Hybrid products to optimize nutrition, taste, cost, and sustainability

Current challenge

Although plant-based meat products have gained increased attention in recent years, the majority of consumers still find them to be lacking regarding taste and cost. Cultivated meat is an emerging option that is anticipated to have the same or a highly similar taste profile to conventional meat, but it will enter the market at a higher cost than plant-based meat, and competing on price with commodity meats will be a challenge until the field is much more mature. Although life cycle analyses of cultivated meat suggest environmental improvements compared to traditional meat production, plant-based meat will likely offer more environmental benefits compared to early cultivated meat products. Hybrid products that combine plant-based protein with cultivated meat present an avenue for improving the end products’ taste, cost, and sustainability. 

Blended products include blends of plant-based meat and conventional meat while hybrid products are combinations of plant-based meat and cultivated meat. However, consumer acceptance of either type of product may be challenging. Surveys of consumer preferences (Caputo et al., 2022; Profeta et al., 2021) indicate that conventional meat products are perceived as tastier compared to alternative meats, including blended products. 

Marketing challenges for these products could affect consumer acceptance.  As with cultivated meat, these products may be marketed with inconsistent names like “blended,” “enriched,” “hybrid,” or “healthier meat” and could benefit from nomenclature testing similar to that previously conducted for cultivated meat. There is also debate whether these products might only appeal to a niche market. Various marketing strategies using plant- or meat-forward advertising tools will likely influence the perception of hybrid and blended products. Plant-based ingredients in plant-forward approaches may promote products as more nutritious, but could be viewed as historically cheap plant-based fillers in meat-forward marketing. Manufacturers of blended products, however, are generally motivated by nutrition and environmental sustainability, which may increase the overall production cost compared to conventional meat but lower market prices compared to purely plant-based meat. In this case, the conventional meat—as the cheaper ingredient—is perhaps more appropriately viewed as a filler for the plant-based meat.

Proposed solution

Current data from plant-based protein and conventional meat blends, which are already available to consumers, could be informative for future plant-based protein and cultivated meat hybrids. Several small-scale (Phil’s Finest, Rebel Meat, Hidden Veggies) and large-scale (Perdue, Tyson, Hormel, Dairy Farmers of America) food companies offer a variety of blended products. These products typically contain 20 to 50 percent plant protein with various plant-based ingredients like vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, and spices. Biomass fermentation-derived mycoprotein blends like the Better Meat Co.’s partnership with Perdue chicken is another blended product possibility. Hormel has argued that a blend of 70 percent meat and 30 percent plant-based ingredients is ideal for flavor and production. However, more research—including taste profiling, techno-economic analyses, and life cycle analyses—is necessary to understand the optimal ratio of blended or hybrid products to improve their organoleptic properties, cost, sustainability, and consumer acceptance.

When given a choice, European consumers expressed willingness to try blended products containing 25 to 50 percent plant substitutes. Efforts to encourage consumer input in creating blended products, like the James Beard Blended Burger Project, could promote consumer acceptance. A study showed that the taste of a 70 percent meat to 30 percent mushroom hybrid was preferred over different types of plant-based burgers during a blind taste test. However, blended product preference decreased when the consumer was informed beforehand (unblinded tasting), possibly because of low consumer familiarity with blended products. Since studies (Grasso and Jaworska, 2020; Grasso et al., 2022) suggest that consumers could view blended products as healthier than conventional meat, one marketing idea for such products is the promotion of “hidden vegetables,” offering consumers a way to achieve a healthier diet without fundamentally changing their eating habits. Some consumers also associate blended products with environmental and animal welfare benefits. However, the focus on the improved nutritional quality of these products could be the most effective marketing strategy. Efforts to optimize the nutritional properties and understand consumer acceptance of plant-based and conventional meat blends can readily be translated to plant-based and cultivated meat hybrid products.

Plant-based meat and cultivated meat pose a promising animal-free hybrid option. Compared to conventional meat products, cultivated meat hybrids could have improved nutritional profiles and are expected to demonstrate improved animal welfare and environmental impacts. Most first-generation cultivated meat products like GOOD Meat will likely contain plant-based blends to varying degrees. With 68 percent of plant-based producers eager to incorporate cultivated fat, a promising strategy for some cellular agriculture companies (Mission Barns, Peace of Meat, Hoxton Farms) is to combine cultivated fat and plant-based meat, given fat’s desirable organoleptic properties and contribution to species-specific flavors. Other technologies like precision fermentation for fat and other ingredients may also advance plant-based and cultivated meat. Numerous hybrid combinations and structures like Novameat’s steak of plant-based meat, fermentation-derived protein, and cultivated meat (replacing conventional meat) could enable a wide variety of benefits to improve nutrition, taste, cost, sustainability, and animal welfare.

Anticipated impact

Cultivated meat hybrids could facilitate market entry for cultivated meat by helping to lower the cost and providing a low-threshold introduction to cultivated meat, while also offering nutritional and environmental benefits relative to fully cultivated products. The improved organoleptic properties of plant-based and cultivated meat hybrids could also increase consumer acceptance from some vegetarians. However, increased consumer awareness through health-focused marketing is needed. Otherwise, hybrid products may only serve a niche market and be mistakenly viewed as highly processed.

Consumer acceptance will allow hybrid products to function as a valuable bridge for consumers to enjoy the health and environmental benefits of a more plant-based diet with the additional advantages of cultivated meat’s organoleptic properties.

Related efforts

Examples of consumer studies on hybrid and blended products made from plant-based and conventional meat:

• The usual suspect: How to co-create healthier meat products (Barone et al., 2021)
• Do plant-based and blend meat alternatives taste like meat? A combined sensory and choice experiment study (Caputo et al., 2022) 
• Part Meat and Part Plant: Are hybrid meat products fad or future? (Grasso and Jaworska, 2020)
• Consumer co-creation of hybrid meat products: A cross-country European survey (Grasso et al., 2022)
• Consumer acceptance of blending plant-based ingredients into traditional meat-based foods: Evidence from the meat-mushroom blend (Lang, 2020) 
• Consumer preferences for meat blended with plant proteins- empirical findings from Belgium (Profeta et al., 2021)

Examples of companies developing plant-based and cultivated meat hybrids:

• Artemys 
• Ohayo Valley
• Eat JUST 
• UPSIDE Foods
• Mission Barns
• Peace of Meat
• Hoxton Farms

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