IEEE Spectrum June, 2013 - 70

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HMMA. But the start-ups involved are,
understandably, reluctant to give away
their secret recipes. It seems they want to
make as much progress as they can before
they have to go head-to-head with the bigger players. Patrick Brown, the would-be
mock-meat magnate, wrote in an e-mail:
"Given the resources and political clout of
the meat and dairy and Big Ag industries,
I'm sure you can understand that we have
more to lose than to gain by drawing further attention to our activities and plans."
Still, details about some products have
inevitably seeped out. Hsieh, whose breakthroughs led to Beyond Meat, was listed as
coinventor on a recent U.S. patent that runs
to 23 pages, including myriad details about
temperature, pressure, pH, and lipid content. You can also find a video on YouTube
that shows the "Missouri faux chicken"
being made, in all its mock-meaty glory.

"chIcken" from
an eXtruder
To make a high-moisture meat
analogue, start by mixing plant
protein powders with water and
oil. Then knead the mix in an
extruder barrel, and finally shear
and cut in a die.

jun 2013

north american

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MIxIng cylIndEr

ExtrudEr barrEl
dIE

g I v e n fa k e m e at ' s l o n g h I s t o r y, w h y I s I t o n ly n o w s ta r t I n g t o
rival the real thing? According to Gerry Hertzel, research coordinator for food products at Wenger, part of the answer can be
found in improvements in the raw ingredients. The suitability,
consistency, and variety of the soy and other vegetable protein
powders from the Big Ag manufacturers, such as Archer Daniels
Midland, Cargill, and CHS, has improved greatly, asserts Hertzel.
"If you look at the soy isolates from 10 years ago and the ones
today, there's a night-and-day difference," he says.
Hertzel's colleague Plattner also points to recent improvements
in the design of extruder dies that let operators very precisely control the rate of coolant flow, which in turn allows for consistent
and uniform cooling. He believes that the pace of improvements
will hold steady and bring even better products in coming years.
And extrusion isn't the end of the line, technology-wise. At
Wageningen UR, engineering professor Atze Jan van der Groot has
invented a different kind of machine to process vegetable protein
powders into a fibrous, meatlike product. Van der Groot began
by studying the protein structure he wanted in the final product
and then set about designing something that could reproduce
it. The ingenious contraption that resulted uses a conical steel
rotor that spins within a complementary funnel-shaped steel vessel. The rotor crushes, shears, and heats vegetable-protein powders. "We can create a wider range of textures," van der Groot
says, while demonstrating his novel food processor. "I think it
will eventually be cheaper than extrusion. It's quite simple and
70

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robust." He is now working with engineers at Delft University of
Technology, in the Netherlands, to scale up the system.
Today a lot of meat-analogue research in Europe is focused on
foods other than soy. One of Germany's renowned Fraunhofer
Institutes is concentrating on lupine seeds and has produced
sausages and "ice cream" that have received good reviews. In
France, the food companies Sotexpro and Roquette have jointly
introduced a pea-protein-based substance meant to be added
to meat to extend it. Studies have indicated that meat can
be supplemented by up to 30 percent with extenders before
people begin to notice any difference. Already, in the United
States, soy protein makes up about 30 percent by weight of the
"meat" served in the National School Lunch Program. Vaclav
Smil says that extenders are the surest way to start displacing
meat on a large scale.
But the more important challenge now is to make a cheaper
meat alternative, not a better one. Plenti and Beyond Meat generally cost about twice as much as real chicken. With greater economies of scale, the costs would undoubtedly go down.
Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, wants his company
to be huge, and not just for the obvious reasons. "If all we end
up doing is serving the wealthy, we'd be upset," he says. "Here's
how I'll know when we've succeeded: when you can go into a
Burger King or a McDonald's and buy a plant-based nugget." n
poSt your coMMentS online at http://spectrum.ieee.org/altprotein0613

illuStration by

James provost

http://http:// http://spectrum.ieee.org/ http://SPectrum.ieee.orG

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum June, 2013