After more than a decade of research, intellectual property created at the University of Missouri has been predicted to be the first competitor of its kind in a market that’s growing over 100 percent in more than a dozen countries according to NationMaster — the meat industry. The twist? The product isn’t meat.
MU researchers Fu-hung Hsieh, a biological engineering and food science professor, and Harold Huff, senior research specialist have created and patented a plant protein-based product that is expected to be a multibillion-dollar competitor in the meat industry, something no meat alternative has previously done.
The creators of the chicken strips, a dry mix of soy, pea powder, carrot fiber and gluten-free flour, have fooled even chicken lovers to fall for the new brand, Beyond Meat.
“You walk into the plant and it smells like you’re walking into a chicken factory,” Huff said. “I walk into it and I get hungry. It smells good and it looks good.”
The product has garnered extensive media coverage, with headlines like “Beyond Meat: The Future of Meat Substitutes?”, “Meat for the Meatless: Fake Chicken So Real It ‘Gets Freaky’”, and “A Chicken Without Guilt” will appear.
As a part of the licensing agreement written by MU for the university’s intellectual property, Beyond Meat, now a part of Savage River Inc., is required to make an investment in Missouri.
The investment, a 16,000-square-foot factory in Columbia on Commerce Street, is expected to hire at least 60 employees, in addition to the 20 that have been running the plant since October.
“It started as another way for Missouri farmers to market soybeans,” Huff said. “It’s the perfect example of a university-derived product process for blending into industry to help the state of Missouri.”
The product already has contracts to be sold in stores from Connecticut to San Diego by 2013.
Ethan Brown, founder of Beyond Meat, has expressed interest in continuing to work with MU’s research to create a beef crumble alternative.
“It’s something we’re going to continue to harness,” Brown said to the Columbia Daily Tribune about the university and its researchers.
Beyond Meat has been endorsed by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has been involved in wildly successful companies such as Twitter and Spotify. The firm also invests in many green tech solutions.
Hsieh pointed out the product’s sustainability as one of its advantages.
“An alternative meat source is more resource efficient in terms of land, water, energy and protein (i.e. consumes plant protein directly instead of converting plant protein to animal protein before consumption). It could also alleviate livestock’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions,” Hsieh said in an email.
Huff pointed out additional benefits the product carries.
“People give you different answers, but … you’re going to research that at a point you can’t feed the world from animal protein,” he said. “This is one way to reduce the impact of animals on the environment, which some people take very seriously.”
Huff says he didn’t fully realize what impact the research could have.
“You work on a project and you kind of have a blinder on and you don’t look at the greater implications,” he said.