Meat Analogues Enter the Digital Age

The country is witnessing, if not a full-fledged changing of the old guard, at least a scooting-over of it. America's favorite fish, fowl, and four-footed foods are ceding ground to a bumper crop of vegetable-based analogues determined to share meat's space at the center of the plate. These new arrivals are making themselves right at home. According to Mintel International Group, Chicago, retail sales of frozen and refrigerated meat substitutes generated $300 million in 2001, and estimates predict that the market for meat and animal-food alternatives will nearly double from 2002 to 2006. In supermarkets, Productscan® Online, Naples, FL, recorded a 124% increase in meat substitute SKUs (stock-keeping units) from 2002 to 2003 alone. Plus, just about 57% of the population sometimes, often or always orders a vegetarian item while dining out, says Bill Stewart, president, Real Foodservices, Inc., Boulder, CO, distributor of MoonRose® vegetarian foods for SYSCO Corporation, Houston, TX.  

But if vegetarians make up only an estimated 2.5% of the population, who's buying all these soy burgers, chickenless nuggets and fakin' bacon? The answer could be sitting at your own dinner table -- or waiting in line at college dining halls or ballpark concession stands. It could even be enjoying a picnic on the beach, shopping at the supermarket or picking up dinner from the fast-food drive-through. That's because with upward of 22 million households now purchasing meat alternatives, according to SPINS and ACNielsen in 2000, the typical meat-analogue consumer is ... the typical consumer.

Now that it's entered the mainstream, the meat-analogue category has seen a changing of the guard within itself. When the core market consisted mainly of dyed-in-the-wool vegetarians, manufacturers played to a captive audience: With only a few meat-free options, consumers had to take what they could get. But as more meat-eaters dip a toe into the analogue pool, they bring a whole new set of tastes and expectations that has manufacturers searching for innovative ingredient and processing technologies.

As ingredients and processes improve, "better products hit the market, which fuels the mainstreaming even more," says Steve Ham, director of marketing, specialty ingredients, MGP Ingredients, Inc., Atchison, KS. "As mainstream demand keeps growing, there's going to be an even wider range of products available -- better-tasting products, and products with better texture." This virtuous circle benefits consumers across the spectrum. So long as manufacturers keep improvements coming, it benefits them as well.

At Seattle's Field Roast(TM) Grain Meat Company, chef and founder David Lee sees the emerging "flexitarian," someone who typically follows a vegetarian diet but sometimes eats meat, as the wellspring of his company's future growth. "It's the demographic of people who are into food, who are discriminating, and who will have steak one night and tofu the next," he says. "They're looking for options that can fit into our established food culture, into the way we were all brought up."

Unfortunately, the chicken-fried steaks that are part of the established food culture have taken their toll on America's hearts and waistlines. As Mark Merryfield, business manager, soy foods, ADM, Decatur, IL, says, "With the baby boom generation hitting that plus-40 range and up, we're not aging gracefully. So we look to food as a way of helping maintain our health."

No wonder, then, that one concern above all sends meat-eating consumers to the analogue aisle: health. With about 40% of Americans claiming to be consciously reducing their meat consumption, David Wilson, U.S. director, Quorn(TM) Foods, Inc., Riverside, CT, believes that the mainstreaming of the market is due to "the meat-reduction issue." When asked why they choose meat alternatives, he says that the primary reason consumers cite boils down to "making a healthier choice, principally to reduce the fat in their diet."

A healthier choice means not just cutting out the "bad," but also including the "good." Thus, the benefits of soy-based items have attracted health-conscious omnivores to the occasional meatless meal. FDA's 1999 approval of a health claim linking soy protein consumption to reduced coronary heart disease risk lets products containing 6.25 grams of soy protein per serving wear the label claim like a badge. "That's when the focus changed," recalls Merryfield. "With the health claim, it became official."

No matter how glittering the health claims, they alone won't sell an analogue. Mitchell Hunt, associate application scientist and culinary specialist, Kerry Ingredients, Beloit, WI, says: "Consumers are seeking nothing different from meat analogues than they are from any other category: They want to see all their desires and all the trends addressed, starting with variety as it relates to bold flavors. They want convenience and prepared foods, hand-held items, and both health-and-wellness and indulgence foods."

