According to the NECTAR report, possibly the biggest barrier to more people adopting plant-based or alternative meat products – the taste – will soon no longer be a problem. According to their ‘sensory research,’ plant-based nuggets have approached animal-based so much in taste as to be virtually indistinguishable.
Such news, if true, would be great news for an industry that’s struggling to maintain its sales growth. As cost of living crises bite, and anti-green backlashes in some countries push people away on ideological grounds, the industry needs all the boosts it can get. And with the environmental benefits of a diet free from animal meat already known (the UN estimates annual carbon savings of over 2 tonnes per consumer), global uptake of alternatives is clearly in demand.
Plant-based and alternative meats have been around a long time, and popular consensus throughout that time has generally been that such products are inferior in taste and texture to their animal-based counterparts. Innovations in recent years, such as the Impossible burger and Just Egg’s plant-based egg products, have suggested that ‘flavour gap’ is closing, and the NECTAR report set out to see just how far.
Using blind taste panels, the researchers set out to test plant-based products across five categories: burgers, hot dogs, bacon, nuggets and tenders (basically another kind of nugget). The results, broadly, were very encouraging. A third to half of survey participants ranked the flavour of the leading plant-based products as passably similar to their meat-based counterparts, with breaded products like nuggets and tenders the clear stand-outs.
“Burgers and nuggets have a texture that’s a little easier to mimic,” NECTAR’s director Caroline Cotto told Food Navigator, while the overall report concluded that “despite the challenging cultural and media narratives about plant-based meat, we remain optimistic about the category’s taste potential.”
We here at Impact Loop decided to do our own (highly unscientific) test.