Where’s the Beef? The Fake Meat of the Future Is Chicken.
By: Andrew Zaleski
Tags: Plant Based, Food, Food Science, Science, Future

Plant-based meat is having a moment. Impossible Whoppers are available at Burger Kings nationwide, and Dunkin’ now carries a Beyond Sausage breakfast sandwich. Even McDonald’s is going to launch a line of plant-based products.

The growth in alternative meats is largely driven by the view that meat made from plants, unlike the flesh of slaughtered animals, has a smaller carbon footprint and protects the environment instead of adding to its woes. Environmental stewardship is in large part the marketing message for companies pioneering plant-based beef. Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown has even said his plan is to take larger and larger bites of the beef market as a way to push the industry “into a death spiral.”

But the poultry industry isn’t safe, either — and it’s Big Chicken that is squarely in the crosshairs of Rebellyous Foods.

Founded by Boeing engineer turned food entrepreneur Christie Lagally, the three-year-old startup is concocting plant-based versions of breaded tenders, patties, and nuggets. These ready-to-eat versions are how most Americans get their poultry.

“There really isn’t a choice about chicken: We have to reduce chicken.”

Chicken is the meat that Americans eat most, accounting for a little more than a third of total meat consumption in the United States. (Beef? Less than a quarter.) Pound for pound, cultivating cattle requires more water, land, and energy than raising broods of broilers. But beef consumption in the United States has been declining since its peak in 1976. Meanwhile, annual chicken consumption increased from 42 pounds per American in 1976 to 96 pounds as of 2019. Some 9 billion chickens are slaughtered every year in the United States—way more than the 33 million cows that annually meet their maker. Still, because Americans continue to eat four times the amount of beef compared to the rest of the world, cows are usually singled out as the leading culprit of environmental malfeasance in the food world.

“Chicken doesn’t get as much attention in the environmental realm because, on a per pound basis, the industry itself has less greenhouse gas emissions than beef,” Lagally tells Future Human. “But there really isn’t a choice about chicken: We have to reduce chicken.”

Often forgotten in carbon conversation, as Lagally likes to point out, are the environmental effects of raising chicks. That’s where Rebellyous Foods is trying to flip the script.

The company already makes plant-based chicken nuggets, with patties and tenders on the way. But the real trick is to produce its products on the same scale as the big players in conventional meat processing. Only then, Lagally says, will you achieve the price points that might convince more people to swap real meat for the alternative. “That the plant-based meat industry has never industrialized production is why plant-based meat continues to be so expensive,” she says.

To Lagally, swapping cows for cuts of plants is only part of the equation. That’s why Rebellyous Foods is coming for America’s favorite meat — and, in the process, building the technology to take plant-based meats to the masses.