If You Kind of Like Peas, Maybe You’ll Love a Pea-Beef Mash
If You Kind of Like Peas, Maybe You’ll Love a Pea-Beef Mash
(Bloomberg) -- Something was missing when members of the class of 2022 arrived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In none of the campus dining halls could they find a 100% beef patty.
Blasphemy, surely, in a state famous for its cows, albeit of the dairy variety. But at this fall’s Badger Welcome BBQ, where spare ribs and vegan bratwurst were also on the menu, meat-and-mushroom Applegate Blend Burgers flew off the grill as fast as their all-animal predecessors had.
“Quite honestly, it’s a better burger,” said Peter Testory, director of dining and culinary services in the housing division. “Outside the nutritional and sustainable benefit, it just tastes better.”
This is the newest category of processed food: products that fuse plant and animal. Fish cut with rice and beans? Milk mixed with ground almonds? Chicken-and-kale sausages? They’re in U.S. grocery stores, along with other intriguing combinations.
The motivation for companies including Hormel Foods Corp., Applegate’s parent, and Tyson Foods Inc., which just introduced burgers made of Angus beef and pea-protein (not to mention bamboo fiber), is what appears to be Americans’ growing interest in their personal health and that of the planet.
The success of vegan offerings from Beyond Meat Inc. and Impossible Foods Inc. was an inspiration. “There’s this loud screaming demand for plant-based meat alternatives so of course big food is going to move in,” said Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “There’s money in it.”
Beyond Meat’s and Impossible Foods’ patties that taste and look like actual ground beef are popular, in part, because no methane-belching cows are involved in their production. Methane is a climate-changing greenhouse gas more powerful than carbon dioxide.
But the plant-animal mash-ups are a different breed, neither here nor there, in critics’ minds. They may not be easy sells “because they fall in between,” said Darren Tristano, chief executive officer of the research and consulting firm FoodserviceResults.
There’s no clear line yet on the appeal. These products are fairly new and the companies that have recorded sales aren’t releasing hard data.
They’re gambling that if a chicken nugget is nearly as much chickpea and cauliflower as bird, and tastes great, anyone interested in consuming more plants and less meat will go for it. There’s a name for this person: flexitarian.
“It’s this idea of being vegetarian-ish,” said registered dietitian Dawn Jackson Blatner, who literally wrote the book on it, “The Flexitarian Diet,” a decade ago. “It’s a pro-plant movement, not anti-meat.”
In Madison, Testory said the school decided to go semi-veggie with its burgers because students want what he called higher-quality food. They are 30% mushroom, which Testory said gives them “a more juicy, more umami flavor.” And students can feel virtuous while consuming them. “Really,” he said, “everybody now is a flexitarian.”
Actually, there’s little data on this contingent, just as there is no consensus on whether stirring processed vegetables and meat together makes for a "healthy" food product. “Is it good for you? Is it good for the environment? I think the jury is still out,” said NYU’s Nestle.
Few Americans mark themselves as vegetarian or vegan—about 8%, according to a 2018 Gallup poll. On the other hand, around 50% claim they’re health-oriented eaters, a Pew Research Center study found last year. Other surveys suggest that younger people in particular are increasingly flexitarian, regularly shunning meat for plant-based options, often because of environmental concerns.
It should’t be complicated. “Eating healthy is so simple that Michael Pollan can do it in seven words,” Nestle said. “‘Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.’”
Pollan dished out this advice in his 2008 bestseller “In Defense of Food.” If it were heeded, a massive U.S. manufacturing industry would have been beaten down by now. In fact, Americans are eating more meat than ever, with the U.S. Department of Agriculture predicting the average person will consume 221.4 pounds this year, the most since 2007.
Considering that, is this flexitarian business model a dud? Not to worry, according to the companies pursuing it. Their big target audience is Gen Z, a cohort some 61-million strong in the U.S. whose members, polling has discerned, are more interested than their parents and grandparents in healthier and less environmentally compromised options but not necessarily in going full-on vegetarian.
“Gen Z’ers are flooding into colleges and universities—they’re looking for these choices,” said John Ghingo, who runs Hormel’s Applegate. “They’re interested in smarter solutions. They actually want to think about a holistic food system. They’re different.”
Sarah Fassett, 26, a bodybuilder and manager of two locations in Chicago of the cafe Native Foods, is a fan of the mixes. Though she recently became a vegan, it took her a year to complete the process. More people might make the switch with these new products to help them along the way, she said. “These blended items, I think they’re fantastic. You’re not losing that familiarity.”
As Blatner, the dietitian, said, “It’s kind of a strict way to live if you want to be fully vegetarian or vegan.” Thus the industry’s message: Going part of the way can be good enough.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Anne Reifenberg at areifenberg@bloomberg.net, Jonathan Roeder
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