Poke around the frozen meat section, and you may find patties with cheese or jalapeño chunks in them; they’re what the industry calls “inclusions.” Inclusions are always visible, always chunky, and they’re a great example of how relative value creates opportunities for trade. Shoppers see inclusions as a value-add. Fancy. “This comes with bacon. I love bacon.” To the manufacturer, inclusions are profitable, as almost any inclusion costs less by mass than the ground meat around it.
From a cost-cutting perspective, inclusions aren’t a new strategy. A lot of us grew up – or fed our own kids – on things like meatloaf stretched with saltine cracker crumbs.
Hold all of this in mind while we cut over to plant-based proteins (PBPs), which have recently seen a precipitous decline in purchases after a decade of growth. Here’s why:
- Taste. From a carnivore’s perspective, PBPs generally don’t deliver, especially in relationship to …
- Price. In the restaurant industry, proteins are often referred to as the “center of the plate.” They’re the main attraction and the most expensive part of the dish. If we’re expecting to pay more for one steak than another, we want the tastiness of the new steak to have some positive relationship to the extra money spent. Taste is a fundamental sense used to signify things like nutrient availability and healthiness. Compared to real meats, PBPs essentially try to swap extrinsic value (sustainability) for intrinsic value (flavor) at a higher price. This is often going to be a bad trade, unless PBPs improve …
- Health. Concerns about health increase with age. GenX is a relatively small generation that views “whole foods” as the standard for healthiness. Capital-WF Whole Foods grew with GenX, which was there when the Food Pyramid, with its foundation of highly-processed carbohydrates, began to crumble. The ingredients list of the newer PBPs can be substantial. While a lot of PBPs are tidying up, they’ll never approach lower-case whole foods. If you look at the ingredients statement on a vac tray of salmon, it’ll say “salmon.” Because it’s made of 100% salmon. One may notice the retail return of former staples like liver and kidney. Carnivore, keto, and paleo diets, with their own health claims, run against PBPs and have a much easier selling proposition when it comes to health and sustainability, which they promote by a “return” to consuming as much of a grass-fed or organic animal as possible. Supposedly, it worked for American Plains Indians, who have always been praised for …
- Sustainability, which was the motivating force behind the creation of many PBPs. What entrepreneurs want and what the market wants are rarely anything but similar. The asymmetry can be extreme. A billion dollars might have gone into creating, marketing, and scaling a line of PBPs while consumers ignored it for the three dollars they’d save buying what they already knew and loved. With few exceptions, greater sustainability = greater price. When it comes down to it, sustainability at the grocery store remains a mostly elite concern because wealthier people can afford the extrinsic trade off against price. Even prior to the recent inflationary years, PBP’s prices reduced accessibility. With inflation, they became untenable. When your electricity bill is 20 days past due, sustainability is a nice-to-have.
Carnivores are not the only heretics. Consider that simpler vegetarian options like tofu and seitan to the basic black bean burger from the likes of Morningstar Farms have been mainstream-ish for decades. These and other perfectly good solutions block vegans’ and vegetarians’ adoption of the newer PBPs because the tried-and-true satisfies the Food Tool taste, nutrition, and sustainability jobs well enough without the higher prices.
Remember: Most PBPs were created with meat eaters in mind. Some 80 percent of regular plant-based protein consumers are flexitarians: people who were already interested in reducing meat consumption.
This is where we get to blends, or plant-rich meat products.
It turns out that just adding plants to meats can satisfy or even improve taste, healthiness, and sustainability without adding much to prices. It isn’t an ideologically pure solution, but it may be a more practical and successful one.
In fact, some of the ostensibly plant-based brands, like Quorn, have been using animal products in some SKUs without notice. Its [ Meatless ] Diced Chiqin Pieces, primarily made from the increasingly popular ingredient mycoprotein, also contains egg whites. As every baker knows, egg whites are a complex protein that lends body to recipes and can make other flavors richer and hold longer.
Back in 2020, Hormel’s Applegate brand released its Well Carved “pairing” line of organic frozen beef and turkey patties with different, very visible and creative inclusions. As reported in Meat + Poultry:
“The Well Carved product line is a bold, direct challenge to the newly established wisdom that the only way to eat meat responsibly is to settle for a highly processed soy or pea-based burger or to not eat meat at all,” said John Ghingo, president. “Well Carved products offer a way for consumers to enjoy the real, clean meat they crave along with the vegetables that promote health and a healthier planet.”
Chicago-based Amy Lu has seen incredible growth in its line of fully-cooked ground chicken based meatballs, sausages, and patties — all of which come in delightful blends aimed at Whole Foods and Costco shoppers.
It appears that mushroom and mycoproteins are leading the way in the plant-rich meat space. But, we should probably clear some things up. First, mushrooms and mycoproteins are not plants, but part of the fungal kingdom, which includes yeasts and molds. Mycoproteins, or mycelium-based or fungal proteins are not mushrooms, either, but the vegetative, or juvenile-to-adult transitional phase, of a fungus. If mushrooms are like the fruit, mycoproteins are like the root. The have different tastes, textures, and nutritional qualities. Look, it matters to the manufacturers.
Marlow Foods’ Quorn label, mentioned before, was the first company to launch mycoprotein-based products. Fermented Fusarium venenatum, which converts starch into a protein-rich, fibrous, meat-ish single-cell structure, is the industry’s mycoprotein of choice since Quorn’s patents, based on decades of research, expired in 2010.
Bringing it back, mushrooms used to function as a popular inclusion. Today, mushrooms and mycoproteins are being blended into meat products to provide an assortment of flavor profiles and qualities. Mush Foods joined with Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors to combine Mush’s 50Cut product – made from a blend of mushrooms and mycoproteins – with premium ground beef.
In a blind taste test, a group of 1,192 omnivores and flexitarians found food products containing a 50/50 blend of animal and plant ingredients to be the most appealing.
In six out of eight categories, the leading plant-rich product outperformed the leading plant-based product, the report said …
Nectar said the results show plant-rich products can do what plant-based meat products haven’t yet accomplished, which is to get consumers to reduce their meat consumption.
“We’re trying to show folks that you can still preserve the taste you love and have benefits not only for the climate but for health,” said Caroline Cotto, the group’s director.