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plant-based

February 12, 2019

Seattle Food Tech Launches Plant-Based Nuggets at Hospital Cafeteria

The food at hospital cafeterias (and cafeterias in general) can get a bad rap. But today in Seattle, limp salads and neon jello were replaced by crispy chicken nuggets that just happened to be made out of plants.

The Swedish Medical Center in Seattle’s Capitol Hill became the first hospital to serve Seattle Food Tech‘s (SFT) signature plant-based nuggets during a one-day pop-up event. The nuggets are made of wheat protein, soy, oil, and (vegan) chicken flavoring, and covered in a crispy breading. Each five-nugget serving contains 19 grams of protein, which is about 50 percent more than a regular chicken nugget. The hospital served a special of eight nuggets plus fries for $4.95; a comparable-sized serving of traditional chicken strips with fries is $7.50.

We got to taste SFT’s nuggets at the Smart Kitchen Summit last October, and they were pretty good. The company has since tweaked the recipe, and the newest version is crispier on the outside and juicier on the inside. There’s a tiny bit of a soy aftertaste, but a swipe of barbecue sauce or ketchup easily masks that. Passers-by at the hospital who stopped for a sample seemed to be fans of the plant-based nuggets, with a few even saying that they wouldn’t have known that they weren’t eating chicken.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

While SFT’s pop-up at the hospital is just a one-day experiment, it’s been the company’s plan all along to sell their nuggets wholesale to large institutional dining establishments like corporate and hospital cafeterias and school lunchrooms. Led by CEO Christie Lagally, who cut her teeth at Boeing and the Good Food Institute, SFT doesn’t want to just make really good-tasting vegan nuggets; they want to revolutionize the plant-based manufacturing process so they can make good-tasting nuggets accessible to big groups of people at low price points.

SFT has raised $2 million in VC funding and last year completed a stint at the prestigious Y Combinator. Lagally told me the company has four institutional customers in place, though she wouldn’t disclose which ones. It also recently doubled its staff and commissary kitchen space to ramp up production to supply the new partners. Next up, Lagally and her team are developing “chicken” patties, “chicken” strips and “fish” sticks.

Judging from the reaction at the Swedish Medical Center, SFT won’t have a problem tempting customers to try its nuggets, or getting instiutional partners to serve them. Now it just remains to be seen if the startup can scale sustainably and keep costs down. A tall order to be sure, but with SFT’s team (specifically Lagally’s engineering background) and its smart go-to-market strategy, I’m betting we’ll soon see a lot more of their plant-based nuggets popping up in cafeterias.

February 12, 2019

When It Comes to Labeling Food “Meat,” Where Do We Draw The Line?

Things used to be so simple. Meat used to cover products that came from slaughtered animals, and everything else was, uh, not meat. But now the lines are blurred — and the meat industry is pissed about it.

This weekend the New York Times ran a story about pushback from animal agriculture industry groups against use the use of the term “meat” to describe any sausage, chop, or burger made from plants or grown in a petri dish — in short, anything that didn’t come from a slaughtered animal. Just this week, Arizona and Arkansas joined the over a dozen states that have introduced meat labeling bills.

The first law of this sort was passed last May in Missouri. The law prohibited companies from “misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” A few months after it passed, a coalition led by Tofurky, the American Civil Liberties Union and others challenged the new law.

The debate isn’t just limited to the butcher counter. In July of last year FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced that his agency would start tightening regulations over what could and couldn’t be called “milk.”

On the surface, this pushback may seem a little bit petty. After all, the U.S. meat industry was worth $4.2 trillion in 2016 and show no signs of slowing down, while plant-based meat netted a comparatively tiny $670 million in 2018. Why does Big Meat care what vegan burgers call themselves?

In short, they care because they’re threatened. From 2017 to 2018, demand for plant-based meat rose a whopping 24 percent. To meet that demand we’ve seen an explosion of plant-based meat options, many of which do a pretty dang good job imitating meat thanks to new technologies like genetically modified heme or new protein extrusion methods. On top of that, companies like Beyond Meat are pushing to have their products displayed in the meat aisle of grocery stores.