Had   you scanned the analogue case as recently as 10 years ago, you would have found little more than grain-based veggie patties, soy burgers and the occasional tofu dog. Had you only wanted a four-pack of veggie burgers to keep as a safety net for the rare vegetarian dinner guest, this selection   would've suited you just fine. But, as Wilson says, "People don't want a veggie burger all the time. They want entrées. They want center-of-the-plate. They want chicken-style products and beef-style products that really meet the health criteria, that taste good, and that are easy to use."

Gardenburger®, Clearfield, UT, has stepped up to the plate. Along with its original grain-based Gardenburger -- which now comes in Savory Portabella and Santa Fe flavors -- the company's product lineup offers an unambiguously beefy Flame Grilled Hamburger analogue, Buffalo Chik'n Wings, a pork-style Herb Crusted Cutlet, and Meatless Riblets, Meatballs, and Meatloaf, among other familiar items.

In another sign that analogues have gone mainstream, freezer cases now carry packages of textured-vegetable crumbles and individually quick-frozen (IQF) chicken-style tenders for a meatless pasta sauce or stir-fry. Quorn Foods even makes Naked Cutlets, a product as flexible to cook as a plain chicken breast. Until these came along, home cooks had little choice when adapting traditional recipes for meatless tastes. Now, says Joe Lawer, vice president, sales and marketing, Yves® Veggie Cuisine, Delta (Vancouver), British Columbia, "In 10, maybe 15 minutes, you can have veggie ground round ready to go over spaghetti or into a taco. And if you follow the directions, it's not a complex meal to prepare."

Making meatless even easier has been the boomlet in heat-and-eat meals that presents analogues as part of multi-component entrées. Gardenburger's Sweet & Sour Pork blends hunks of soy protein concentrate with bell peppers, onions and pineapple in a classic Cantonese-style sauce. Yves Veggie Cuisine has added rice and noodle "bowls" to its lineup of fresh, refrigerated chili, penne and lasagna entrées   found in supermarket produce sections -- a channel that distinguishes the line from the usual frozen offerings. While the chili, lasagna and penne feature a textured-soy and -wheat   Veggie Ground Round, the Santa Fe Veggie Beef and Thai Lemongrass Veggie Chik'n Bowls contain a soy-based meat alternative that replicates the texture and appearance of whole-muscle meat.

But to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the soy burger's death are greatly exaggerated. Merryfield notes that these trusty staples still represent 45% of all meat alternatives sold. Although   he doesn't doubt that the analogue category will continue to add prepared meals, new varieties and recipe-ready ingredients, "I don't think you'll ever see that burger section get much smaller than it is now."  

Brian Yager, corporate research chef at ADM -- and a vegetarian -- agrees for two simple reasons: "One, the burger is a convenience food. And two, it's a piece of cultural nostalgia that crosses socioeconomic lines." Increasingly, so do analogue consumers.

No matter what side of the socioeconomic line they're on, flexitarians have received most of the credit for reinvigorating the analogue category. While their purchasing power has prompted manufacturers to shape up their products' image, vegetarians are just as loathe as anyone to settle for the same old substitutes.

In foodservice, for example, often a vegetarian item is the same old pasta primavera that's on every menu. Left without better choices, operators who wanted to give vegetarian customers something other than noodles with veggies would cherry-pick certain vegetarian items -- tofu, tempeh, this and that -- to bring into their establishments, if for no other reason than that they were easier to source.

However, within the past few years that major distribution entities have taken an interest in meeting the meatless needs of foodservice operators, Stewart notes: "The recognition became that the category was mainstreaming itself, and that there was a need for a healthier dining cuisine to be made available," he says. And the main reason that foodservice operators hadn't embraced it earlier, he thinks, "was that they just couldn't get it."

