lee are the entrepreneurs behind Ava Winery. They create compounds with ethanol that mimic the chemical composition of wines, but that will sell for much less money. The full process involves experimenting with mixes of amino acids, sugars, and ethanol, and they have also tried mimicking the taste of 1992 Dom Perignon.

If you’re interested in the detail-by-detail mechanics involved in mimicking wines, read Mardonn Chua’s Medium post here, where he lays out recipes tried during experiments.

Ava Winery has shown tenacity in the face of critics, too. The editors at New Scientist grabbed headlines when they compared Ava Winery’s Moscato to a plastic “pool shark,” with “essence of plastic bag,” which prompted the winery to respond: “Nothing resembling plastic is an ingredient in the wine, taste is deeply subjective.”

Ava Winery sees the promise of its form of “hacking” extending beyond just wine, and its founders note: “This is what the future of foods looks like: food will be scanned and printed as easily as photographs today. These digital recreations will be identical chemical copies of the originals, capturing the same nutritional values, flavors, and textures of their ‘natural’ counterparts. Part scientists and part artists, our canvas will be macronutrients like starches and proteins; our pixels will be flavor molecules.”

Indeed, Ava Winery’s vision of creating synthetic wine is hardly the only game in town on the synthetic food and wine scene. Memphis Meats, impossible Foods and other companies are focused on synthetic meat and food, and Beyond Meat has gotten rave reviews for its synthetic burgers and also gained interest from both Bill Gates and his former Microsoft buddy Nathan Myhrvold.

In fact, Gates has penned a very interesting post titled “Future of Food,” where he notes the following: “The chicken taco I ate was made using Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative. I wasn’t the only one fooled by how real it tasted. New York Times food writer Mark Bittman couldn’t tell the difference between Beyond Meat and real chicken either. You can read his review here.” Gates has put his money where his mouth is and invested in Beyond Meat, as have others.

A video on Beyond Meat’s vision of taking animal protein out of the food chain is available here:

And then there’s the Impossible Burger. While Beyond Meat is working with other burger joints like Burgerfi to put their meat-alternative in the hands of consumers, Impossible Foods – the brain child of DNA microarray inventor Patrick O. Brown – decided to not only create a plant based burger that bleeds, but to create a national chain of restaurants – to sell the Impossible Burger.

While Ava Winery is focused on triggering the same pleasure receptors that are triggered when we consume a traditionally fermented fine wine, companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have the potential to create inexpensive alternatives to meat that could make a profound nutritional difference for people all around the world.

According to Ava Winery’s Alec Lee: “Today we’re on the cusp of significant technological breakthroughs in food production the likes of which have never been seen before. It took humanity nearly 10,000 years of agriculture to develop many of the crops and animal herds we consume today. It took only a few centuries to develop the farming tools that have culminated in large-scale, efficient mechanized farming. And it only took decades to marry science with food allowing us to directly manipulate the genetic constructs of our food.”

It’s worth watching Lee’s video, where he expands on these concepts and explores Ava Winery’s strategy:

Image credit: Flickr user Star5112