Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

plantbased

A Plant-Based Tour of What I Ate at the Good Food Conference

You don’t attend the Good Food Conference (GFC) for the food. You go there to hear the Big Guns of the meat alternatives movement — like Seth Goldman of Beyond Meat, Mark Post of Mosa Meats, and Uma Valeti of Memphis Meats — speak onstage. You go there to watch new startups pitch their company’s vision for reducing (and eliminating) industrial meat production. You go there to hear about the latest breakthroughs and challenges in the plant- and cell-based meat spaces.

But at the same time, you kind of do go for the food. Because the whole point of the conference is to promote alternatives to traditional meat — and in order to be successful, the first thing those alternatives have to do is taste good. Like, good enough that a carnivore would choose them over a burger or hot dog.

As cell-based meat isn’t to market yet, all the alterna-meats from the two-day conference were plant-based. Here’s a brief overview of all the ones I tried:

Photo: Veggie Grill.

Breakfast

The Good Food Conference fueled their first-day attendees with a breakfast burrito featuring JUST Egg, a vegan egg replacement made of mung beans. The resulting scramble is yellowish and color and, while the texture is pretty spot-on, still has an unmistakeable beaniness. However, camouflaged in a tortilla with black beans, roasted potatoes, and spicy salsa, said beaniness was pretty well concealed.

Sadly I didn’t take a picture of this since I just grabbed one to eat while watching the opening panels, but the photo from Veggie Grill, who teamed up with JUST to launch an all-day breakfast burrito featuring the scramble, is pretty similar. While I think JUST Egg still has a ways to go before it fools any egg-lovers out there, it’s still a reasonable stand-in for huevos when combined with other, stronger flavors, like salsa, peppers, and cheese (vegan or otherwise).

The Beyond Meat spread.

Lunch

Beyond Meat provided the lunch for Day 1, and boy did they do it right. Their grilled sausages (in Bratwurst and Italian flavors) accompanied corn with vegan aioli, as well as several salads. I got a “bratwurst” and really enjoyed it; the sausage had a nice snap and the interior texture was realistically sausage-like. The flavor was also super heavy on the umami, without tasting overly of soy. Overall, two thumbs up.

Photo: JUST

Snack

To combat that afternoon lull, I had an individual serving of JUST cookie dough, which comes in a nifty plastic container with a detachable spoon built into the top. The two flavors I tried were birthday cake, which was overly sweet with sprinkles, and chocolate chip, which tasted just like Tollhouse. (That’s a good thing.)

Overall it’s not that hard to make good-tasting vegan cookie dough — I’ve done it at home with just a few simple substitutions — but the individual serving packages are pretty genius. Now you can get a sugary snack on the go without worrying about salmonella from raw eggs — and they know just the shade of millennial pink to use to draw in customers.

Day 2

Breakfast

Day 2’s breakfast was courtesy of MorningStar Farms, but all I saw were bagels, granola (with almond milk!), and fruit. Not that I’m complaining. I did have a latté made with Oatley oat milk however, which I thought was pretty darn delicious.

Oat milk is definitely the next non-dairy milk trend, at least when it comes to coffee: it doesn’t separate as easily as almond milk and froths much better than soy, meaning your barista can make fancy latté art with it. Oats also require far less water to grow than almonds, so it’s comparatively sustainable, and also doesn’t affect those with nut or soy allergies.

Photo by Nick Klein for The Good Food Institute.

Lunch

For lunch on Day 2 we had Impossible Burgers. Which, after the awesome Beyond sausage the day before, were fine but a little lackluster. They were super savory and tasted mainly of soy, and I kept thinking there was a fishy flavor in there — though that could be attributed to the mishmash of toppings I layered on the patty.

However, the burger was cooked medium, meaning I could see a little bit of the heme-powered “bleeding” action. Overall I would have gone with a smaller bun or thicker patty (or maybe White Castle-esque slider!) so the burger didn’t get lost under everything else.

 

Snack

Visually, this snack spread was one of the most trompe l’oeuil meat-like of the entire weekend. Provided by Worthington, a meat alternative food company, there were “chicken” nuggets and even a vegan charcuterie plate with plant-based bologna. Both tasted primarily of soy, but I liked them — especially the nugget, which had the semi-spongy trademark chicken nugget texture nailed to a T.

 

Photo: Good Catch Foods.

What I Didn’t Eat:

I missed the fish-free tuna sushi from Ocean Hugger foods (made of tomatoes!) and the plant-based tuna salad from Good Catch Foods. I also didn’t get to try Morningstar Farms’ “meat lover” vegan burger, which is clearly trying to capitalize off the buzz around the meat-like patties from Beyond Burger and Impossible Foods. Next year.

 

Conclusions:

Overall, a lot of things tasted pretty heavily of soy, reminding me of veggie breakfast sausages and “soy”-rizo products I’ve eaten in my five years of vegetarianism. The food items that really impressed me were the Beyond Sausage, whose texture was spot-on, and the look of the Worthington charcuterie. I’m sure at next year’s summit there will be even more alterna-meats, milks, and eggs, from even more new, hungry young companies. I can’t wait to try them all.

