In five years, will we all eat plant burgers at our Fourth of July barbecues?
Photo: Grub Street/Getty Images Jon McIntyre, a biochemist who has worked in the food industry for 26 years, can tell you exactly what makes a hamburger so good. “That first bite, where your teeth sink through the meat — there’s texture to it, and flavor,” he says. “If it’s a really good, juicy burger, that flavor pushes out from your teeth, almost into the sides of your mouth, and you feel that really great sensation of the moisture.
At Motif Ingredients, a four-month-old lab in Boston’s Seaport District, the team lead by McIntyre, the biochemist and a former PepsiCo VP, uses molecular science to break down every aspect of the FBE: texture, color, aroma, how meat binds and releases fat, even, McIntyre says, “how flavor is created.” From there, Motif, via its parent lab Ginkgo Bioworks , plans to make replicas of a burger’s essential proteins and fats, animal-free stunt doubles that are created without ever touching a cow.
“We know exactly [what] we’re trying to compete against,” says Seth Goldman, Beyond’s executive chair. “In this case, the competitor is a hamburger. What nature, or whatever, has done so well is that interlacing of fat and protein. It’s very, very ornate and complex. When we look at an MRI — and we do, we’ve had MRI scans of our product against a burger — we can see that it’s not identical, but it’s not apples and oranges. It’s maybe two types of oranges.
Let’s imagine a world in which some of these companies succeed. They’ve hit full cow, at a price point that’s comparable to slaughtered beef.
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