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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

fake meat

Poop vs. Methylcellulose: Impossible Responds to Critical Super Bowl Ad

If you watched the Super Bowl yesterday, you may have noticed a particular ad vying for your attention between plays. The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a lobbying agency, made a commercial claiming that laxatives were used in plant-based meat.

The spot, which aired in the DC market, showed a spelling bee where a cute child had to try and spell “methylcellulose,” which the spelling bee guide defined as “a chemical laxative that is also used in synthetic meat.” A voiceover went on to say that meat alternatives contain dozens of chemical ingredients and “if you can’t spell or pronounce it then maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.”

Synthetic Meat Spelling Bee Commerical: 30 sec
Center for Consumer Freedom’s anti-faux meat commercial

The commercial is a clear swipe at plant-based meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, both of which are already battling naysayers (including chains like Chipotle) who claim their product is too processed or artificial.

But Impossible Foods at least didn’t take the challenge lying down. The alternative meat company clapped back by releasing a parody of the CCF’s ad. In it, another spelling be contestant has to spell a much simpler word: “poop.” The pronouncer, played by Impossible Foods’ CEO Pat Brown, defined it as the bacteria-filled stuff that “comes out of your butt” and is also “in ground beef we make from cows.”

A voiceover then goes on to state that out of 300 samples of ground beef tested by Consumer Reports in 2015, all of it contained fecal bacteria (even samples from grass-fed and organic cows). “Just because a kid can spell poop, doesn’t mean that you or your kids should be eating it,” the spot concludes.

Impossible™ Spelling Bee

This isn’t the first time that the CCF has thrown shade at meat alternatives. Just last week the group took out a full-page ad in The New York Times featuring two lists of ingredients. On the top it asked “Fake Meat or Dog Food: Which is Which?”

It’s also not the first time that Impossible Foods has taken a stand against alt-meat critics. Last May the startup published a strongly-worded rebuttal against an article claiming that plant-based meat contained weed killing chemicals.

It’s tempting to dismiss the CCF, which is a right-wing organization with a sketchy-at-best agenda, as biased extremism. The lobbying group is “supported by restaurants, food companies, and thousands of individual consumers,” and it seems safe to assume that at least some of those companies have a stake (steak?) in the meat industry. Of course they want to criticize plant-based meat any way they can — and an easy tactic is to frame it as synthetic, heavily processed, and “fake.”

Personally, I think yesterday’s commercial-off goes to show that when it comes to the fight for consumer’s protein choices, there are lots of ways to spin it. Yes, plant-based meat has more ingredients, including some unfamiliar ones. But just because you can’t pronounce them doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad for you. In fact, as CNET points out, methylcellulose is an ingredient that’s also used in baked goods and desserts, making it relatively innocuous.

Meat, on the other hand, has a very simple ingredient list. But there are plenty of unsavory aspects to the meat industry, including environmental costs and the whole eating-dead-animals thing. It goes to show just how critical a role that marketing will play in framing consumer perceptions of meat, both plant-based and traditional.

Yesterday’s commercial-off illustrates that criticism against plant-based meat is not going anywhere. In fact, the more that the alternative meat space grows in popularity, the more fire it will attract from beefy opponents. Impossible and others should be ready to weather the storm (and fight back), both on the advertising field and off.

Will Beyond Meat’s Small Army of Celeb Endorsers Help Sell its IPO?

Alex Honnold may be the only person to have ever free solo climbed El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, but he is just one of many sport celebs who hopped on board the Beyond Meat bandwagon this week. (I just watched Free Solo so I have the climber on the brain.)

Honnold is actually among the least-known sports figures who are were announced this week as investors and champions for the plant-based burger company. This list is rather lengthy, so I’m just going to quote the Beyond Meat blog here:

The new roster is being unveiled as part of our new Go Beyond campaign and includes Kyrie Irving, Shaquille O’Neal, Chris Paul, DeAndre Hopkins, Victor Oladipo, Lindsey Vonn, DeAndre Jordan, JaVale McGee, Harrison Barnes, Malcolm Jenkins, Derrick & Charity Morgan, Alex Honnold, Shaun White, and Luke Walton. These athletes join existing Beyond Meat shareholders JJ Redick, Tony Gonzales, Leonardo DiCaprio, Thomas Middleditch, David Wright, Eric Bledsoe, Maya Moore, and Tia Blanco, as well as forward-thinking celebrities Snoop Dogg, Common, Jessica Chastain, Nicole Williams and Liza Koshy.

