The market for alternative-protein products

MOST people like to eat meat. As they grow richer they eat more of it. For individuals, that is good. Meat is nutritious. In particular, it packs much more protein per kilogram than plants do. But animals have to eat plants to put on weight—so much so that feeding livestock accounts for about a third of harvested grain. Farm animals consume 8% of the world’s water supply, too. And they produce around 15% of unnatural greenhouse-gas emissions. More farm animals, then, could mean more environmental trouble.

Some consumers, particularly in the rich West, get this. And that has created a business opportunity. Though unwilling to go the whole hog, as it were, and adopt a vegetarian approach to diet, they are keen on food that looks and tastes as if it has come from farm animals, but hasn’t.

The simplest way to satisfy this demand is to concentrate on substitutes for familiar products. “Meat” made directly from plants, rather than indirectly, via an animal’s metabolism, is already on sale for the table and barbecue. Impossible Foods, a Californian firm, has deconstructed hamburgers, to work out what gives them their texture and flavour—and then either found or grown botanical equivalents to these. It launched its plant-based burger in a number of upmarket restaurants in America last year. Beyond Meat, another plant-based hopeful, has compounded from legumes something that tastes like chicken. This has been on sale since 2012. Last year, its “beef” patty (pictured) reached the shelves of several stores belonging to the Whole Foods Market chain.

For those who really want to eat steak while saving the planet, a second approach may be more promising. This is “clean”, or cultured, meat—made by taking animal cells and growing them in a factory to form strips of muscle. Steak is not yet on the menu, but burgers and meatballs may soon be. The field leader is Mosa Meat, a Dutch firm staffed by scientists. The first burger it made, in 2013, cost around $300,000. By 2020, it hopes, the price of making them will have come down to about $11. Close behind Mosa, Memphis Meats, an American startup, is looking at the meatball rather than the burger market. Between 2013 and 2015 it managed to bring its costs down a hundredfold—though even then a single meatball would have set you back $1,200.

Milk, too, is in the sights of the new no-animal farmers. Perfect Day, a startup based in Berkeley, California, makes “milk” that has the same nutritional value and taste as traditional, dairy-based sources. It does so by engineering the relevant cattle genes into yeast cells, and growing those in fermentation tanks.

And there is one more novel source of meaty protein that does not involve farm animals—at least, farm animals of the conventional sort. This is insects. Grasshoppers, for example, are around 70% protein. Insects do have to be fed. But, being cold-blooded, they convert more food into body mass than warm-blooded mammals do and, being boneless, more of that body-mass is edible. Per edible gram, they need only a twelfth of the food that cattle require—and even only half as much as pigs.

Here, the problem is marketing. Around 2bn people eat insects already, but few of them are Westerners. Changing that could be a hard sell. Grind the bugs up and use them as ingredients, though, and your customers might find them more palatable. Hargol FoodTech, an Israeli startup, plans to do just that. Locust burgers, anybody?