The alternative meat industry is struggling. ‘Blended meat’ could reinvigorate it

2023 was a tough year for alternative protein. Plant-based meat from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods faced significant backlash for not being a whole food like apples or carrots, while cell-cultivated meat—meat grown from animal cells rather than slaughtered animals—was scrutinized for failing to be on shelves by now. As sales slowed and funding came to a halt, several companies in both sectors closed shop.

Is there any hope for no-kill meat? Some entrepreneurs think so, and that the answer to saving both categories lies in combining the two. Why not take the best parts of each approach, plant-based and cell-cultivated, the logic goes. Enter “blended meat”—an emerging category of hybrid meat alternatives that blends the two together.

Take Mission Barns. The San Francisco-based company has developed a line of pork products—bacon, sausages, and meatballs—that are made of both plant-based meat and cell-cultivated meat. Its founder and CEO, Eitan Fischer, was inspired to create the company in 2018 when he noticed a gap in the market.

“Certainly there’s interest out there in plant-based meat,” Fischer says, “but I think the question is how many of those consumers are return consumers and what is missing for the ones who aren’t.”

According to Fischer, what’s missing, simply put, is “real meat.” The data backs him up. With rare exception, study after study shows that taste testers consistently report a significant preference for animal-based meat over plant-based meat.

To aid in creating “the flavor and juiciness of meat,” which Fischer notes is what consumers crave, Mission Barns uses pork fat cells. To develop the cells, which the company first procured from some pigs who now live on farm sanctuaries, they feed them an animal-free mixture containing plant-based ingredients like vitamins and minerals. After the cells multiply and grow in bioreactors—fermentation-like tanks that maintain very specific environmental conditions for the ingredients inside—they are harvested and combined with the plant-based meat.

Leading cell-cultivated meat company Upside Foods has in part been trying to meet consumer preference using only animal cells—it sells a limited quantity of its whole-textured chicken at Bar Crenn in San Francisco through a partnership with Dominique Crenn, chef-owner of three-Michelin-starred restaurant Atelier Crenn.

But Fischer argues there’s a challenge to this approach: “Going for 100% cells right away is not going to be the fastest or the most scalable or the most affordable way to enter the market, and that’s why we’ve chosen to start with both cultivated meat and plants.” Fischer declined to share exactly what percentage of animal cells make up his company’s products, but noted it’s a “minority.”

SCiFi Foods is another blended-meat company just outside of San Francisco. Inspired by a similar thesis as Mission Barns, it has developed a hamburger that is made of 90% plant-based meat and 10% beef muscle cells.

“There are still some really major technical hurdles that until they are solved we will not be able to produce 100% cultivated at a low cost and at a large scale,” says SCiFi Foods CEO Joshua March. “At the same time, plant-based meat is a great step in the right direction, but there are still real gaps from a taste, texture, and experience perspective that are going to hold back mainstream adoption among meat eaters. . . . Blended is the answer to both of those problems.”

March argues that cell-cultivated meat companies are starting to embrace this reality, pointing to Upside as one recent example. Last spring, after several years of working on developing a method to scale its over 99% cell-cultivated chicken, Upside announced it would focus more heavily on scaling its blended ground meat products.

“It is now very clear, what I’ve been saying the whole time, that 100% cultivated is not ready for prime time,” says March, who cofounded the company in 2019. “A lot of people just didn’t do the math . . . and it was easy to tell the hype story of 100% cultivated and go and raise money off of that . . . which I do think was a bit of a disservice honestly to the industry.”

March tells a story of meeting investors in 2020 who asked him why he wasn’t creating meat made out of 100% cells, to which he replied, “because it’s not possible.” The investors noted other companies were saying that it is. This divide, March says, initially made it more difficult for him to raise funds.

But now, he says, times have changed: “Gone are the days of raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build a speculative facility. . . . People are going to have to figure out how to be profitable earlier, and the only way to do that is by lowering the amount of cells.”

Both Mission Barns and SCiFi Foods have applied for regulatory approval from the Food and Drug Administration. After receiving such a stamp of approval, they will need another from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Once receiving the green light from both agencies, they intend to release their products to the public soon after. Exactly when and how isn’t yet known; both companies declined to share information about their distribution plans.

Regardless of whether they launch their first product in restaurants—like Upside did—or in supermarkets, a challenge for blended-meat companies is that they still represent a compromise. I enjoyed the taste of both Mission Barns’s bacon and meatballs and SCiFi Foods’s hamburger. I appreciate that all three taste more like animal-meat than their plant-based meat equivalents.

But the reality is that they still taste less like animal meat than animal meat. They have clear hints of animal meat, but without the full meaty punch, it left me wanting more. (Admittedly, I was examining the blended-meat products closely and in a manufactured environment when eating them—perhaps with less scrutiny, and in a more natural setting, they would be indistinguishable from the real thing.) Which begs the question: Once available, will meat eaters make the switch?

I’m hopeful, but not super optimistic. (I rarely am. And for good reason.) Humans are notoriously finicky when it comes to their food. A study published in 2022 found that among those surveyed, cell-cultivated meat was “viewed negatively on all attributes except animal friendliness,” including its perceived safety, healthiness, and enjoyability. The result? Only one-quarter of participants indicated a willingness to consume cell-cultivated chicken and beef.

Might the blended mixture add an extra “ick factor,” like a child who doesn’t like when her peas and mashed potatoes touch one another? And even if the meat is made with only 10% animal cells, price parity is still far from certain, as it’s hard to successfully scale any business. And if consumers have to pay more for less, it’s a nonstarter for most.

But no matter the odds of success, it’s certainly worth a try. More than 99% of meat in the U.S. and 90% globally is raised from animals on factory farms, large-scale industrial agricultural facilities that drive biodiversity loss, increase risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and zoonotic disease, and confine animals under torturous conditions.

With meat consumption on the rise, blended meat can’t come soon enough.