We asked Beyond for some more details around the nature of these celebrity investments and will update this post if we hear back.

Beyond Meat is adding all this star power on the heels of the company releasing a new recipe and in the run up to its hotly anticipated IPO. Will this cadre of cool spokespeople help Beyond’s public offering pop?

All eyes are on the Beyond IPO as it will be a bellwether for the fake meat industry. Beyond Meat itself has raised $122 million while alterna-protein rival, Impossible Foods has raised $387.5 million. In addition to those two behemoths needing to generate a return for their investors, there are a number of other plant-based protein startups coming up that will be looking to find and fund their own paths to success. The hit or miss of Beyond’s IPO could impact their ability to raise money and scale as well.

While Honnold is certainly not alone in his endorsement, we’ll just have to see if Beyond’s stock will climb as well as he does. (Seriously, go watch Free Solo right now, it’s terrifyingly great.)

Will Alterna-Meats Stupefy Smart Ovens?

One of the benefits of using a connected oven like the June is the fact that the built-in HD camera automatically recognizes the food you’re cooking. Throw in a salmon and the June recognizes it, and helps you cook it perfectly. Even if it doesn’t automatically recognize a food, the touchscreen UI is clear enough that it’s easy to navigate homescreen > seafood > salmon in just a few taps.

But when I was making Beyond Burgers the other night, and the June thought they were regular beef burgers, it occurred to me that the coming wave of alternative, plant-based proteins is going to make things more complicated for the June, and any other appliance that either recognizes your food and/or has pre-set cook functions.

Beyond and Impossible burgers look and even “bleed” like beef burgers, which will bring up a couple of issues for smart cooking appliances. First, the device will have to develop new means for detecting what is placed in it. A fake meat patty will look a lot like a traditional one, yet different from other plant-based patties (like a black bean burger) — how important will it be to automatically tell them apart?

Second, not all “veggie” burgers are made the same. There is a “Veggie Burger” setting on the June, but that is more of an old-school Boca burger. I reached out to June to ask about how it will incorporate items like Beyond and Impossible, and this is what a company rep emailed me back with:

“We do think that Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger will have their own Cook-Programs in the future because of their different composition of protein (Beyond Burger being made of a mixture of pea protein while Impossible Burger is a mixture of wheat protein, potato protein and heme).”

And that’s just burgers! Just about all of the animal proteins we eat now will have a plant-based analog soon enough. Just has its mung bean-based “eggs.” Seattle Food Tech has its wheat-based “chicken nuggets.” And Good Catch is creating plant-based fish.

The June has already made moves to become more of an iPhone-like platform with the recent addition of the dedicated Whole Foods button on its touchscreen to automatically cook items from that grocer. If June creates separate settings for Beyond and Impossible, how far down that rabbit hole will it and other appliance makers go? At what point in popularity does fake salmon need to get before June puts resources into a specialized cook program? And how many brands, each with their own cook program and accompanying on-screen instructions, will June have to include?

Yes, there is probably no greater measure of my privilege than me fretting over how many buttons I’ll need to tap when cooking my plant-based burger in my expensive connected oven. But this isn’t entirely just a thought experiment either. Sales of plant-based foods boomed last year, hitting $3.3 billion, and plant-based meat alternatives are only getting better and cheaper. Any appliance company that makes guided cooking apps, cookware or appliances will have to keep one eye on the market and adapt now to an increasingly diverse plant-based food future.

Seattle Food Tech Raises $1M, Will Ship its Plant-Based Chicken Nuggets this Month

Seattle Food Tech, a startup that creates plant-based “chicken” nuggets, has raised a fresh $1 million in capital from investors including Liquid 2 Ventures, Sinai Ventures Fund, Uphones Capital and VegInvest (h/t Food-Navigator). This brings the total amount raised by Seattle Food Tech to $2 million.

