A Realistic Steak Is Fake Meat’s Holy Grail

The engineers and food researchers are, you could say, a bit obsessed. But the startup isn’t looking to sell the perfect cut of beef. Instead, it wants to create a plant-based facsimile. The company is building a 3D printer that it says will produce a meatless steak that’s so fatty, juicy, and perfectly meaty that even the most dedicated carnivore won’t know the difference. “All meat alternatives today are basically a meat-homogeneous mass,” says Eshchar Ben-Shitrit, Redefine Meat’s chief executive officer. “If you 3D-print it, you can control what’s happening inside the mass to improve the texture and to improve the flavor.”

Startups such as Redefine Meat and their backers say that 3D printing promises to give diners the same sensory experience as eating a real T-bone or rump roast. The technology involves developing a design that can then be printed countless times. First, proprietary computer software creates a detailed model of a steak, including the muscle, fat, and blood, based on whichever cut it’s emulating. That blueprint is then transmitted to a printer loaded with plant-based “inks.” Hit the start button and out comes a “steak.”

Alternative meat is enjoying a boom as climate change and health concerns drive consumers to products such as those made by Beyond Meat Inc. and Impossible Foods Inc. While ground-meat replacements are widely available, mimicking an actual cut of meat has proved far more challenging. That’s because replicating the mouthfeel and visual appeal of a juicy sirloin is a lot tougher than cranking out something that’s going to be slapped between a bun. Says Giuseppe Scionti, founder of Novameat Tech SL, a Spanish company developing a 3D-printed steak: “A beefsteak is the holy grail of plant-based meat.“

The faux-meat category has already reached an estimated $14 billion in annual sales worldwide, according to Barclays Plc, and will grow to $140 billion in 2029. The sausages and patties now on the market are much easier to make, since all the ingredients are mixed up into a ground mash and then squeezed out into the format of choice. “We have a lot of burgers in the market—many, many burgers,” says Dan Altschuler Malek, managing partner at Unovis Partners, which manages New Crop Capital, a venture fund that invests in alternative protein businesses. “When will fillet come about? When will sirloin come about? Consumers will want to have a choice.”

Engineering a realistic texture is crucial. It goes beyond flavor and affects attributes like mouthfeel, chewiness, and the sensation of multiple tastes in a single bite. That means engineers face the difficult task of precisely re-creating layers of thin muscle fibers and fat.

Cultured-meat companies, which already are growing chicken, beef, and duck from extracted animal cells, have also struggled to perfect realistic texture, since doing so requires multiple kinds of cells that interact with each other within a scaffolding that can organize it all correctly. “You need to create at the same time the taste, the texture, and appearance of the fibrous meat, the whole muscle tissue,” says Scionti, whose company is backed by New Crop Capital.

The two companies say they will supply customers, including restaurants, meat distributors, and retailers, with both the printers and cartridges. For the 3D-printed steak prototype Scionti first unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last February, the ingredients included rice, peas, and seaweed. The resulting steak’s appearance was underwhelming—it looked more like a pancake than a sirloin. Scionti says the focus was on texture; he’s now perfecting the look and will next focus on flavor. A revamped version, he says, is slated to be available by 2021. He hopes to build a gigantic steak-producing machine ready for industrial use in 2022.

Redefine Meat, which plans to introduce its plant-based steaks to the public in the first quarter of 2020, is particularly focused on fat. Ben-Shitrit says the future success of imitation meat depends on getting that piece of it just right. “Fat is flavor, fat is texture,” he says. “You need to have this play between the muscle fibers and the jelly kind of consistency coming from the fat.” Listening to him wax poetic about animal collagen and fatty acids, it would be easy to forget the man is a vegetarian.

In September, Redefine Meat secured $6 million in funding from firms including big German chicken producer PHW Group and CPT Capital, a venture fund owned by private equity veteran and sustainability-minded investor Jeremy Coller. “The everlasting question is: Can you scale it up?” says Arnold Bos, a senior consultant at Lux Research Inc., a technology researcher. “If you need to print more, you need more printers.”

Food companies might get around that hurdle by using faster printers, but that’s tricky since extrusion-based printers, which are typically used for food, could be limited by the speed of their nozzles, Bos says. Redefine Meat’s printer, the current fake-steak speed king, can deliver five 7-ounce steaks in an hour. The company hopes to speed that up to 22 pounds by the end of 2020, when the technology is set to go on sale. That will mean 50 servings an hour, or the equivalent of a cow’s worth of steak a day.

Because Novameat’s plant ingredients are relatively cheap, Scionti says he’s sure that in a few years his steak will be cheaper than the real thing. Printing a 7-ounce steak on his company’s prototype printer costs $4 now, but Scionti expects it to come down to about $2 by the end of next year, using a $15,000 full-production machine. “Plant protein is more efficient to produce than animal protein,” Scionti says. “In the next few years we are sure that we can be competitive and even cheaper than normal meat.” —With Deena Shanker and Lydia Mulvany

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.