But now, with so many looking for the occasional meatless night out, foodservice outlets have no choice but to expand their options of meatless menu items. Stewart and MoonRose offer everything from veggie patties and soy burgers to meatless taco mix and vegan herb-crusted cutlets. Granted, some strategic positioning of the analogue doesn't hurt its chances for success. "If you're using a meat analogue as the centerpiece of a vegetarian entrée," says Stewart, "and if that entrée doesn't deliver on a presentation and flavor that's equal to the other items on the menu, then your customers are going to feel like they've paid a lot and didn't have their expectations met."

Coming up with alternatives takes some consideration. Terry Gieseke, director, business development, Nutriant, a Kerry Company, Cedar Falls, IA, says, "There are fundamental preference differences between long-term vegetarians and omnivores deliberately reducing their meat consumption." For example, she says, omnivores indicate a strong preference for meat-like characteristics and appearance, whereas vegans and some vegetarians show little if any desire for explicit meat mimicry, sometimes even rejecting a product   that displays any visible meatiness.

Targeting analogues for "natural" distribution poses yet another set of formulation concerns. Carrie Kuhnell, food technologist, Givaudan Flavors Corp., Cincinnati, says, "The natural channels tend to require more specific ingredients, like non-GMO and all-natural, vegan ingredients." In contrast, she says, when developing them for the mainstream market, "the restrictions aren't so strict. They still have to be vegetarian, of course, but a lot of them even allow egg or dairy."

According to Gieseke, Nutriant's naturally processed soy ingredients meet the stricter demands of the former market.   Lacking exposure to hexane during the oil-extraction phase of processing, she explains, they have "a uniquely clean flavor and remarkable physical properties in analogue applications. And they're the only soy concentrates and isolates that can be certified organic."

That's important to Anna Kassoway, marketing manager for Green Options,   San Rafael, CA, a company that sells meatless products under the Vegi-Deli® and Now & Zen® brands. As an organization dedicated to environmentally sustainable food production, Kassoway says, Green Options' greatest challenge   has been securing a source of organic ingredients whose supply and prices   can actually sustain the company's desire to make its products all-organic.

The industry's most significant contribution to mainstreaming meat analogues has been in helping them better live up to their name -- making them more analogous to meat, the tastes of committed vegetarians notwithstanding. With this latest generation of meat analogues, says Stewart, "You wouldn't know them from beef or chicken ...They've got the good chew and clean protein flavor that the palate understands and has really grown used to."

It hasn't always been this way. The first several iterations mimicked only a narrow range of meats -- a consequence, in part, of the state of the processing art. Extrusion, the cornerstone of analogue engineering technologies, originally proceeded via machines that used a single screw to force a vegetable-protein mixture -- often soy or wheat proteins, or a combination of both -- through a barrel. High heat and pressure would cook and texturize the protein, giving the extrudate a resistant chew like that of cooked meat. Varying the nature of the protein blend, the extruder die or the cutter lets manufacturers produce different types and forms, usually grounds, chunks, crumbles or flakes.

The most famous of these early textured extrudates was probably ADM's texturized vegetable protein, or TVP. An ingredient mainstay since the 1950s, its reasonable cost and workmanlike efficiency have kept it in use in applications as wide-ranging as imitation bacon bits, ground-meat analogues and meat extenders in school lunch programs. Then there's the classic soy burger. "A vast majority of the burgers we make in our meat analogue plant are based on textured soy pieces," says Yager. "They're hydrated, they're mixed with binders, flavors, stabilizers and colors, and then the mixture is put into a machine that forms the patties the same way you'd make a traditional burger."

Textured soy concentrate can help impart the crumbly, ground-beef texture that says "burger" to the palate. Modifying the size of the piece -- going with, say, a flake or a granule -- fine-tunes the pleasingly grainy chew, as does building gel strength in pockets throughout the patty with a functional soy protein isolate. The isolate also "gives some firmness to the burger that wouldn't be inherent to it if we just used the textured concentrate piece," says Yager.   Finally, to simulate the juicy fattiness of a burger, he says,   "we can just add a basic fat to the mixture."

Making hot dogs and sausage links follows a similar path. "You take your extruded ingredients, you hydrate them, and you add some other functional ingredients," says Yager. "Then you put those into a hopper and you stuff the sausage the same way you would a traditional one." Manufacturers can achieve the finer emulsions common in bacon, ham and lunchmeats through a strategic choice of textured and functional soy proteins, while sprinkling a few tofu chunks throughout the paste to produce the particulate-studded texture in sausage.

