You're biting into a burger.
Right away, you detect a subtle smokiness. The patty has a familiar rough texture. And as you chew down, you unlock those salty, fatty flavours, triggering a satisfying rush of dopamine.
But this burger isn't made of meat.
Instead, it's a finely-tuned concoction of rehydrated soy protein, vegetable oils and spices engineered to look, taste and smell like the flame-grilled patty from a fatty cut of beef.
These days, it's almost impossible not to notice this new generation of plant-based meat alternatives flooding into Australia's shops, supermarkets and takeaway joints.
And it's not just vegetarians and vegans that these disrupters hope to convince.
The red-meat eaters of Australia are firmly in their sights.
So success depends on getting the taste and texture of the plant-based burger as close as possible to the real thing and overturning the reputation of those soggy, flavourless veggie burgers of yesteryear.
How to make a meatless burger
But replicating a beef burger experience is no easy feat.
Water is the main ingredient in a plant-based burger.
Soybean, pea or wheat is often used as a protein base.
This is processed into a mixture known as textured vegetable protein, or TVP.
It's where the chewiness of the burger begins.
Next up are fats, which carry much of the flavour associated with a burger.
Just about every meatless burger uses a vegetable oil — typically canola or coconut oils.
So far so good, but our ersatz burger mince is still looking a bit mushy.
Structural ingredients help to bind the patty and give it its texture.
These include fibres from soy, pea and bamboo, as well as starches — typically from corn, potato or tapioca (the root of a cassava plant).
The remaining ingredients can include seasoning and colouring agents.
Tomato paste, burnt sugar, smoke flavour and molasses are common additives, while beetroot powder can be used to give the raw patty a red, beefy look.
Vitamins and minerals can also be added to provide some of the nutritional benefits you might expect from meat products, such as iron and B12.
In summary: protein, fat, fibres, starches, colours and seasoning.
Mix well.
Closing the taste and texture gap
To get a better idea of how this works in the real world, we visited the offices of All G Foods, one of the plethora of start-ups in the alternative-protein sector.
Founded in 2020 and funded by $40.5 million in venture capital, the Sydney-based company launched its plant-based BUDS burger during the height of the pandemic.
At the company's testing labs in inner-city Waterloo, food scientists are tinkering with its patties.
Lead scientist Damian Frank shows off a machine in the corner of the laboratory that looks like a prop from a science-fiction movie.
This is a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer that's used to isolate ingredients down to a molecular level. This opens up an almost infinite number of ways to fine-tune the patty's meat-like qualities.
The same machine can also be used to reverse-engineer competitor products and understand how those recipes might have achieved desirable attributes.
Across the room, food microbiologist Ingrid Zamora carefully places a sample burger patty under the pressure of a texture-analysing instrument that's best described as a burger squish-o-meter.
It measures the sensory properties that are considered desirable in meat: tenderness, chewiness, cohesiveness and stickiness.
Those measurements can be used to guide the creation of plant-based burgers that emulate the texture, chew and "mouthfeel" of real meat.
New recipes are then formed within a small-scale burger press before they are grilled and put to the taste test.
In addition to the burger patty, All G Foods produces a range of plant-based frozen meals including arancini balls and faux chicken nuggets, and are developing a bacon substitute and a synthetic milk product.
"The medium-term vision is that basically 80 per cent of the products that you're eating in the animal kingdom, you can get from the plant-based kingdom without any taste or texture compromise," founder and CEO Jan Pacas says.
For now, it's all about closing that taste and texture gap.
"Ideally, you want to get to where 100 per cent of people won't be able to spot the difference," Pacas says.
"The first kind of major improvements happened very fast. The last 10 per cent always takes much more time to fine-tune."
"We still have lots of work to do."
Comparing burgers to burgers
A common concern about plant-based burgers is just how highly processed they tend to be.
Accredited practising dietitian Teri Lichtenstein says it's easy to miss the fact that both meat-based burgers and plant-based alternatives are processed in very similar ways.
"It's about comparing apples and apples," she says. "Or, should I say, burgers and burgers."
"A burger, whether it is a meat burger or it is a plant-based burger, is a processed food. But if you are wanting to reduce your meat intake, for whatever the reasons are, these plant-based burgers do offer an alternative."
Lichtenstein co-authored a report on the health and nutrition of plant-based meat in 2020, in collaboration with Food Frontier, an independent consultancy specialising in alternative proteins.
The report compared the nutrition information and health rating of nearly 100 plant-based meat-alternative products in Australian and New Zealand supermarkets to their meat counterparts, including burgers, sausages, bacon, mince and schnitzels.