Let’s Unpack Impossible Foods’ Strategy to Edge in On the Beef Market

By now, you may well have sampled an Impossible Burger. (We certainly have — and liked it.) If you haven’t, you’re probably at least curious about the plant-based burger which claims to taste, cook, look, and even bleed like real beef.

The Redwood City-based startup released their 2018 Impact Report this week, touting three of their achievements over the past year: their growing reach (and growing customer demand), their ace-in-the-hole ingredient, heme, and their sustainability mission. With their progress, they hope to continue on their quest to replace beef burgers with their plant-based patties. Here’s how:

  1. Larger availability, smaller price point

Last year Impossible patties were available in only 40 restaurants. Now, you can find them in 3,000 restaurants in the U.S., Hong Kong and Macao. To keep up with rapidly increasing demand, Impossible Foods had to hire a second shift of employees to work in their large-scale commercial plant in Oakland, California, which produces about 500,000 pounds of plant-based meat each month.

In addition to widening their availability, Impossible has also been dropping its price point. Initially they were available only at Momofuku Nishi, David Chang’s hip NYC restaurant, for $18 (albeit with fries). Now you can pick on up at one of 140 White Castle locations for only $1.99.

Impossible Foods has chosen to market their meatless patties in restaurants because of chefs’ trendsetting power with one highly influential demographic: millennials. Millennials are driving the explosive growth of the plant-based meat market and are leading the charge on flexitarianism. Impossible Foods knows this, and is taking advantage; about three-quarters of its customers also eat meat.

“We want meat eaters globally to happily prefer our plant-based vegan products because they think it’s just better,” David Lee, COO and CFO of Impossible Foods, told crowds at TechfestNW earlier this year. It’s a smart move on Impossible Foods’ part to take any self-righteous guilting out of the equation. In fact, they seem to be moving towards a branding strategy where they don’t differentiate themselves from meat at all. Their website’s slogan is: “We make delicious meat from plants”.

Not to be nitpicky, but technically, they don’t — they make vegetarian burgers out of plants, which happen to mimic the things we love about meat (umami flavor, juicy fattiness, etc.). The secret to their burger’s taste-alike success? Well, that would be…

2. The buzzy molecule behind the “bleeding” burger

A big part of Impossible’s branding is their patties’ uncanny ability to “bleed” just like beef. This is thanks to heme, a molecule found in red meat — and also plants, which is where Impossible creates and harvests it. When we sampled the Impossible burger, we could taste the animal almost-metallic funkiness (yes, that’s a good thing) that comes from heme. Heme not only gives the patties a distinctly beef-like flavor — it’s also one of the most important aspects of their marketing strategy. The reason that a burger made from plants can be dubbed as “meat” is because it has some of the same chemical flavors, down to the molecule.

A few months ago the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) flagged heme as a potential allergen after Impossible sent in their burger for a voluntary food safety test. Recently, however, the FDA gave heme the green light, declaring it safe. The FDA holdup wasn’t much of a roadblock; Impossible could (and did) sell their burgers widely. More of an issue, at least to some, is the fact that the patties aren’t GMO-free. In fact, heme is made through genetically engineering. But the GMO aspect doesn’t seem to cool excitement over this molecule, which is one of Impossible’s biggest selling points — one which allows them to position their products as a “burger,” not a “veggie burger.”

3. Mission Earth 

Plants have a smaller environmental footprint than animals — they just do. And beef is one of the worst culprits of all. In the impact report, Impossible Foods’ CEO and founder Pat Brown said that his company was on track to “eliminate the need for animals as a food production technology by 2035.” He told Time that by doing so, we can save Earth and “keep it habitable” so we won’t be forced to relocate to Mars.

Obviously, this is super ambitious — and optimistic. Even if we could eliminate the need for animals as food (that is, come up with enough plant-based protein to sustain the world) many people would be hard-pressed to give up meat — no matter how realistic the veggie burger.

There’s no question demand for (and acceptance of) plant-based protein is on the rise. The market is increasing at a CAGR of 5.9% and is projected to reach $14.22 billion by 2022. Almost 40% of people are trying to incorporate more plant-based proteins into their diets.

Which sounds super encouraging, until you realize that 2018 is also the year we’re projected to eat more meat than ever before. So while Impossible’s sales might be growing, is it moving any closer to its goal of replacing beef? Or is it just becoming a supplementary option for our protein-crazed selves?

Right now we’re at a critical juncture for the future of meat alternatives; they’re clearly gaining popularity and reach, but are they actually making a dent in meat production? As of yet, not so much. But with continued technical innovation, and new manufacturing methods, they might become so good that they might reach Impossible’s self-professed goal to be so good that carnivores choose their burgers over the real thing.

Conclusions

With heme now FDA-approved, and its continuing march towards affordable ubiquity, Impossible seems to show no sign of slowing down its growth, both to new marketplaces and new heights of media attention. Apparently, the company also has patents on the flavor chemistry used to create pork, chicken, and fish flavors, and plan to make plant-based alternatives to all three in the future.

If it can fix a few training issues, and avoid the roadblocks that Beyond Meat has experienced with meeting growing demand, maybe they can take some of the wind out of beef’s sales — and then conquer the rest of the animal kingdom. Of course, as long as lab-grown meat doesn’t knock them out of the water first.