- This machine is testing
how chewy this fake meat burger is.
It's one of the many tests Beyond Meat
puts its burgers through, but why?
Alternative meat sales have increased
across the globe.
The market is set to reach 6.3 billion
in revenue by 2023.
UK-based company Quorn has been making
meat substitutes since 1985,
and it's on course to become a billion dollar company.
Legacy meat brand are trying to get
a slice of the pie too.
Tyson Foods, the largest meat producer in the US,
was part of a 55 million round of investment
in Beyond Meat.
The reason for all this growth?
Flexitarians.
Or, those who seek protein alternatives.
In the United States, at least 6% of people
consider themselves vegan, but in 2014,
it was only 1%, and business is booming globally.
The demand for vegan meat exploded
by 451% in Europe.
Another reason for the surge in meat alternatives
is the environmental impact
from greenhouse gases, about a third of which,
come from emissions from livestock.
Alternative meat companies are creating products
to help dial back on meat consumption
and by doing so, we're changing how we see meat.
- Do you need an animal to produce a piece of meat
and we've found that you really don't.
What you need is essentially four things;
it's amino acids, it's lipids, it's trace minerals
and it's predominantly water.
What we can do is take those same core components
from plants and assemble them through using
heating, cooling and pressure into a piece of meat.
- [Marisa] Brands like Beyond Meat say they don't
want to be known as meat alternatives,
they're sold in the meat section at Whole Foods,
and to them, what they're making is meat.
They create plant-based proteins
using some of the same components
that make up a slab of beef.
Even restaurants are breaking in
to the alternative meat market.
Homegrown Smoker in Portland has
an entirely vegan barbecue menu.
With all these new types of alternatives
popping up, what will be the future
of the actual meat industry?
Well, it's not going anywhere.
Although the fake meat business is growing,
the size of the US meat industry
is still immense, it costs the United States
up to $289 billion a year, by 2050,
that number could be as high as $1.6 trillion.
But, as the flexitarian demographic continues
to grow, it means, more cows might stay in the pasture.