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The following ingredients are found in the Impossible Foods Burger (4): While Beyond Meat relies on a flavor additive to recreate that desirable, meaty taste, Impossible Foods has developed a functional ingredient to deliver its flavor – soy leghemoglobin. The other ingredients are added for texture/ingredient binding, flavor, and maintaining product quality/ stability.Ĭontrary to the focus on texture that Beyond Meat has done, Impossible Foods has a stronger focus on the flavor development of their burgers. This makes it an ideal colorant for a burger because as you cook it, it will brown as the betalains degrade. Beets contain a natural pigment called betalains which are stable at room temperature but highly unstable at high temperature. There is also beet juice used for the red color. Coconut oil has a fatty profile that melts in your mouth, much like the fats found in meat. Water, Pea Protein Isolate*, Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil, Refined Coconut Oil, Rice Protein, Natural Flavors, Cocoa Butter, Mung Bean Protein, Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Apple Extract, Salt, Potassium Chloride, Vinegar, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Sunflower Lecithin, Pomegranate Fruit Powder, Beet Juice Extract (for color)Īside from the texture component of the protein, the company uses coconut oil to simulate the marbled appearance of animal meats. The following ingredients are found in the Beyond Meat Burger (3): In other words, the vegetable protein undergoes great pressure and shear to form it into a texture similar to animal meat. The pea protein is first formed into a dough under alkaline conditions, extruded to help denature and align the proteins in a fibrous, meat-like network, and then set into a fixed fibrous structure as it is cooled through a die (2). In order to achieve this, the company has a patent for a process to alter the structure and presentation of plant proteins (in the case of Beyond Meat burgers, they used pea protein). Thus, the goal of the company was to create a plant-based protein that has the same three-dimensional protein network. Water, carbohydrates, fats, and flavors are entrapped in this meat matrix and delivered to the consumers in a desirable form (i.e. The proteins in animal meats are fibrous and three-dimensional, which contributes to firmness and cohesion of the food matrix. Beyond Meat really does a great job of focusing on mimicking the texture of animal meat.
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Recently, Beyond Meat has become a household brand for plant-based meat products. For this article, I will focus on how the two companies produce their burger substitutes. My hopes are that by understanding how these two major companies create their products, it will help mitigate consumer’s fear surrounding these products. After explaining to her that they were not lab-grown or cell-based meats but rather plant-based meats, I realized that I didn’t exactly know how they were made or what the difference was between the two products. She was hesitant to try them because she believed that if they are made in a lab petri dish it wouldn’t be safe or natural to consume.
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Most recently, I’ve had a friend ask me how Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burgers were made and if they were safe. However, there has been a great amount of confusion or misunderstanding around the development of these plant-based meat alternatives amongst the public, and even food scientists. Companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have developed alternatives to animal meat products as a result of the grave environmental impacts associated with the way we produce meat in our current food system. Sustainable methods of producing and consuming food are necessary for the sake of humanity. I want to preface this article with the stark statistic that was reported by the 2 nd Sustainable Development Goal by the United Nations, which states that there are more than 800 million undernourished people worldwide today and this number will increase to 2 billion by the year 2050 if we maintain our current food system trends (1).