Plant-based meat is no longer a fringe product for hippies — it’s now a legitimate competitor for traditional meat. And animal agriculture groups know it.

Once cell-based meat comes to market, the issue of what defines “meat” will become even more pressing. No matter how bloody or juicy the taste, plant-based burgers are still fundamentally not made of animals. Cell-based (or cultured) meat, however, is actual animal tissue — that just happens to have been made in a bath of serum, not a slaughterhouse. And some cultured meat companies have made the point that cell-based fish and pork must be labeled as “fish” and “pork” for both allergy and transparency reasons.


Finless Foods is creating cultured bluefin tuna [Taylor Grote vis Upsplash]

It’s hard to make the argument that meat made from actual animal muscle and fat cells should be called anything other than “meat.” (The USDA will have the final say on how to label cell-based meat.) However, adding qualifiers seems to make a lot of sense, both for plant-based and cultured meat. Not only to appease the cattlemen, but also for consumers.

Nebraska Democratic state senator Carol Blood, a vegan, was inspired to write a meat-labeling bill after she witnessed two women who were unclear over whether or not Beyond Meat contained animal tissue. “I don’t care that it says burger — I care that it says it’s meat,” Ms. Blood said in the New York Times.

The fact that meat alternatives are, well, alternative to meat is one of their main selling points. It would follow, then, that these companies would want to call out the fact that their products are not made from slaughtered animals. At the same time, plant-based meat companies are trying to draw in flexitarian consumers by making products that taste just as good as meat, without the animal.

Do you see how easy it is to spin yourself up into a tangled mess of meat labeling confusion?

There isn’t a clear-cut answer here, but I for one am team let-alternatives-call-themselves-meat-if-they-want — as long as they add a qualifier like “plant-based” or “cultured” so that the consumer is clear on what they’re buying.

Instead of putting their energy into pushing for labeling crackdowns, meat industry players would do well to take a page from Tyson’s and Cargill’s books and invest in their competition. (In fact, Tyson is reportedly developing its own line of plant-based “meats.”) It won’t solve the meat labeling question, but by having a stake in the meat alternatives game could help ease tensions in a future that’s only going to get more and more complicated.

February 11, 2019

Are Soy Burgers Enough to Tempt Meat Lovers? Sweden’s Oumph! is Counting on It

There’s a new plant-based burger in town, and its name is Oumph!

And by town, I mean Europe. The latest offering from Swedish company Food for Progress, the new Oumph! burger (pronounced “Oomph!”) is soy-based — like Oumph!’s entire plant-based product lineup — and gets its red, beefy color from beets.

In fact, after speaking with Oumph! marketing director Henrik Åkerman, the burger seems to be made only out of soy and beet juice.

I haven’t tried the Oumph! burger yet and don’t know what sort of technology goes into transforming their products. However, my gut tells me that with an ingredient list like that (read: basically just soy) it’ll be hard to stack up to other meat-like vegan burgers, like Beyond and Impossible. The latter two companies have spent years tweaking their burger recipes in labs, harnessing technology and different ingredient ratios in an attempt to make plants taste better than beef from a cow. Impossible even went so far as to genetically engineer heme to emulate the taste of blood. I’m skeptical that a burger made out of what seems like just soy with some beet juice for color could tempt people away from beef in the same way.

Some of Oumph’s other offerings [Photo: Oumph website.]

The Oumph! burger debuted last week in Stockholm’s Fastfood & Cafe, and will roll out in Scandinavia, the U.K. and Singapore early this spring. According to Åkerman, a two-pack of quarter-pound patties will retail for around €3.5 ($3.95). Compared to Beyond, which costs £5.50 ($7.00) for two patties, that’s a steal.

The company intends to sell the new plant-based burgers both through retail channels and in restaurants, though they have yet to reveal any specific partners. However, they currently sell their other plant-based products in supermarkets throughout Scandinavia, as well as in Tesco and Whole Foods stores in the U.K., so we can safely assume the new Oumph! burger will make an appearance over there during the next few months.