Seattle Food Tech separates itself from other alterna-meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible in a few ways. First, the company uses a specialized means of production to better replicate the texture of “real” chicken nuggets through a combination of wheat, oil, chicken flavoring and more. The company says it can implement this manufacturing at large scale production.

Large scale production is important, as unlike its competition, Seattle Food Tech is not going after the consumer market and instead targets commercial customers like school and hospital cafeterias. As my colleague, Catherine Lamb wrote earlier this year:

By opting not to sell their nuggets as a CPG, Seattle Food Tech would be able to offer them at roughly the same cost as meat — around $2 per serving. Lagally says that eventually, once they get their volumes up, they might consider putting their products in large grocery stores, such as Walmart and Costco.

Since the time of that article, Seattle Food Tech’s B2B go-to market strategy remains a smart one as competition in the fake meat space has certainly become more fierce. Next year Beyond Meat will go public, and Impossible will bring its heme-burgers to grocery store aisles. Beyond is already rapidly expanding its product line, and by sticking with institutional customers, Seattle Food Tech can sidestep costly marketing battles with better funded companies.

That strategy seems to be already paying off. Even though Seattle Food Tech has only been around for nine months, the company said in a press release that it will start delivering alterna-nuggets to select customers this month.

We had a chance to taste Seattle Food Tech’s nuggets at our recent Smart Kitchen Summit show here in Seattle, and they were actually pretty good! You can check out the company’s Founder and CEO, Christie Lagally in this video from the Summit, talking about the future of meat:

Plant-Based, Cellular & Sustainable: Exploring The Future of Meat

Beyond Meat’s Sausage Patties are Amazing, and a Smart Play for Breakfast Business

The first thing fans of Beyond Meat (of whom I am one) should know is that the company knows their product is hard to find and they are working on it. Beyond Meat just brought on a second production facility in Missouri to help fill the empty aisles at your local grocery store (except for you, England — sorry!).

The second thing fans of Beyond Meat should know is that its forthcoming sausage patty is, to this writer, the best product the company has created so far. It’s still in development with no announced release date, but after tasting it at the Beyond Meat R&D facility in El Segundo yesterday I’m convinced this product is a game changer in the alterna-meat category. In fact, I think it could bring in a whole new line of business for the company. But more on that in a minute.

Inside the Beyond Meat HQ, you can see the real science behind fake meat. PhDs in lab coats run samples of pea proteins through microscopes, while others try to replicate aromatic meat molecules from the plant world, while still others put patties in a machine that replicates chewing (or biting — two very different things) to test for elasticity. The team there is constantly iterating and running tests to make its plant-based products more meat-like.

The Beyond Meat tour featured a stop in its kitchen, where the company’s chefs whipped up some their burgers, brats and sausage patties for me to try. These were high-end creations piled with truffles, carmelized onions, pickles, and a variety of delectable sauces. And while all were delicious, the sausage patty really stood out.

Made from peas, mung beans, brown rice and sunflower seeds, the patty faithfully recreated the experience of eating a sausage biscuit from McDonald’s. And I mean that as high praise. It had nice peppery tones that gave the patty’s flavor some depth, the right color and smell, and a crust that gave it that slight crunch. To be honest, it’s a much better simulacra than the Beyond brats, which, while good, were over-engineered to the point of feeling synthetic.

Getting the patty right isn’t just about flavor, though. For Beyond Meat it also means entering into a new category: breakfast foods. Right now, the company offers plenty of options for lunch and dinner; the addition of the sausage patty could lead to people eating Beyond products multiple times a day. (Perhaps a Beyond sausage patty would go well with some JUST plant-based eggs in the morning.)

The Beyond rep didn’t provide a timeline for the patty’s release, but my guess is that it probably won’t be until next year, given that the company is still wresting with its existing supply issues and expanding availability for its sausage brats line.

For fans of Beyond Meat though, the wait will be worth it.

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.