But what if you want to move beyond ground-beef patties and lunchmeat emulsions to the myofibrillar structure of whole-muscle chicken breasts, beef tenderloins or pork chops? A good place to start is with the twin-screw extrusion, which Eric Sevatson, member-manager, USC, LLC, Sabetha, KS, says has allowed a quantum leap in the quality and manufacture of meat analogues.

Single-screw extrusion, Sevatson explains, was held back by its inconsistency during processing: "A single-screw system isn't as positive a pump. What you put in it wouldn't always go through it and come out in a straightforward, timely manner. A single-screw is very dependent on the formula and the quality of the ingredients." If the protein mass is too sticky, or contains too much oil and fiber, for instance, it's more apt to tax the machine to its limit. "A single-screw is very sensitive to those fluctuations. If you deviate much from a certain ingredient specification, a single-screw will not work," he says. In contrast, he continues, the twin-screw extruder's screw and barrel geometry creates "clearances and tolerances that are far more precise than in a single-screw. So a twin-screw can overcome some of these ingredient issues. And it is a very positive pump, so you can have far better control of the extrudate."

Armed with twin-screw extrusion, manufactures can better orient the tangled coils of protein into the lateral and longitudinal fibers that give muscle meat its characteristic grain. "What the extruder does," says Sevatson, "is it gets those proteins all going in the same direction so that when you get that textured piece out of the extruder, you can tear it just like you could tear a cooked chicken breast. It comes off in strands."

ADM has helped push extrusion's boundaries with the development of NutriSoy® Next, a new, high-moisture extrusion technology for making an analogue that resembles a traditional muscle meat. "That's important because, from our standpoint, the most difficult part of the meat-analogue business is developing the mouthfeel that goes with it," says Yager. "Each muscle meat has an inherently different mouthfeel." Through a combination of die shape, knife action and familiar soy protein ingredients -- isolates, concentrates and flours -- the technology "allows the proteins to line up in that fibrous nature that looks exactly like a chicken breast."

The technology also has a gentle touch with volatile flavor profiles, by manipulating temperature during extrusion. "With this process, we can maintain the flavor profile in the meat analogue so that we don't have to flavor it afterward," says Yager. It can also tolerate binders, oils, fibers and other ingredients that would have thrown the single-screw extruders of yore into a mechanical tizzy.

Innovations in protein ingredients also help close the gap between analogues and the meats they mimic. While there isn't anything   new about wheat gluten acting as a convincing meat substitute -- Buddhist monks discovered its virtues as far back as 1,500 years ago -- new technologies have introduced it to texturization and have capitalized on its ability to reproduce the myofibrillar striation of muscle meat with startling fidelity.

To recreate particularly realistic meat textures, formulations often put both wheat and soy proteins to work. That's because a laminar protein structure based solely on wheat can sometimes go from pleasantly meaty to leathery. Seeding that structure with hydrated soy protein gels balances wheat's tendency toward toughness with soy's tenderizing effects. This approach hits the target even better when the soy proteins are associated with a certain degree of fiber. More fiber means more disruption of the wheat protein network, and thus, more softening. So, when aiming for the mellow bite of a pot roast, a soy protein concentrate, with its relative excess of fiber, would hit the textural target better than a fiber-poor isolate.

Quorn, an import from the United Kingdom, is unlike either wheat or soy protein. It has been in existence as an analogue in Europe for 17 years and has been trying its luck in the States since early 2002.

What's most intriguing about the product is its unusual provenance and manufacturing process. Mycoproteins isolated from Fusarium venenatum, a fungus   discovered growing in a field in Buckinghamshire, make up Quorn's analogue scaffolding. "Mycoprotein is found naturally occurring in soil," explains Wilson, "and if you look closely, its structure is like a series of strands, a series of fibers."