If so, that means that in the U.K. they’ll have to compete with Beyond, which debuted in Tesco at the end of 2018. But there’s plenty of room for more vegan “meat” offerings. Demand for plant-based food is on the rise: according to Mordor Intelligence, between now and 2023 the European plant-based protein market will increase at a CAGR of 7.1 percent.

Grocery stores are taking note of the growing demand for plant-based foods. In fact, Tesco recently increased its vegetarian and vegan offerings after observing that sales of refrigerated and frozen plant-based products rose by 50 percent in 2018.

“Beyond and Impossible have done a great job, but there is definitely room for some competition,” Åkerman told me. I’m just not sure if soy will be giving them much of a run for their money.

February 7, 2019

Good Food Institute Announces Winners of $3M Grant to Revolutionize Meat Alternatives

Back in September, GFI called for applicants for a $3 million grant to fund research into plant- and cell-based meat. Yesterday, the company named the 14 winning scientists, each of whom will receive up to $250,000 over the next two years to fund their investigations.

The chosen projects are pretty evenly divided between cell-based meat (six companies) and plant-based meat (eight companies). Some topics were broad, like how to scale up cell-based meat production, how to improve texture in plant-based meats. Others were quite specific, like a project exploring the potential of red seaweed as a meat substitute, or a Norwegian research center building out a “farmyard” of animal tissue for cell-based meat.

The most interesting part of the grant awards, however, is the purpose behind the grant itself. According to an email from GFI to The Spoon, the grant was created in order to establish “a base of scientific inquiry” in the meat alternative space. The email goes on to say that the science of plant-based and cell-based meat “skipped a step,” leaping immediately from idea to product in development by private companies. That means that there’s no scientific basis for the technology, so meat alternative companies end up doing duplicating a lot of scientific legwork.

Which is actually true. Many cell-based and plant-based companies are very protective of their technologies (the exception being Shojinmeat’s open source clean meat initiative), so any new company in the space basically has to start from scratch. That means a lot of trial and error, a lot of wasted money, and a slower route towards the end goal: making a product that tastes as good as — and costs less than — traditional meat.

But if the GFI’s chosen scientists can help establish some base framework for the technology used to create plant-based and cell-based meats, alterna-meat companies new and old could use it as a resource to optimize R&D and eventual product scaling. And with $250,000 in their coffers, hopefully the winning scientists will be able to do just that.

February 6, 2019

Three Companies Feeding the Global Protein Frenzy with Microbes, Air, and Yeast

With the population set to skyrocket to over 9 billion by 2050, companies are scrambling to find new ways to feed our demand for protein in a sustainable (read: non-animal-based) way.

Many are turning to plants, transforming them into everything from burgers to yogurt to scrambled eggs. But when it comes to protein, there are several companies thinking outside the plant kingdom and turning to surprising sources to create these energy-packed building blocks:

Microbes

Sustainable Bioproducts has developed fermentation technology based off of their studies of the extremophile microbes (which can thrive even in, er, extreme conditions) in Yellowstone’s volcanic springs. The company’s scientists replicate the microbes in labs and feed them starches and glycerin. Out comes protein. The microbes’ output is meant to be a versatile building block — it can be savory or sweet, liquid or powder — which can be used to make meat or dairy alternatives.

The protein may come from a lab, but Sustainable Bioproduct’s technology is very different than cellular agriculture (the science behind cell-based meat), which uses animal tissue.

Earlier this week, the Chicago-based company announced a $33 million Series A funding round, led by Silicon Valley-based venture fund 1955 Capital with participation from the venture arms of Archer Daniels Midland and Danone, a climate-focused tech fund backed by Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and others. But don’t rush out to purchase microbe protein just yet — according to the Wall Street Journal we’re still a few years away from sampling Sustainable Bioproducts’ protein.

