While most meat alternatives are processed products such as burgers, sausages, and grounds, multiple startups have sprung up in recent years attempting to produce whole cuts from plants and fungi. But none of them have really nailed it, claims Prof. Yaakov Nahmias.
Nahmias, who is best-known in the foodtech world as founder of cultivated meat startup Believer Meats (he remains on the board but stepped down as president two years ago), is founder of Tissue Dynamics, a startup that has developed a robotic automation platform enabling the formation and tracking of thousands of human organoids in parallel.
But he has also been working on a project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with his PhD student Mohammad Ghosheh to create plant-based chops and steaks that he claims both precisely replicate the texture of whole cuts of meat, but just as importantly, are suitable for mass production.
The tech combines two technologies: metamaterials—familiar materials with unique properties due to the way they are structured; and injection molding, a technique we associate with plastics that Nahmias claims could enable mass production of plant-based steaks at a fraction of the cost of 3D printing.
AgFunderNews (AFN) caught up with Prof. Nahmias (YN) following the publication of an article in Nature Communications outlining the patent-pending technology.
AFN: You’re comparing your tech to 3D printing, but aren’t there other ways to create whole cuts worthy of comparison?
YN: Several companies are making whole cuts although they haven’t all published what tech they are using. Many of these approaches are fascinating, but they don’t replicate the texture of meat. What we like about our approach is that the metamaterials we created are almost indistinguishable from farmed meat. However, I have to add the caveat that [in consumer testing] we were comparing our product to a well-done product, not a medium [rare] steak.
AFN: Very simply, can you describe the process?
YN: There are two components. A fat component comprising a proteoleogel [an oleogel structured with a plant protein], and a low-temperature meat analog (LTMA) made from pellets of TVP [textured vegetable protein] mixed with an emulsion and put through low-temperature single-screw extrusion allowing the fibers to gel during shear.
To make a steak or a chop, we create a mold and inject the LTMA or ‘muscle’ part of the steak. Once the LTMA cools off we lift the top of the mold exposing the ‘intermuscular’ cavities into which we inject the proteoleogel. The product is then frozen and the mold is removed, leaving a whole piece of meat.
AFN: What’s the appeal of injection molding?
YN: Injection molding is a high-capacity plastic manufacturing technology developed in the 1940s that is yet to be utilized in food manufacturing.
For our work on whole cut meat alternatives, once you’re producing above a few tons of material, injection molding pretty much leaves 3D printing in the dust. It’s several orders of magnitude more cost efficient than 3D printing, allowing mass production of alternative protein products.
It’s also a huge advantage that the injection molding process is not going above 100 degrees, which means that the color of the raw product won’t change during cooking and the flavoring agents don’t oxidize, which can be a problem with meat analogs made using high moisture extrusion.
AFN: What’s the attraction of metamaterials?
YN: This is where the science gets exciting. Metamaterials are materials whose function comes from their structure rather than their composition. Previously they’ve been used in the aerospace industry for things like lightweight heat shields. What’s appealing is that you can produce a new material with unique properties without changing your supply chain as you can use same materials to make the new metamaterial product.
I remember a few years ago there was a team of Dutch researchers looking at metamaterials that 3D printed chocolate with a spiral design, so that when you bite it, it explodes in your mouth, essentially creating a product that would give you the same experience of chocolate with a fraction of the amount. It captured my imagination and I thought that as an engineer, I must do something with this concept!
AFN: What’s the proteoleogel made from and what’s interesting about it?
YN: Standard oleogels are a great invention, where you take a liquid monosaturated fat [such as a vegetable oil], emulsify it, and get something that behaves a bit more like butter [which is semi-solid at room temperature]. The problem is that when you cook them, the fat spreads out, whereas animal fat behaves differently.
When you cook animal fat, it doesn’t spread out during cooking like a [standard] oleogel or rapidly melt like coconut oil. Instead, the lipid droplets are held inside the cells, as animal fat is essentially a hydrogel encapsulating an oleogel. We replicated this by creating a proteoleogel. We screened a large library of plant proteins and identified the ones that would essentially encapsulate an oleogel in a protein matrix. When you raise the temperature, the protein denatures and and cross links the oil emulsion, binding everything together.
Mung bean protein was very effective as a structuring agent, creating an irreversible gel during cooking.
AFN: What’s the low temperature meat analog made from and what’s interesting about it?
YN: We start with TVP and then add an oleogel and flow the mix at low temperature through a low-temperature extruder we retrofitted in the lab. The extrusion process orients the TVP microfibers and traps them in a gel. When you look at the LTMA under a microscope, it looks very different from products made with high-temperature extrusion, which gives you a layered structure, where if you bite it in a certain direction, it feels like rubber and it can break apart during cooking.
When you bite through LTMA, it feels exactly like meat. And when you test the bite strength, it responds mechanically like beef.
AFN: What are you planning to do with this technology?
YN: We are currently engaged with a couple of European partners that are interested in the technology and there are a couple of interesting venture possibilities here as well.
When I look at this technology, I see two major aspects. First is the equipment. I think it’s unique to the point where I would love to engage an equipment manufacturer in sub-licensing this out. And second, I think there is a unique opportunity to create products that nobody has seen before that are very, very cost-efficient. So I would love to build a company to essentially pick this up and run with it.