Rather than aligning those fibers into a meaty muscle arrangement through extrusion, the manufacturer   grows them via continuous aerobic fermentation in a glucose medium. Wilson describes the mycoprotein as it comes out of the fermentation process as almost like raw pastry dough. "Then all we do to it is add other natural ingredients, natural flavorings, maybe some onion, depending on the final product, and a little bit of egg white to help bind the fibers together," he says. Following heating to help gel the mass, the company forms it into the finished product shape -- a nugget, slice or cutlet.

A cross section displays the fibration expected in a chicken cutlet or turkey slice, a quality that Wilson says results from nuances in the company's proprietary heating and freezing process. In part, he hints, ice-crystal formation inside the mycoprotein fibers contributes to the striation and "helps align those fibers and create that incredible chicken-like texture."

The tubular structure of the mycoprotein fibers themselves also boosts   Quorn's textural appeal. "When you look very closely at mycoprotein through a microscope, it's a series of very thin tubes. Inside the tubes, you actually carry some naturally occurring fat, and also some water. When you take the product through the cooking process, then, the fat and the water are still held within those tubes," says Wilson. That, he says, provides the moist, succulent bite, "which you don't get to the same degree in soy protein or wheat protein." The mycoprotein's strong cell walls and structure keep Quorn in a solid shape even with overcooking.

Quorn and other deliberately meaty analogues create an illusion that forces consumers to define them in terms of something else. In other words, we measure an analogue's success by how closely it resembles the ideal of, say, chicken, ground round or pulled-pork barbecue.

But Lee is quick to point out that, "If you look up the word 'meat' in the Oxford English Dictionary, you'll find that, traditionally, the word actually meant solid food." Thus, it's not unusual to hear people speak of "nutmeats" or of scraping the "flesh" from a pumpkin. Even so, he says, "In a vernacular American usage, we associate the word exclusively with animal flesh."

It's another example of how deeply meat is ingrained into our culture. Although Lee isn't fighting that meat culture, he is fighting to resurrect the word's more inclusive meaning through his products, which he calls "grain meats," not "grain-based meat analogues." They may be vegan-friendly blends of wheat protein flour, grains, vegetables and legumes, but "We're embracing the meat culture and all that entails," says Lee. "I'm making a vegetarian meat for meat eaters. That's our target."

You won't bite into a Field Roast grain-meat loaf, deli slice or breaded cutlet and marvel at how much it tastes like chicken or ham. But, Lee says, you will notice a savory flavor and meaty texture that you can sink your teeth into. "We're not trying to be something else," he maintains. The products don't imitate other meats, but expand "meat" options to include choices besides the animal-based variety.

In many respects, that's made product development easier. Freed from "trying to create that sinew, that flavor of animal flesh," Lee says, he has license to focus on building vibrant profiles based on tomato, garlic, sage, hazelnut and shiitake mushrooms. "I'm using bold flavors and dominant flavors that leap out at you   and that are authentic," he says. "When you taste our Wild Mushroom Loaf, it's the shiitake and the bolete mushrooms that really come out. In the Lentil Sage, it's that flavor of sage." He's even designing a port-infused country-style pâté for sale by the slice at specialty delis. "We like to think that we're the Boar's Head of the vegetarian world," says Lee, referring to the Sarasota, FL, purveyor of premium sausages and cured meats. "I would call our products artisan-made, vegetarian meat for meat eaters."

In keeping with this artisanal spirit, the production methods purposefully lean toward the low-tech. "I am proud -- and I think that it's one of our key attributes -- that Field Roast is a product that is simple for us to make," says Lee. The ingredients don't stray too far from what a consumer could find in their own pantry, perhaps with the exception of some carrageenan and Irish moss extract to help the products slice more cleanly. The plant employs   grinders and smokehouses, along with kettles where hand-netted grain-meat loaves simmer in a seasoned broth. "We have gone to great pains," says Lee,   "to give consumers a sense that, 'Hey, I can see where this came from. When I bite into Field Roast, I can see the onions, I can see the lentils, I can see the mushroom flecks.' It is what it is."

Lee's flavor-first focus might seem like a luxury to product developers   saddled with making soy taste like sirloin. But what was once a luxury is increasingly a right thanks to two major changes in the food industry. "One is better technology in the soy world," says Kuhnell, "and two, we've furthered our research and development into vegetarian flavors in general."