Yeast

Similar to Sustainable Bioproducts, Perfect Day uses a sort of fermentation process (feeding sugar to genetically modified yeast and bacteria) to create protein. Only instead of making a versatile building block, they’re focused on two very specific proteins: casein and whey, which are two main “ingredients” that make milk taste — and function — like milk.

Combined, the two create a cow-free dairy product to be used to make everything from cheese to yogurt to ice cream. In 2017, Perfect Day pivoted from a B2C to a B2B model, and at the end of last year, the startup partnered with Archer Daniels Midland to scale up the implementation of their technology. Their first product will be whey protein, slated to come to market in the next few years.

Image Credit: JAA TÄMÄ KUVA

Thin Air (sort of)

Before founding Finnish company Solar Foods, researchers from Lappeenranta University of Technology and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland created a single cell protein in a lab using only water, electricity, carbon dioxide, and small organisms in the environment.

Solar Foods recently snagged €2 million (~$2,273,000) in funding from Lifeline Ventures, and is working with the European Space Agency to create a bioreactor that can make food in outer space to feed colonies on Mars. On Earth, the bioreactors could be a new food source that doesn’t put stress on our existing systems.

We don’t know exactly what Solar Food’s protein could be used for (Meat alternatives? Protein shakes? Soylent-like complete meals?), but the company has indicated it expects commercial protein production to start by 2021.

—

No question — the concept of making protein out of microbes or literal air is fascinating. But as with cell-based meat, I have to wonder about the energy costs — and the cost costs. How much energy does it take to run these new protein sources? And how long will it take before creating protein out of these sources is cost-competitive with making protein from plants?

Of course, if climate change severely reduces agricultural input, as some are predicting it will, then growing soy and wheat might be a lot trickier, and we might have to turn to making protein from the air, extremophile microbes, and animal tissue in a lab. But in the nearer term, these technologies have the potential to feed areas that don’t have access to legitimately delicious plant-based foods — or are struggling to produce enough food, such as communities affected by famine or drought.

It’ll likely be a while before we see (or taste) this technology in our homes or on our grocery shelves. Until then, we’ll have to feed our hunger for sustainable protein with plants. Good thing there are plenty of options.

January 29, 2019

Lavva Uses Pili Nut to Make Legit Delicious Plant-Based Yogurt

As a lactose-intolerant person who loves her morning yogurt & granola, I’ve tried my fair share of vegan yogurts. Usually I’m disappointed. Most plant-based yogurts are bitter or have an off-putting grainy texture; some just taste like a straight-up cup of either soy or coconut.

But at last I think I’ve found one plant-based yogurt to rule them all. Lavva, a product of New York state-based EVR Foods, is everything I’m looking for in yogurt, minus the dairy. It comes in a very appealing, brightly-colored packaging (no, that doesn’t affect the taste, but still — nice), and it’s made of just a few, pronounceable ingredients: coconut water and cream, plantains, cassava, vanilla extract, lime juice, fruit, live vegan cultures, and pili nut.

According to the packaging, it’s the pili nut that gives Lavva its distinctive creaminess and rich texture reminiscent of full-fat yogurt. Flavor-wise, Lavva has a light sweetness and, most surprisingly, a true tanginess that I have yet to find in any other plant-based yogurt brand.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

Of the five flavors I tried, the Original was my favorite. It essentially tastes like a very mild coconut (not surprising, considering that coconut is the first ingredient listed on the label), but also has a nice tart kick. I could definitely see adding this to a morning smoothie, using it as a base for granola and fruit, or even swirling it on top of a savory vegetarian soup. I also liked the tropical flavors — Mango and Coconut — which gelled well with the coconut undertones.

Not all the flavors were home runs, though. The strawberry was slightly too acidic for my taste, and the vanilla — despite using real extract and vanilla bean — was lackluster.

A 150g single-serving container of Lavva contains 140 calories with only 6g of sugars. It also has 11 grams of fat (7g saturated), which is fairly high. However, it fits with recent trends in fat-forward, low-carb diets like keto and paleo. The one nutritional downside of Lavva is that each cup only has 2g of protein, which might give pause to those who turn to yogurt as a protein-packed breakfast option.

