Sat, Jul-27-24, 09:29
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Senior Member
Posts: 2,200
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Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000
BF:
Progress: 50%
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Beyond Meat’s newest sausages aren’t pretending to be meat anymore
Quote:
Beyond Meat’s newest sausages aren’t pretending to be meat anymore
Beyond Sun Sausage isn’t meant to mimic meat. Instead, it features whole vegetables and legumes.
Alt-meat companies like Beyond have long made plant-based proteins that look to mimic their animal counterparts, whether beef burgers or pork sausages. But Beyond Meat’s latest offering is putting the “plants” back in plant-based meat: called Beyond Sun Sausage, it features fruits, vegetables, and legumes—and isn’t meant to be an animal-meat imitation at all.
Other plant-based sausages like this do exist. Tofurky and Field Roast, two plant-based meat companies that have been around since the 1990s, both sell sausages made with ingredients like bell peppers, eggplant, and sundried tomatoes. But both are also made from vital wheat gluten, the main ingredient in seitan (and Tofurky’s sausages also include tofu).
Seitan has been around for centuries, originally created in dynastic China. Brands like Blackbird and Upton’s Naturals also use seitan for their meat alternatives, but wheat and soy are among the major food allergies. And Beyond says it’s innovating on plant-based proteins, rather than using a method that’s existed for centuries. “This is a different effort,” Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown says of the Beyond Sun Sausage. “This is an effort to truly take everything we’ve learned over the last 15 years about building meat from plants, and combine it with these terrific [plant] proteins.”
Beyond Sun Sausages contain no gluten or soy; one of their primary ingredients, like other Beyond products, is yellow pea protein, along with proteins from red lentils, faba beans, and brown rice, and ingredients like red bell peppers, spinach, and dried pineapple. Beyond Sun Sausage will come in three flavors: Cajun, Pesto, and Pineapple Jalapeno.
The Sun Sausages also include avocado oil, which the company uses in its Beyond IV, the fourth generation of its Beyond Burger and Beyond Beef. Beyond IV came out earlier this year as a healthier version of the alt-meat, with lower saturated fat. Though that product, which is meant to have a “meatier, beefy flavor” differs from the plant-forward Sun Sausage, Brown says it’s part of the same strategy for the company: to create healthy plant-based proteins. Both Sun Sausage and Beyond IV were made in collaboration with nutritional experts, and are certified as a heart-healthy food by the American Heart Association’s Heart-Check program. (Red meat and processed meats are associated with a higher risk of heart disease.)
Plant-based protein companies have faced some recent struggles as sales lag. Though sales of plant-based meats soared between 2018 and 2021—growing from $4.8 billion to $7.4 billion—a 2023 report from the Good Food Institute said plant-based meat and seafood sales fell by 12% over the past two years. Beyond Meat also saw “wider-than-expected” revenue losses in the first quarter of 2024.
And even as plant-based proteins that look to mimic meat have taken over grocery store shelves and restaurant menus, some consumers have said they miss the days when veggie burgers were made with real vegetables. A Whole Foods forecast looking at 2024 food trends supports that sentiment; the report predicted that more companies would put the “plant” back in plant based, with products featuring ingredients like mushrooms, walnuts, and legumes “in place of complex meat alternatives.” (Beyond and Impossible’s beefs, in contrast, are made from specific plant proteins, not the whole plants, and use an extrusion process to create a meat-like texture.)
Beyond Meat says it will continue to make products that are representative of meat—that mimic beef, pork, and poultry—and that Beyond Sun Sausage is an extension of its offerings. Sun Sausage is now available at Sprouts Farmers Market stores across the country. The company has gotten requests from restaurants, it says, but will see how the product does before expanding.
Brown did hint at another Beyond Meat product in the pipeline; he said the company is again working with nutrition experts on its development and that it isn’t a veggie burger. That focus on health has become key to Beyond, especially as critics have called out both Beyond and Impossible Meat for being unhealthy and “processed.”
“We’re going to build healthier, better for you, center-of-the-plate proteins,” Brown says. “We have an unassailable story on the environment. An obviously unassailable story on animal welfare. We needed to make our story on health unassailable.”
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https://www.fastcompany.com/9116077...-fruits-legumes
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