Poor flavor plagued yesterday's analogues, particularly with respect to the underlying flavor of the product itself. Early soy ingredients retained a significant concentration of the soluble carbohydrate fraction, even post-refinement, resulting in a host of flavor defects described as everything from "grassy" to "beany" to "hauntingly like wet cardboard." Masking flavors and brines helped overcome some of the off-notes, but the relatively recent ability to strip soy flours of the offending carbohydrates, producing soy concentrates and isolates of roughly 70% and 90% protein, respectively, has given a real advantage in rendering less-troublesome analogue flavoring.

Brenda Waite, a food scientist at Givaudan, credits soy ingredient manufacturers. "The soy protein concentrates they've developed have much less beany flavor than they did," she says. "And another piece, too, is the soy protein isolate. That's very clean. If you taste it, it really has almost no flavor."

So, less flavor defects at the outset, means less need for flavor maskers to overcome them. That liberates product developers to emphasize making the products' flavor "much more multidimensional," says Waite, "which is truer to the flavor of the original meat."

In beef's case, that means juicy and bloody, with notes of serum. Also important, says Kuhnell, is "that rare-beef taste you get when you're eating a seared beef tenderloin or New York strip." Chicken authenticity means fatty, brothy notes that carry the essence of pan drippings. The trick is to recreate these flavors without help from any animal ingredients at all.

The traditional tools for flavoring analogues, 5' nucleotides, hydrolyzed vegetable proteins, autolyzed yeast extracts and others, were somewhat blunt in their execution, creating more of a general savory   impression than a flavor specific to a particular meat. Moreover, their appearance on labels often became a liability. Now, through a combination of sensory science and analytical techniques, such as gas chromatography/mass spectrometry and electronic noses, Hunt can more accurately determine the levels and precise structures of the compounds associated with a particular meat flavor.

This lab work lets flavorists provide tailor-made profiles. "So if a customer called wanting to make a vegetarian pad Thai and needed something to flavor the chicken analogue," says Kuhnell, "that's something we could give them." The technology has also yielded believable vegetarian versions of tallow or pork fat. "We've got some nice flavors for bacon, too," says Waite. "And you can combine them with canola oil so that you're delivering both the fat and the flavor while still maintaining the vegetarian status."

With cleaner, more-authentic flavors, analogues no longer need to pile on so much grill or smoke flavor that they taste like a bonfire. For example, says Kuhnell, "instead of a heavy, one-dimensional smoked chicken, you're seeing more oven-roasted chicken." This development should please the increasingly sophisticated palate of the American consumer.

Hunt sure thinks it will. "Consumers want to be wowed with flavors and accompaniments," he says. "They want layers of flavor on top of each other: savory, salty, meaty, sweet. They want to taste sautéed onion and garlic, or a tangy, fully developed sauce like a raspberry-chipotle barbecue. They want that caramelized-sugar flavor that comes from grilling the 'meat' with the sauce, and they also want a touch of black pepper from the initial seasoning to balance it all out."

According to Hunt, nothing gives an analogue depth better than texturally complex trimmings. He suggests caramelized onions deglazed with Marsala, sautéed mushrooms, blue cheese, crisp lettuce, tender tomato and a rustic ciabbata roll with a bite. "And why not include a packet of Swiss-cheese-and-mushroom topping with a bacon analogue for the consumer to microwave alongside, or pour on top?"

Before manufacturers get ahead of themselves with far-out, fancy flavors, they should take note that, as Waite has observed, "Home-style has gotten to be a definite trend with meat analogues." We're talking good, old-fashioned suppertime standards -- "like a vegetarian chicken pot pie, a meatloaf with gravy, pork cutlets, things that are battered and breaded," she says. Home-style profiles make perfect sense, given the mainstream path that analogues have taken. Sometimes, it seems, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Kimberly J. Decker, a California-based technical writer, has a B.S. in Consumer Food Science with a minor in English from the University of California, Davis. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and enjoys cooking and eating food in addition to writing about it.

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