With the recent spike in demand for plant-based foods — especially plant-based dairy — it’s no surprise the vegan yogurt space is having a bit of a moment. Ripple, purveyor of pea protein beverages, came out with a yogurt which almost scarred me for all plant-based yogurts (though Ripple’s PR team reached out saying they’re reformulating their yogurt recipe). Israeli company Yofix, winner of PepsiCo’s European Nutrition Greenhouse Programme 2018, makes a yogurt out of a blend of oats, seeds, and legumes. U.K.-based Coconut Collaborative recently rolled out their coconut-based yogurt Stateside.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

Big dairy players are getting involved, too. Silk and SoDelicious, two of the biggest names in plant-based dairy (and both owned by Danone) have their own vegan yogurt lines. And just within the past month Chobani, the leading yogurt producer in the U.S., launched a new plant-based product which is set to hit grocery shelves nationwide mid-February.

After launching in 2018, Lavva’s yogurts are now available in roughly 1,000 stores around the U.S., including Whole Foods, Fresh Market, and Safeway (in some states). A cup of Lavva will set you back around $2.49, which is slightly more expensive than other plant-based yogurts on the market (Chobani’s “yogurt” cups cost $1.99 each and Silk is around $1.50).

I’m excited about the direction plant-based yogurt seems to be going — getting more creamy, nuanced, and generally closer to the “real thing.” Hopefully soon Lavva will have some competition.

January 24, 2019

Newsletter: Is the Burger of the Future Plant-Based, or Made by Robots?

What a month! This January I’ve been hopping around from event to event, stopping briefly at home to pack fresh socks and water my plants. First up was CES, the gigantic, robot-filled wonderland (check out The Spoon and our YouTube page for exclusive video content and interviews). Next, I flew south to San Francisco for the Winter Fancy Food show.

Though strolling up and down the rows of vendors armed with samples of everything from pickle juices to CBD chocolates was certainly a dream, my favorite area of the show was the “What’s Next in Food?” exhibit. That’s where I got to meet companies who are trying to find new ways to feed the world in an ethical, environmentally sustainable way. Like Clara Foods, which is using cellular agriculture to make cultured egg whites, or Farm from a Box, which is, well, a company that lets communities grow a 2-acre farm from a single box. It’s nice to leave a conference not only tired and full of cheese samples, but also feeling inspired.

Before heading back to Seattle, I stopped by the inaugural Alternative Protein Show in San Francisco to see what sort of products and manufacturing technologies are going to change the way we eat animal products. One thing that wasn’t on the menu was cell-based (or cultured) meat, which has yet to come to market. At the conference I met Dr. Sandhya Sriram, whose startup Shiok Meats is not only making cell-based shellfish, like lobster, shrimp, and crab — they’re also the first cell-based meat company in Southeast Asia. Period. Since the majority of cellular agriculture companies are based in the U.S., Israel, or the U.K., it was really exciting to see this technology expanding to not only new types of meat, but also new areas of the globe.

I left the show for a few minutes to pop by the Creator restaurant and watch their robot make a cheeseburger from start to finish. Here’s a sped-up video if you want to see the burger bot do its thing — it’s pretty amazing.

With burgers on my mind, I went by Carl’s Jr. in downtown SF to take a taste the new Beyond Burger 2.0. While I found that the patty itself was more of a supporting player (like many fast-food burgers are), the new formula is pretty good — my one qualm was the texture, which was a little too chewy for my liking. But the Carl’s Jr. staff told me that the burger was one of their favorite items on the menu, so it’s still a win for alterna-meats.

I’m not the only one smitten with plant-based foods. Chris took a look at his shopping list this week and realized that he is slowly turning vegan(ish), thanks to food tech. It made all of us check our own shopping lists and realize that, huh, we’re all eating more plant-based foods, too. And not just for ethical or environmental reasons, but because they genuinely just taste really good — and are (sometimes) healthier, too.

