Meet the flavour engineers working to make plant-based food taste more like meat

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Taste is intrinsic to how we experience food. A bad taste will easily put us off trying something again and a good taste will keep us coming back for seconds. But what if the taste of your favourite burger was engineered in a lab using animal stem cells or beans?

In a bid to boost the faltering market for alternative proteins, a handful of Canadian scientists are betting this lab-based approach could catch on with consumers if the burger tastes good enough. Using science to add or modify certain ingredients in plant-based foods, the researchers have become engineers of flavour who believe their products could have what it takes to sway a critical yet wavering market of people who want to eat less meat without compromising on taste.

These self-identifying flexitarians are the target audience for many alternative protein producers. Less fussed about taking the rigid all-or-nothing approach of a vegetarian or vegan diet, these consumers are often just looking for a way to reduce their meat intake for the sake of their health and the planet’s.

From cultivated beef fat to fermented chickpeas, experts say the scientists’ work could be consequential – but only if consumers can be convinced to sink their teeth into what ends up on grocery store shelves.

“What we eat is so incredibly personal, it’s so nostalgic. It’s going to be really hard to get people to switch from meat if you don’t offer them good alternatives that have the experience they’re looking for,” said Emily Farrar, CEO and co-founder of Genuine Taste, a Canadian startup making cultivated animal fat.

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The popularity of plant-based meat substitutes has ebbed and flowed in recent years. The sector made significant gains in the past decade, with global retail sales nearly tripling between 2014 and 2023 to reach US$6.4-billion, according to market research firm Euromonitor. But as customers have less disposable income to spare, owing to the rising cost of living, their willingness to pay a higher price for fake meat has notably decreased. According to an analysis by the Good Food Institute, year-over-year unit sales of plant-based meat substitutes in U.S. retail fell by 19 per cent in 2023, in line with broader industry trends of subdued sales.

Yet, a global trend analysis by Agriculture Canada found about a third of American adults would buy more meat substitutes if they tasted indistinguishable from the real thing. Plus, more than two-thirds would prefer alternative proteins that taste like meat rather than vegetables.

This is the market Ms. Farrar is trying to tap into at Genuine Taste.

To produce their cultivated beef fat, the company takes stem cells isolated from a cow through a biopsy, places them in a bioreactor and feeds them nutrients. Once in the lab, the cells are handled by scientists, who use an array of test tubes, pipettes and vials to move cultures around.

The scene inside the lab is sterile, clean and controlled – a stark departure from the barnyard origins of the cells. But most importantly, the animal doesn’t have to die, and the cells continue to reproduce for years, Ms. Farrar said.

The end product can’t be labelled vegetarian or vegan, but it can make a plant-based burger taste infinitely more like beef. This is important, Ms. Farrar said, because flexitarians or “reducetarians,“ who are open to partially reducing their meat intake, represent a larger share of the alternative protein market than those who don’t eat meat at all.

“These are people who don’t necessarily care if the product has animal products in it or not. It’s more about what it delivers in terms of taste, flavour, and they’re really interested in improving their health and reducing their environmental impact,” she said.

In the next five years, Ms. Farrar said Genuine Taste will look to branch out into other animal fats and continue to improve the nutritional profiles of its products, which already have a higher ratio of “good” or unsaturated fats compared to conventional animal fat.

Pooya Mamaghani, chief technology officer and co-founder of Genuine Taste, said fat is easier, faster and less expensive to cultivate than animal muscle but still has a huge impact on taste. Their product is also chemically identical to conventional animal fat, which is very difficult to replicate with plant-based oils, he added.

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Focusing first on pet food, which has fewer regulatory hurdles to overcome, the company has plans to expand into human foods.

In December, Genuine Taste announced a partnership with plant-based meat maker The Better Butchers Inc. to develop a product that uses their cultivated fat as an ingredient. However, Dr. Mamaghani said the hybrid meat, which will contain mushroom-based protein and cultivated fat, won’t hit shelves for at least a year or two because it will have to undergo regulatory approval in Canada.

In a lab on the East Coast, Marcia English, an associate professor at St. Francis Xavier University and Canada Research Chair in Protein and Flavour Chemistry, is taking a different approach to making plants taste more meat-like.

Instead of cultivating a whole new class of ingredients, she’s tapping into an age-old staple and using fermentation to give it a fresh start.

Pulses, such as chickpeas or lentils, are a versatile food. They can be eaten as is or made into flour and incorporated into products such as cookies or pasta for a high-protein, gluten-free alternative.

However, when ground up, pulses can emit an off-putting, “bean-y” aroma, Prof. English said, which limits their use in certain foods where the ingredient is an asset, but its flavour is not.

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Through fermentation, a metabolic process used to make products such as yogurt and cheese, Prof. English and her team have found a way to isolate, remove and alter certain tastes and aromas of pulses – a crop that Canada leads globally as a producer and exporter, and which provides almost 26,000 Canadian jobs and contributes $3.1-billion to the country’s GDP, according to Pulse Canada, a national association representing growers, traders and processers.

“This is a really good source of food that’s not being utilized to its full capacity,” Prof. English said.

By controlling factors such as how long a pulse ferments and which micro-organisms are used to break it down, Prof. English said her team can optimize the reaction for specific products, such as a chickpea-based cheese that actually melts or a seafood alternative resembling flaked Atlantic salmon, which is made from a blend of pea and faba bean proteins.

After some more work to improve the fatty acid composition of her formulations, Prof. English said she hopes to look into scaling up from lab to market to offer a meat alternative made from Canadian pulses that flexitarians and vegetarians alike can embrace.

But this is where the hard part begins, said Gary Pickering, a professor of biological sciences and psychology at Brock University. Food science has been toying with taste for decades, he said. That’s nothing new.

The real challenge comes when it’s time to convince consumers they should embrace a whole new category of products from brands they may not yet trust.

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“Look at the back of any industrialized food package on the supermarket shelves, and you’ll see a lot of unnaturalness there,” he said, adding that accusations of “unnaturalness” are something new, lab-grown products are likely to come up against.

Therefore, as with any new food technology, the key to its success rests in its marketing, he said.

Lianne Foti, an associate professor at the Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics at the University of Guelph, said products such as those from Genuine Taste will be particularly difficult to market because of their hybrid plant-animal nature.

“When a product contains one ingredient but evokes the taste of another, marketers are going to have to address the potential cognitive dissonance,” she said.

Transparency will be critical, Prof. Foti said. While the flexitarian consumer may be open to trying a new alternative protein, they’re unlikely to take a chance on a brand they don’t trust.

“Consumers are very savvy, and marketers should include a clear and engaging explanation of how flavour is derived and why it matters,” she said.

Clear labelling will be a priority for Genuine Taste, Ms. Farrar said, adding that she’d like to see their product simply listed in ingredients as “cultivated fat.”

But at the end of the day, she said most people will end up eating what tastes good and if Genuine Taste can get that right, the rest will fall into place.

“If we can provide sustainable alternatives that taste good, that are at a reasonable price point, I think the messaging won’t matter as much.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the honorific for Emily Farrar.