Plant-based alternatives have existed for a long time. The first bean- and soy-based burgers were available in the 1970s. The recipes for plant-based “meat products” have refined and fine-tuned in the meantime. But there’s one basic problem: It is extremely difficult to imitate the structure of meat. Plant cells and muscle cells are fundamentally different. While muscles are elastic and pliable, plant cells are stiff and non-pliable. The ETH spin-off, planted, has tackled this problem and developed plant-based “chicken” that mimics the meat structure as closely as possible using the extruder process.

But the typical meat flavor, especially for beef, is very difficult to achieve. There is a very complex chemical reaction behind this flavor that is activated when the meat is cooked, and researchers still do not fully understand it. Animal meat gets its red color and characteristic iron aroma from blood cells. The company Impossible Foods managed to achieve both characteristics through the addition of “heme,” a blood-like red coloring agent extracted from the roots of soy plants.

Meat from a petri dish

In order to convince ardent meat eaters to try alternatives, products need to look like meat, taste like meat and be affordable. For this reason, more and more food producers are researching “artificial” meat alternatives in the lab – known as “cultured meat.” The first lab-based hamburger was created in 2013 and eaten on live TV. Since then, dozens of companies around the world have been researching cultured meat. The idea behind this research is to use a very small tissue sample from a cow to extract what are known as satellite cells. This involves a type of muscle stem cell that produces new muscle mass in the event of an injury.

The satellite cells are placed in a petri dish, where they stimulated to grow. This requires a medium that provides the stem cells with nutrition and continuously induces them to reproduce. In the future, such “culture mediums” will be made from plant materials, such as certain plant proteins. Extracting these and other necessary materials, like vitamins and amino acids, in large quantities requires biotechnological processes.