Plant-based meats — think the Impossible Burger or Quorn “chicken” nuggets — are generally filled with a long list of strange-sounding ingredients: pea protein, potato starch, coconut oil, mycoproteins and more. Those ingredients have turned off some consumers and sparked concerns about the highly processed nature of the average veggie burger or faux slice of bacon.
But now, a few start-ups are planning on adding one more component to the mix: animal fat. Some companies are growing fat in laboratories, hoping to combine it with wheat protein and spices to make an extra porky form of plant-based bacon. Others are pulling animal byproducts from traditional meat production and blending it with plant ingredients to create pieces of shredded steak.
The change could alter the identity of plant-based meats, which have been largely seen as an option for vegans and vegetarians. But proponents see that as a feature: a tasty way to propel plant-based meats away from the small proportion of consumers who don’t eat meat and into the mainstream.
“It’s fundamentally difficult to make plants taste like meat,” said Saba Fazeli, co-founder of the start-up Choppy, formerly known as Paul’s Table, which is incorporating fat into plant-based meat. “I would say it’s impossible.”
Why plant meats have struggled
In the late 2010s, plant-based meats looked poised to take over the world. Beyond Meat — which produces a plant-based burger colored red by beet juice — saw its stock rise to over $200 per share in 2019.
But after the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, the market slumped. In 2022, unit sales of plant-based meats in the United States fell by 8 percent from the previous year; plant-based companies that were former Wall Street darlings saw their stock prices plummet.
Food analysts say the flavors of plant-based meats aren’t yet up to par — and while meat-eating accounts for approximately 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, most consumers aren’t making choices based on sustainability so much as on cost and flavor.
“While people do want to change the world and want to live sustainable lives, ultimately, at the end of the day, people only want to do that when they’re able to eat the products that taste really good,” said Ed Steele, co-founder of the London-based cultivated fat start-up Hoxton Farms.
The need for fat
The solution, for some companies, is to incorporate one of the most flavorful components of real meat: fat.
“Fat is just such an incredibly important part of the food sensory experience,” said Priera Panescu, lead scientist for plant-based meats at the nonprofit Good Food Institute. Fat coats the tongue, causing flavors to linger much longer than they would otherwise. It also carries scents, helping to enhance the aroma of a freshly seared steak or roasted chicken breast. In one form or another, animal fat gives burgers their juice and pastries their flaky crusts.
Right now, the most commonly used fat alternative in plant-based meats is coconut oil. But while coconut oil is better than some other vegetable oils for plant-based meats, “it’s really nothing like animal fat,” Panescu said. Coconut oil has a much lower melting point than animal fat — meaning that during cooking, it melts too early, giving plant-based meat a greasier texture. It also doesn’t coat the mouth in the same way.
Without fat, the taste of plant-based meat is “incredibly disappointing,” Steele said. His company is cultivating blobs of pork belly fat in a London lab — fat that could ultimately provide the juice of a plant-based meatball.
In California, the start-up Mission Barns has set out on a similar path: growing pork fat in the lab that can be added to plant-based bacon, meatballs or sausages. “We feel it’s the biggest missing piece,” said Eitan Fischer, the company’s CEO.
Companies also claim that lab-grown fat has advantages over standard muscle tissue grown in the lab. Growing meat remains prohibitively expensive — while most companies do not publicly share their costs, lab-grown or “cultivated” meat is estimated to cost hundreds of dollars per pound. That’s largely because the process involves a host of expensive, medical-grade equipment, from bioreactors to the soupy nutrients that are pumped in to feed the growing cells.
Lab-grown fat still requires some of that equipment, but it takes different, cheaper nutrients than standard muscle cells. “No expensive proteins — you just need very cheap sugars and very cheap oils,” Fischer said. “It doesn’t take a lot to convince a fat cell that it’s time to store more energy.”
Some fat with your plants
Hybrid protein products have been around for a long time — large food companies like Perdue Farms have experimented with offering proteins that are mostly meat with some vegetable proteins blended in, sold under optimistic names like “Chicken Plus.” But the new companies are flipping that process on its head: building products that are around 90 percent plant-based with just 10 percent fat blended in.
That fat doesn’t even have to be grown in a lab. Fazeli’s company, Choppy, is adding byproducts of the meat industry — like fat, collagen and broth components — into plant-based products. For most vegetarians and vegans, that would make their products a no-go. But Fazeli and his co-founder, Brice Klein, aren’t necessarily looking for vegetarian buyers.
In the plant-based meat space, “we’ve been taking this kind of ‘Field of Dreams,’ ‘build it and they will come’ approach,” Klein said. “Billions of dollars have been poured into this space, and the number of people eating the product hasn’t changed.” Over the past 20 years, the percent of U.S. consumers who identify as vegetarians or vegans has remained relatively stable at less than 10 percent.
Because of that, Klein argues that trying to stay fully plant-based may be a waste of time. “We’re more interested in that mass market audience,” he said. Their prepackaged plant-based products — with fat added in — are sold at some grocery stores in California and Utah. Most of the cultivated fat companies are still waiting for Food and Drug Administration approval.
Will these new products work? It’s hard to say. Some of the problems with plant-based meats — consumer suspicion over long ingredient lists, high processing and higher costs — may carry over into the new blended foods. The food industry has yet to prove that any meat alternative can take a decisive chunk out of the market for chicken, pork and beef.
But the massive land requirements of the meat industry — combined with its sky-high carbon emissions — call for some change in how we eat. “The way that we produce food is unsustainable,” said Faraz Harsini, senior scientist for cultivated meat at the Good Food Institute. “There have to be alternatives.”