In other news this week: Delivery continued to expand (we called it), with DoorDash now serving all 50 states and UberEats expanding its Starbucks pilot to more cities. And who better to facilitate all this new food delivery than Starship’s new robotic delivery fleet or Robomart’s new self-driving mobile commerce vehicles?

Speaking of robots, did you hear about Articulate, our food robotics and automation summit in San Francisco on April 16th? We’ll have speakers from Google Brain, Sony, Cafe X, Chowbotics, and much more — Early Bird tickets are on sale now, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Finally, if you’re in the Seattle area, we’re having our next meetup on January 29th all about The Future of Beer. Join us! Bonus: All attendees get a free beer.

Until Friday,
Catherine

AutoX Eyes Expanded Restaurant Delivery for its Self-Driving Cars
AutoX, the startup that made a splash last year with its self-driving grocery delivery + mobile-commerce solution, expanded into the hot food delivery space, and is now working with 14 restaurants in the San Jose area.

Chowbus Announces a $4M Seed Round for Its Food-Delivery Platform
Chowbus today announced a $4 million seed round for its food-discovery platform. Founded in 2015, the Chicago-based company bills itself as a food-delivery app that lets users “discover authentic, international foods.”

All_EBT Offers New Tool to Help SNAP Recipients Budget Purchases
With the government shutdown, the 39 million people on the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) got their money early this month, and have to make it last through February (and maybe March as well). All_EBT has a new tool to help SNAP recipients budget their purchases.

What’s Next In Food? CBD, Cultured Eggs, Food Waste Cookies and More
A tour through what caught our eye at the What’s Next in Food exhibit in the Winter Fancy Food Show, from upcycled cookies to egg whites grown in bioreactors to a farm in a box.

Beleaguered Food Delivery Service Munchery Shuts Down
Munchery, a food delivery service that had raised $125 million in venture capital, announced to its customers via email yesterday that it was ceasing operations.

Starship Launches Robot Food Delivery Fleet at George Mason University
A fleet of more than 25 mini delivery robots from Starship Technologies are now delivering food to students at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, which, Starship says, is “the largest implementation of autonomous robot food delivery services 

Starbucks Expands Uber Eats Delivery Pilot Across U.S.
Starbucks is expanding the delivery pilot program it runs in Miami with Uber Eats to other U.S. cities. It’s now available in San Francisco, and will move to NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles over the next few weeks.

Goodr Launched Free “Pop-Up Grocery” Store Featuring Surplus Food for MLK Day
In anticipation for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Atlanta-based startup Goodr has partnered with the Atlanta Hawks to launch a “Pop-Up Grocery” event featuring surplus food from local grocery stores.

A Rough Guide to Ghost Kitchens, According to Chowly CEO Sterling Douglass
Sterling Douglass, CEO of the restaurant tech company Chowly, thinks that “everyone” should be using ghost kitchens. Here, he explains the different types and looks into how they will shape the future of restaurants.

Food Tech is Gradually Turning Me Vegan
Head editor Chris Albrecht looked at his shopping list and realized that, slowly but surely, he was eating more and more plant-based foods. The reason? Food tech.

January 24, 2019

Lightlife’s New Plant-Based Burger Looks a Lot Like the Beyond Burger…

Alternative protein company Lightlife announced yesterday the release of a new plant-based burger that, according to a press release, is meant to deliver “the sensory experience consumers crave from a beef burger.”

The so-called Lightlife Burger is made of pea protein, coconut oil, and beet powder. It has 20g of protein, no cholesterol, and is free from soy, gluten and GMOs. The burger will be the face of a new pea protein-based product line from the company, which meant to be more evocative of meat.

The launch is in tandem with Lightlife’s upcoming rebrand to mark its 40th anniversary. It’s also just a smart move on Lightlife’s part to try and compete with other meat-like burgers on the market, like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods — especially as Beyond prepares for an IPO and Impossible gears up for its retail launch. Composition-wise, the Lightlife Burger seems closer to the Beyond Burger, which is also pea protein-based and also uses beets for its “bloody” look.

