Vegan burgers muscle their way onto menus

WORCESTER - Customers couldn’t spot the difference between a regular burger and a vegan burger at The Fix Burger Bar on Grove Street a few days ago, the restaurant manager said.

“(They) cut it open and couldn’t tell," manager Emily Kelley said. "It was kind of funny.”

O’Connor’s Restaurant & Bar on West Boylston Street offers the same vegan product, which is nothing like the traditional veggie burger, according to owner Brendan O’Connor.

These local restaurants serve the Beyond Burger, a meatless patty with 20 grams of plant-based protein, and no soy, gluten or GMOs. The Beyond Meat company challenges the meat industry with food designed to emulate beef and to be good for human health, the environment and animal welfare.

Beyond Meat products are different than veggie burgers because they try to mimic the chemical makeup of meat, so the patties are designed to cook, look, and taste like the real thing. To achieve the meaty texture, University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Eric Decker said, the company uses a method called extrusion -  a common process also used to make pasta and dry cereals.

“You take a mix and then force it through small holes, and as you push it through the small holes, the proteins all align in long strands,” he said. “When you look at a regular piece of meat, you see these kind of lines, which gives it a typical chewy texture.”

While consumers might find the process shocking, a professor of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Glenn R. Gaudette, said the production of plant-based products just ran under the radar.

“From a scientific point of view, it is not that shocking if you think about all we can do in regards to genetic engineering in human and animal cells,” Mr. Gaudette said. “There have been some amazing work done in plant biology that just doesn’t get the same press as human biology.”

Jeremey Bowman, a consumer goods writer for Motley Fool, said the wave of plant-based technologies creates an appealing space for investors.

“From an investing perspective, this is really a high-tech approach at disrupting traditional meat,” Mr. Bowman said.

In just over one month, the Beyond Meat (NASDAQ: BYND) stock grew by 600% when its initial public offering of $25 soared to $186.43 last Monday.

Mr. Bowman said the growth is likely caused by a “short squeeze,” which describes a scenario where people who previously bet against a stock rapidly buy their positions back to minimize their losses.

O’Connor’s recently tapped into the rapidly growing plant-based industry. Since the restaurant opened in 1989, veggie burgers always have appeared on the menu, but the restaurant began serving Beyond Burgers about two months ago, Mr. O’Connor said.

Previously, the restaurant served Beyond Meat’s competitor, Impossible Foods’ burger, for about a year. Mr. O'Connor said the restaurant consistently sells about 60 Beyond Burgers a week, and it was the same for Impossible Burgers, and about 300 regular burgers.

“They have had so much exposure and are growing by leaps and bounds, so people know about it now,” he said. “Even people who are not vegetarian or vegan eat it, and that is the key. It is not a niche market.”

Mr. O’Connor said it costs about 60 percent more to purchase Beyond Meat than regular meat, but that doesn’t mean the menu price reflects the steep disparity. In fact, Beyond Burgers at O’Connors are $9.95, which is 4 cents less than a classic hamburger.

The reason, Mr. O’Connor said, is to satisfy guests who want to purchase alternative meat, without making them empty their pockets.

“There is no point in having something on the menu that won’t sell,” he said. “And we can’t put the price out of reach for someone who is vegetarian. We like to accommodate all groups.”

The Fix also offers the Beyond Burger, just at a higher price. The burger costs $16.50, ranking it the most expensive burger patty on the menu, which also has a house-made veggie burger for $9.

Restaurant manager Ms. Kelley said the company does not buy Beyond Burgers in bulk, which is why the price is higher than other patties served there. She estimates Beyond Burgers make up about 5 to 10% of their total burger sales.

“I think a majority of customers who order it try to avoid meat, but I did have a customer today who ordered it just to try it,” she said.

Mr. Decker,  head of the food science department at UMass Amherst, said it is tough to determine whether Beyond Meat is actually healthier than cooked lean ground beef. On one hand, Beyond Meat is lower in saturated fat and contains dietary fiber, Vitamin C and no cholesterol - but it is also higher in sodium and doesn’t contain complete proteins, he said.

“People may argue that there is less saturated fat (in the Beyond Burger),” he said. “And there was a recent paper released that showed that people that ate beef or chicken did have higher (LDL) cholesterol levels than people who ate plant protein.”

While an argument about health can be debated, Mr. Decker said sustainability factors make a better case for why consumers would opt for Beyond Meat instead of animal products. Beyond Burgers have 99% less impact on water scarcity as compared to a quarter-pound of U.S beef, according to a peer-reviewed analysis on the company’s website.

“You have to feed a cow about 6 pounds of plant food for it to gain one pound, and animals emit a lot of carbon dioxide and use a lot more water than you would use for a plant,” Mr. Decker said. “The plant-based burger would be much better for the environment than a beef-based burgers.”

Mr. Gaudette agrees, adding that beyond the fact that plant-based foods emit less greenhouse gases than meat production, the products could help increase the national food supply.

“I think this work has the potential to be very impactful,” he said. “These types of products are going to help our environment, so I think environmentally conscious people are going to flock to (them).”

The Beyond Meat ingredients list is hefty, mostly composed of hard-to-pronounce chemicals, but Mr. Decker said the additives are common and some occur naturally.

“It’s not anything unusual. It’s just that the current trend right now is for what they call 'clean labels,' which means to have as few ingredients as possible,” Decker said. “All these things are there to bind the protein together and to bind water. They add pigments so it looks like meat; otherwise it would be a white-ish gray color.”

Mr. Bowman said that if the public mindset about Beyond Burgers is altered, it might take a toll on the market.

“People instinctively think of something coming from a plant as being healthier than meat,” Mr. Bowman said. “If media coverage starts to come out and say this isn’t better for you than a classic burger, there might be some backlash that would (hurt the company).”

Beyond Meat’s consumer appeal could also lessen when competitors catch up, Mr. Bowman said, noting that food giants such as Nestle and Tyson are working to make similar products.

He pointed to La Croix’s recent success, which fizzled out when competitors entered the all-of-a-sudden-trendy sparkling water market.

Looking toward the future, Mr. Gaudette said he suspects new plant-based products to debut on almost a yearly basis.

Companies "have had a lot of success with ground beef, so I would certainly think they will probably go after chicken next,” he said.

Whether Beyond Meat and other plant-based foods will become a staple in the U.S food supply in 10 years remains unknown. But the owner of O'Connor's just wants to keep guests satisfied.

“People want to eat less meat and I’m happy to sell it—if that’s what people want, so be it,” Mr. O'Connor said. “It’s really good as well.”

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