Even she was surprised by the results which found that, on average, plant-based meats were nutritionally superior compared to conventional meat products across many categories.
The average plant-based analogue contained significantly less fat and saturated fat, comparable protein and lower or similar kilojoules and sodium.
An average Australian beef burger patty is composed of 16 per cent protein, 16 per cent fat and just 5 per cent carbohydrates. The rest is made up of water.
At 15 per cent protein and 11 per cent fat, the average plant-based burger patty delivered comparable protein and was leaner.
Some 12 per cent of the plant-based patty is carbohydrate, noticeably higher than the beef burger, while another 4 per cent is made of dietary fibre, which the beef burger does not contain.
Lichtenstein says her report also found that plant-based meats didn't present the same health risks as conventional meat when it came to food safety including microbial resistance and airborne parasites, and the links that an excessively high red-meat intake has to diseases such as cancer, heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
But she also realises that decades of public health messaging hasn't shifted Australians' eating patterns all too dramatically.
"If you go to a backyard barbecue, especially in Australia, we should be eating more whole foods. But let's be real. No-one's going to open a can of chickpeas and put that on the barbecue, right? You want a burger."
"In an ideal world, you would go to your backyard barbecue and you might have a processed burger. But the rest of your plate would be composed of fresh salad and whole grain carbohydrate and legumes."
Putting it all together
The v2food factory is situated on a grassy industrial estate on the outskirts of Wodonga on the Victorian side of the Murray River.
The company was founded in January 2019 out of a partnership between CSIRO and Hungry Jack's owner Competitive Foods.
Their first offering, the plant-based "Rebel Whopper", hit Hungry Jack's franchises later that year.
The factory floor is dominated by a machine the size of a tow truck which is connected to a maze of funnels and pipes snaking into the ceiling and adjoining rooms.
Known as a twin-screw extruder, it combines and cooks soy protein with water and presses — or extrudes — this mixture between intermeshing and rotating screws to produce a rough dry mix known as textured vegetable protein.
v2Food uses a lot of soy protein powder. It arrives in large brown paper sacks containing a fine flour which is loaded onto an ascending conveyor belt and prepared to be dropped into the extrusion machine.
When the extruder comes to life, the noise is thunderous.
It takes 90 minutes to start in the morning and four hours to clean at the end of the day.
Soy powder is funnelled through feeders from above. It is conditioned with moisture to make it homogenous and flowable so it can be injected into the extruder's twin co-rotating screws.
As it is pressed through several sections by the screws, the mixture is subjected to a range of temperatures and pressures over a varying amount of time.
Like an oversized pasta machine, the extruder produces a string of textured vegetable protein out of tiny holes, which is sliced by a four-blade spinning cutter into tiny uneven grains.
The unevenness is crucial — if the grains are sliced too fast, they emerge with a very clean edge that won't absorb moisture.
The grains of textured vegetable protein (TVP) are then shuttled by conveyor belt into large bins to be dried out and later rehydrated.
In the test kitchen next door, food scientist Saleshni Devi demonstrates how the dried TVP grains are formed into a burger patty.
First, the cereal-like TVP is hydrated in a brine of water and beef-like flavours and colours.
Burnt sugar gives a browner colour, beetroot powder a redder one.
After 15 minutes, Devi stirs in binding bamboo fibres along with canola oil and frozen pellets of coconut fat to mimic the fat marbling in real beef.
This is where the fine-tuned pressure, moisture and heat settings from the extrusion machine play a critical role. If the TVP structures haven't developed to hold the moisture properly, it will ooze out.
Finally, Devi drops the mixture into rings to form the patties before whisking them into a commercial grill.
Room to grow
Not every plant-based burger uses a soy, pea or wheat base.
Sunshine Coast-based Fable Foods promises an umami meaty patty with mushroom as its key ingredient — specifically, the stems of shiitake mushrooms, a by-product of their farming.
These mushrooms are grown on logs of compressed hardwood sawdust, sourced from timber mills and inoculated with mycelium, which is a network of fungal threads from which mushrooms grow.
The mycelium grows through the logs and after about six weeks there are mushrooms ready to be harvested. The hardwood logs are capable of producing three to four flushes of mushrooms this way before they are spent.
At this point, the mycelium has helped to break down the wood, which can be sent to nearby farms as compost.
Fable says that with millions of tonnes of mushroom stems discarded at farms globally each year, by upcycling the stems into new products there is plenty of room to grow.