But young upstarts like Beyond and Impossible aren’t Lightlife’s only competitors. Big Food has also been getting into the meat alternative space, releasing products that are more meat-like to capture flexitarians and cash in on the plant-based eating trend. Last month Nestlé released the Impossible  Incredible Burger, just a few days after Unilever bought Dutch plant-based meat company The Vegetarian Butcher.

Lightlife could have an advantage, though. Both it and Field Roast are owned by Maple Leaf Foods, a major packaged meat company in Canada. That means that the company has the advantages that come with being part of a Big Food company, including supply chains, sales channels, and retail partners. But, since it’s also a veteran in the meat alternative space, it also has more plant-based street cred than, say, Nestlé. This could lead to less blowback from consumers who don’t trust Big Food to make their vegan meats.

Recently I predicted that veteran plant-based protein companies, like Lightlife, Tofurky, and Boca, would rebrand from “vegan” companies to “meat” companies–just ones who happened to make meat out of plants. It seems that, at least in the case of Lightlife, that prediction is coming true.

In the U.S., the Lightlife Burger will start rolling out in foodservice this month and hit grocery shelves in late March. It will launch in Canada in April. I couldn’t find any information about pricing, but I imagine it will be in line with other Lightlife vegan burgers (around $2.50 per patty). We haven’t tasted the Lightlife Burger yet, but as soon as it’s available in Seattle grocery shelves it might be time for an alterna-meat burger cookoff.

January 23, 2019

Editor Roundtable Podcast: Plant-Based Burger Wars & The Fast-Changing Delivery Landscape

It’s time for another editor roundtable podcast!

In this week’s show, the Spoon editorial team gets together to talk about whether 2019 will be the breakout year for plant-based burgers. We also talk about the fast-changing world of food delivery, and Chris shares some personal news (hint: foodtech is changing his behavior).

As always, we encourage you to subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show from The Spoon on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or your favorite podcast app (and give us a review if you haven’t already). You can also download the podcast direct here or just click play on the Soundcloud player below.

January 17, 2019

I Went to Carl’s Jr. to Taste the Beyond Burger 2.0

It’s been quite the month for plant-based burgers. Last week at CES we watched (and tasted) as Impossible Foods unveiled their new ground “beef” recipe, and in the New Year Beyond Meat rolled out a new burger formula of their own right before they launched a partnership with Carl’s Jr.

In the spirit of journalism, I stopped by the Carl’s Jr. in downtown San Francisco today to sample Beyond Meat’s new “Burger 2.0.” The burger arrived in a fluffy sesame bun and was topped with cheese, mayo, ketchup, pickles, tomatoes, and a hefty slice of iceberg lettuce.

Photo: Catherine Lamb

So how did it taste? Pretty good. The burger itself was nicely pink and had the trademark tepid char evocative of fast food burgers everywhere (that’s actually a good thing). The “meat” was lightly packed and almost spongy, with the fatty juiciness that we expect from beef. However, there were some chewy ribbons throughout that almost reminded me of yuba, or tofu skin; a texture I like, but which doesn’t especially make me think I’m eating beef.

Sadly, most of the nuance of the burger got lost under the loud flavors of the pickles, condiments, and the bun, which dwarfed the patty. This isn’t necessarily bad; fast-food burgers aren’t just about the taste of the beef, they’re about the umami-bomb that comes from putting a bunch of savory, fatty ingredients — ketchup, pickles, cheese — together. In this way the Beyond Famous Star reminded me of a stereotypical fast-food burger more than any other plant-based option I’ve tried so far. And for a lot of consumers, that’s pretty appealing.

So how was the new recipe? Coincidentally, I’d eaten a Beyond burger three nights before while out at a local craft burger joint, who was still serving the original Beyond recipe. During the taste test I tried hard to compare the two, but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t discern any noticeable difference. According to the Beyond website, the Burger 2.0 has less saturated fat than the original (a good thing), and apparently a “more meat-like texture.” I’d say the texture was maybe slightly chewier, which doesn’t exactly scream “meat-like” to me.

