A meat analogue is a food industry term for a meat-like substance made from vegetarian ingredients. More common terms are plant-based meat, vegan meat, meatsubstitute, mock meat, meat alternative,imitation meat, or vegetarian meat, or, sometimes more pejoratively, fake meat or faux meat. Meat analogues typically approximate certain aesthetic qualities or chemical characteristics of specific types of meat. Many analogues are soy-based or gluten-based but now may also be made from pea protein. Other less common analogues include cottage cheese and mycoprotein.
Cultured meat is a meat produced by in vitro cell cultures of animal cells. It is a form of cellular agriculture.
Tyson Foods, Inc. is an American multinational corporation based in Springdale, Arkansas, that operates in the food industry. The company is the world's second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork after JBS S.A. and annually exports the largest percentage of beef out of the United States. Together with its subsidiaries, it operates major food brands, including Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm, Ball Park, Wright Brand, Aidells, and State Fair. Tyson Foods ranked No. 79 in the 2020 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
Stephen T. Jurvetson is an American businessman and venture capitalist. Formerly a partner of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), he was an early investor in Hotmail, Memphis Meats, Mythic and Nervana Systems. He is currently a board member of SpaceX and Tesla, among others. He later co-founded the firm Future Ventures with Maryanna Saenko, who worked with him at DFJ.
Boca Burger is a veggie burger produced by Kraft Heinz in Chicago, Illinois. Like all of Boca Foods' products, Boca Burgers serve as a meat analogue.
Morningstar Farms is a division of the Kellogg Company that produces vegan and vegetarian food. Many of their offerings are plant-based variations of traditionally meat products, including some that are vegan. Their products include meatless chicken nuggets, popcorn chicken, corn dogs, breakfast sausage, burgers, hot dogs, bacon, and pizza snack rolls with vegan cheese. Some, but not all products are vegan; Morningstar Farms announced all products would be vegan by 2021.
Patrick O'Reilly Brown is an American scientist and businessman who is the chief executive and founder of Impossible Foods Inc. and professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University. Brown is co-founder of the Public Library of Science, inventor of the DNA microarray, and a former investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Lightlife Foods is a company that produces plant-based foods for plant-based diets. In 2018, its worth was estimated at $80 million. It is best known for its top-selling plant-based veggie dog, Smart Dog, which launched in 1993 but the company more recently launched a plant-based burger to compete with Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat in 2019. Lightlife Foods is a carbon-neutral company.
Eat Just, Inc. is a private company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops and markets plant-based alternatives to conventionally produced egg products. Eat Just was founded in 2011 by Josh Tetrick and Josh Balk. It raised about $120 million in early venture capital and became a unicorn in 2016 by surpassing a $1 billion valuation. It has been involved in several highly publicized disputes with traditional egg industry interests but has also partnered with them to produce and sell products. In December 2020, its lab-grown chicken became the first lab-grown meat to receive regulatory approval in Singapore. Shortly thereafter, Eat Just's cultured meat was sold to diners at the Singapore restaurant 1880, making it the "world's first commercial sale of cell-cultured meat".
Beyond Meat is a Los Angeles-based producer of plant-based meat substitutes founded in 2009 by Ethan Brown. The company's initial products were launched in the United States in 2012. The company offers plant-based options in the beef, pork and poultry categories. As of March 2021, Beyond Meat products are available in approximately 118,000 retail and foodservice outlets in over 80 countries worldwide.
Impossible Foods Inc. is a company that develops plant-based substitutes for meat products. The company's stated aim is to give people the taste and nutritional benefits of meat without the negative health and environmental impacts associated with livestock products. The company researches animal products at the molecular level, then selects proteins and nutrients from plants to recreate the experience and nutrition of meat products.
Upside Foods is a food technology company headquartered in Berkeley, California aiming to grow sustainable cultured meat. The company was founded by Uma Valeti (CEO), Nicholas Genovese (CSO), and Will Clem. Valeti was a cardiologist and a professor at the University of Minnesota.
The Good Food Institute (GFI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that promotes plant- and cell-based alternatives to animal products, particularly meat, dairy, and eggs. It was created in 2016 by the nonprofit organization Mercy For Animals with Bruce Friedrich as the chief executive officer. GFI has more than 100 staff across six offices in the United States, India, Israel, Brazil, Asia Pacific, and Europe.
Cellular agriculture focuses on the production of agriculture products from cell cultures using a combination of biotechnology, tissue engineering, molecular biology, and synthetic biology to create and design new methods of producing proteins, fats, and tissues that would otherwise come from traditional agriculture. Most of the industry is focused on animal products such as meat, milk, and eggs, produced in cell culture rather than raising and slaughtering farmed livestock which is associated with substantial global problems of detrimental environmental impacts, animal welfare, food security and human health. Cellular agriculture is field of the biobased economy. The most well known cellular agriculture concept is cultured meat.
Michael Seibel is a Managing Director at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.
Benjamin Pasternak is an Australian technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of SIMULATE, an American nutrition technology company, that has raised US$57M in investment to date. SIMULATE's signature product, NUGGS, is a plant-based chicken nugget simulation, that launched in July 2019. Previously Pasternak founded Monkey, a popular social networking app that enabled teenagers to video chat with like-minded people.
Beyond Fried Chicken, Kentucky Fried Miracle or KFC Chicken Nuggets are a type of chicken product sold by the international fast food chain KFC. In August 2019, El Segundo, California-based Beyond Meat partnered with KFC for a plant-based chicken nugget. It is the first fast-food chain to introduce a plant-based meat after partnering with Beyond Meat.
Perfect Day, Inc. is a food technology startup company based in Berkeley, California, that has developed processes of creating dairy proteins, including casein and whey, by fermentation in microbiota, specifically from fungi in bioreactors, instead of extraction from bovine milk.
Nature's Fynd is a company that develops microbe-based proteins for meat substitutes and dairy substitutes. The protein is produced by a fungus first identified in geothermal springs in Yellowstone National Park.
MeaTech 3D Ltd., or MeaTech for short, is a company which develops 3D bioprinting technologies for usage in cellular agriculture. Based in Israel, it has a Belgian subsidiary called Peace of Meat, with which it produces cultured meat, with a focus on cultivating foie gras.
