2025-01-23 04:40:48
HALFWAY THERE
49 Percent of consumers who believe plant-based foods are healthier than traditional meat
Conventional meat purists and alt-meat fans alike tend to look down on those products that combine both, but the “blended” sector of the market is nearing an inflection point.
Consider that recently, Pat LaFrieda and Dufour Gourmet, a charcuterie provider, have joined the market, where players from Phil’s Finest, 50/50 Foods (which makes Both Burger) and Choppy to Perdue and Hormel, are also selling or testing meat/plant combinations.
“I love food. I know that most of us are not going to be vegan or vegetarian. And I know that people care mostly about themselves and their loved ones, not about ‘save the planet or the cows,’” says Shalom Daniel, founder and CEO of Mush Foods in New York City. Mush makes a powder out of different types of mycelium, which is substituted by the likes of Pat LaFrieda for some portion of the meat in a sausage or burger.
“When you eat this, you could reduce 50% of the cholesterol, 50% of the saturated fat, 20% of the sodium because you don’t need too much seasoning,” Daniel says. “I’m adding fiber, vitamins that you don’t have in the meat by itself, and you’re eating vegetables.”
“Instead of trying to take something away or convince consumers to eat something that they’ve never had before, we said, ‘Okay, you like meat, you put roasted mushrooms and caramelized onions on your burgers to make it taste better. We put things you normally associate with making meat taste better, inside the burger,” said Andrew Arentowicz, CEO of 50/50 Foods, at the recent Future of Protein Production conference in Chicago.
Price remains a hurdle, although a relatively low bar considering the elevated prices for animal proteins that have shadowed the market for two years now.
Mush Foods’ Daniel points out that his company’s mycelium powder is more economical than many of the gourmet mushrooms, such as shiitakes and enokis, often used in recipes in place of meat. Further, a burger with Mush Foods’ 50CUT product included doesn’t shrink in the cooking.
“It’s not a matter of ‘if’ we’re going to be giving up meat or ‘if’ meat prices are going to go up. It’s a matter of when,” Arentowicz contends. “It’s all-hands-ondeck time, and we need cultivated, we need Impossible, we need Beyond, we need to build a bridge [with the conventional meat supply chain]. We’re all just trying to be a part of the solution.”
"Hybrids are an opportunity to create the familiarity that our consumer needs with some of these new ingredients."
—Dina Fernandez, global R&D director, Alternative Proteins, ADM, on how hybrids can help introduce consumers to ingredients that might seem ‘too weird’ on their own.
Processed is the new fat
76
Percent of healthy US consumers who indicated that they aim to eat fewer processed foods
Source: Purdue University, Consumer Food Insights Report, 2024
In the 1970s, the U.S. government created the first set of dietary guidelines for Americans. Chief among their recommendations was to avoid fat. Fat, the government and its medical experts said, causes heart and other diseases.
For years, CPG companies rode the wave of fat phobia, replacing flavorful, satiating fat with sugar in everything from yogurt to muffins.
Of course, sugar isn’t any better for health than fats. And in trying to address heart disease, the dietary guidelines and resulting consumer sentiment fueled an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and similar diseases.
The lesson: Creating a nutritional villain simply doesn’t help anyone — and it can do serious harm.
Today, this cycle is repeating itself with ultra-processed foods. Consumers are avid to avoid this “bad boy” food category, which happens to include most altmeat products.
“The problem is that the category of ultra-processed foods, which makes up about 60 percent of the American diet by some estimates, is so broad that it borders on useless,” Nicola Guess, a dietician and Oxford researcher, wrote in a New York Times oped. “It lumps storebought whole-grain bread and hummus in with cookies, potato chips and soda.”
The USDA agrees. In developing the 2025 Dietary Guidelines, the agency concluded that there is limited evidence on the health effects — positive or negative — of ultra-processed foods. In a separate project, the organization also found that it’s possible to build a healthy diet in which 91% of the calories come from so-called ultra-processed foods.
“According to current dietary recommendations, the nutrient content of a food and its place in a food group are more important than the extent to which a food was processed,” USDA Agricultural Research Service Nutritionist Julie Hess said of the finding.
Putting the nail in the coffin of the ultra-processed argument, Hess added, “It is possible to eat a low-quality diet even when choosing mostly minimally processed foods. Building a nutritious diet involves more than a consideration of food processing.”
"The concept of ‘ultraprocessed’ is a broad and misleading term that moves focus away from what really matters."
—Quorn Foods CEO Marco Bertacca on media reports and studies around ultra-processed foods and their health impact.
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