Photo: Catherine Lamb.

While I was chewing at the Beyond burger I couldn’t help but compare it to the Impossible Burger 2.0 I’d tried the previous week at CES in Vegas. Admittedly, the Impossible burgers at the unveiling event were prepared by a prestigious chef, not a fast-food line cook; they were also cooked into carefully curated dishes instead of slapped on a bun with some condiments and tasteless tomatoes. But the new Impossible burger’s texture just reminded me more of beef: its texture was looser and more natural, and it had the rich bloodiness of a medium-raw patty.

Though the Beyond burger at Carl’s Jr. might not taste 100 percent like beef, it can’t exactly call itself vegan, either, since the burger is prepared and charbroiled in the same spaces as beef patties. That eliminates quite a few potential customers (read: strict vegetarians and vegans), but according to the manager at the Carl’s Jr., the Beyond burger has been a popular addition to the menu. What’s more, she told me that once customers they try the Beyond Famous Star once they’ll often come back and order it again. “Even people who work here eat it,” she told me.

The Beyond Famous Star burger cost $9.49 at the downtown SF location I went to, $12.99 with fries and a drink. That’s more than the $6.29 that the Beyond Famous Star burger costs at my local Seattle location, but since Carl’s Jr. is a franchise pricing varies depending on location.

Plant-based meat options are becoming more and more accessible, popping up on fast food menus, online, and grocery aisles alongside beef and pork sausage. In addition to Carl’s Jr., Beyond also has partnerships with Del Taco and Canada’s A&W chain. Said accessibility is key as Beyond Meat marches towards an IPO in 2019, making it the first meat-like alterna-meat company to go public. We’ll no doubt see many more iterations of Beyond’s burger (and its kin) down the road, as plant-based meat companies continue to try and create a product so good, it disrupts the meat industry completely.

January 10, 2019

Video: Why Impossible Foods Thinks They Can Make Better Meat Than a Cow

On the first night of CES, we hit up the Impossible Foods press conference to try their new and improved burger 2.0. The verdict: juicy, savory, and delicious.

But before the actual taste test began, the Impossible team set the stage with a short panel featuring CEO Dr. Pat Brown, Chief Science Officer David Lipman, and Mary Sue Milliken, owner and chef of Border Grill, who hosted the unveiling and cooked all the delicious food.

Check out the full conversation below to learn why Dr. Brown thinks that food is “the most fundamental and ancient human technology,” one that he and his team is constantly working to improve it. “Unlike the cow, we are going to be getting better every single day from now until forever.” Next up: steak. 

The Full Impossible Burger 2.0 Press Conference at CES 2019

January 9, 2019

Beyond Meat Debuts Their Own Burger 2.0 with New Protein Formula

This week at CES Impossible Foods unveiled their “burger 2.0” amid lots of fanfare and mini-sliders.

They’re actually the second plant-based company this week to debut a new and improved version of their product. On January 2nd, Beyond Meat announced the release of their own “Beyond Burger 2.0″ (albeit with much less pomp). The new iteration still has pea protein (the primary ingredient of the original burger), and also adds mung bean and rice proteins into the mix. It’s apparently lower in saturated fat and has a better, more meat-like texture than the Burger 1.0.

As far as I can tell, this is the first big product revamp by Beyond since they launched their burger back in 2016. I haven’t tried it yet, but I have tried the Impossible burger 2.0 and have to say, it’s a high taste bar for Beyond to beat.

But in the end, it doesn’t really matter: plant-based meat companies’ biggest competition isn’t each other, it’s the industrial meat industry. “If other people are making great products… we love it,” Ethan Brown told The Spoon in an interview. “They’re not our competition — they’re on the same mission we’re on.”

The announcement came two days after Beyond Meat announced its partnership with fast food chain Carl’s Jr. In addition to Carl’s Jr., their new “burger 2.0” will also be available at all A&W locations in Canada (who have been serving Beyond burgers since July 2018).

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