Fable's co-founder and lead scientist Jim Fuller is a veteran fine-dining chef with a background in chemical engineering as well as mycology, the science of mushrooms.
Fuller has developed a process by which the mushrooms are cooked, minced and shredded to highlight their natural umami and meaty flavours and textures, while lessening the overall mushroomy-ness.
Fable adds filtered water and coconut oil to the mushroom solids to create a patty with the right amount of moisture and fat — not too pasty, gummy or dry.
Then the usual binding and seasoning suspects are added. Soy protein, rice and tapioca starch hold the fat and mushroom solids together to help give the patty a bouncy meaty texture, while seasonings include yeast extract, tomato, onion and garlic powders, as well as a liquid smoke flavour for a flame-grilled sensation.
Winning over the reducetarian
Michelle Colgrave leads CSIRO's Future Protein Mission, which looks at ways to meet the future food gap that is projected to emerge as the world's population expands, grows more affluent and seeks out more protein in its diet.
Colgrave describes CSIRO's mission as "protein agnostic", meaning it is impartial as to whether this gap should be filled with meat or plant-based products.
"We don't mind where the protein comes from, as long as we are making it so that it is sustainably produced and that it meets the health needs of the consumer," she says.
"At the same time, the consumer will only choose it and repurchase it if it tastes good. So we've got to make sure that we create products that not only are sustainable and healthy but also have the right tastes and flavours."
Australians are some of the most enthusiastic meat eaters globally. In 2021, we consumed 89 kilograms of meat per capita — 2.6 times the global average, according to the OECD.
In fact, the average Australian would need to reduce red-meat consumption by 24 kilograms per year to keep within current dietary guidelines.
Although market research shows that around 12 per cent of Australians are entirely or mostly vegetarian, Colgrave says there is another cohort to consider.
"You've got around a third of Australians who are now what we call the reducetarian — that means they eat less meat — or the flexitarian, where they're just choosing different things in their diets. So they're just swapping out a meat meal for a plant-based meal once or twice a week."
The reducetarian category has grown as compelling research has revealed meat and dairy's acute environmental impact.
A landmark study published in the journal Science in 2018 went some way to highlighting the issue.
Researchers looked at the full impact of foods "from farm to fork", creating a dataset based on almost 40,000 farms worldwide, covering the vast majority of food products consumed globally.
The analysis found that meat and dairy were providing just 18 per cent of calories and 37 per cent of protein consumed worldwide while requiring 83 per cent of global farmland and expending 60 per cent of agriculture's greenhouse gas emissions.
Researchers concluded that a plant-based diet was "probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth".
Blind test
So how close is the plant-based burger industry coming to replicating the taste of the real thing?
In a completely unscientific experiment, we conducted a blind taste test using plant-based and traditional meat burgers from the same takeaway food chain.
Eight randomly selected people from the ABC newsroom were asked to don a blindfold and taste one of each variety and then identify which was which.
While only two of the eight were fooled into thinking that the plant-based burgers were meat, several of our testers commented that it was hard to pick the difference.
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Australia is the world's third-fastest-growing market for plant-based foods.
According to Food Frontier data, Australia's plant-based meat sector generated $185 million in sales in 2019--20, up 32 per cent from $140 million the previous year.
But in the US, the largest market for plant-based meats, sales flattened in 2021 after experiencing meteoric growth at the start of the pandemic in 2020.
It hasn't helped the US sector's reputation that shares in the vaunted Beyond Meat nosedived almost 80 per cent from a peak after a much-hyped stock market listing in 2019.
Australian producers have their work cut out for them in bringing consumers around to meat alternatives that have a reputation for costing more.
Another challenge to the sector has been played out in a Senate inquiry into the labelling of non-animal proteins in the meat and dairy sectors.
Farmers and livestock industry groups weighed in with concerns about the potentially misleading use of meat-related naming and imagery in plant-based products.
In its final report, the inquiry recommended a national standard be developed to restrict the use of "meat category brands" such as "beef" and "chicken" to animal protein products, as well as the use of images of animals on packaging.
The committee agreed with the animal protein sector that there was "a clear market failure caused by current labelling and marketing practices of the plant-based protein sector".
At v2food, CEO and founder Nick Hazell says they have "abundant evidence" that consumers are not easily misled by meat-related product titles.
"There are a small number of people who are scared about what this future might look like. And I appreciate that. But I just want them to know that there is a big opportunity for the meat industry and an even bigger opportunity for Australian agriculture if we embrace plant-based [food]."
Credits:
Reporting, design, 3D modelling, photography: Jack Fisher
Development: Thomas Brettell