Soylent, Impossible Burgers And More: What Do High-Tech Foods Really Taste Like?

SAN JOSE, Calif.

Your fridge is connected to the internet, your car parks itself and you do all your shopping online from the comfort of your bed. But are you still eating low-tech food?

A new generation of startups wants to change that. They’re cooking up everything from nutrient-rich meal-replacement drinks to bio-engineered fake meat, with the goal of making mealtime healthier, more efficient and better for the environment.

Venture capitalists have poured nearly $110 million into these next-generation food startups so far this year, according to PitchBook Data, and a few companies have developed a cult following of techies.

Eager to see what all the buzz was about, I gathered a panel of reporters and editors from The Mercury News to sample meal replacement products from Soylent and MealSquares.

Then I tasted plant-based burgers from Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. The verdict? No one is giving up their favorite lunches.

Still, these alternative food startups fit right into Silicon Valley, their leaders put a premium on efficiency and talk about farming and raising livestock the way someone else might talk about an outdated computer.

“Animals are just a technology for food production, a prehistoric technology for producing meat and dairy foods,” said Patrick Brown, CEO and founder of plant-based “meat” maker Impossible Foods.

Brown, who is opening a new factory in Oakland this summer, spent three years in a lab using plant compounds to reverse engineer the taste, smell, texture and look of ground beef.

Southern California-based Beyond Meat has the same idea, selling “the future of protein” in the form of plant-based burgers and chicken strips intended to taste like the real thing.

Clara Foods in San Francisco is making egg whites without the chicken. And San Leandro-based Memphis Meats recently produced the world’s first lab-grown chicken meat, made by cultivating and harvesting real meat cells, and plans to have its products on the market by 2021.

Meanwhile, companies like Los Angeles-based Soylent want to replace food altogether. Soylent makes 400-calorie drinks designed to take the place of breakfast, lunch or dinner, and San Jose-based MealSquares makes prepackaged bars with the nutrition of a full meal.

But what do they taste like? I sampled two of the engineered burgers and decided that while they have a definite meaty flavor I’ve never tasted in another veggie burger, they’re nowhere near ready to replace In-N-Out Burger or other favorites.

Our test panel also tried Soylent and MealSquares, and the consensus was if we were locked in a doomsday bunker during the apocalypse or traveling through outer space, they’d be great. But for a quick meal at our desk? We’ll probably stick with a sandwich.
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Impossible Burger
Verdict: Almost tastes like meat.
Price: $19 at KronnerBurger.
Where to get it: For now, it’s only available in select restaurants including KronnerBurger in Oakland, Vina Enoteca in Palo Alto and Cockscomb, Jardiniere and Public House in San Francisco.
Nutrition facts: 220 calories, 13 grams of fat, 19 grams of protein and 1 gram of sugar.
What’s in it: Wheat, coconut oil, potatoes, and other plant materials. The secret ingredient is heme _ the compound that makes meat red and gives it its signature flavor. Impossible Foods engineered yeast to produce heme for their burgers.
Compared to a beef burger, making an Impossible Burger uses about {0 the land and \ the water, and produces [ the greenhouse gases, according to the company.
Taste test: I ordered one at KronnerBurger, a trendy, upscale burger joint in Oakland. My first qualm was the $19 price tag (which didn’t include french fries).
When the burger arrived, it was juicy and pink on the inside, just like real beef. For the first few bites, I thought the taste was pretty spot-on too. But the patty was much softer than real meat, and it started to squish into the bun as I continued eating. And halfway through I found the “meat” was too salty, and had a slightly off taste.
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Beyond Meat’s Beast Burger
Verdict: Not quite meat.
Price: $5.49 for two frozen patties at Sprouts Farmers Market in Oakland.
Where to get it: Select grocery stores carry the Beast Burgers and plant-based chicken strips. Beyond Meat also makes fresh raw “hamburger” patties, but those are still tricky to come by in the Bay Area, and I wasn’t able to taste them in time for publication. The company said last month it was introducing the patties into Northern California Safeways, but my local store said shipments had been spotty and unpredictable.
Nutrition facts: 260 calories, 16 grams of fat, 23 grams of protein and no sugar.
What’s in it: Pea protein, oil, tapioca starch and a vegetable blend of spinach, broccoli, carrot, tomato and beets.
Taste test: I picked up a frozen Beast Burger at a local grocery store and cooked it in a skillet on the stove for lunch. The patty had the distinct smell and taste of animal fat _ it filled the kitchen with the fragrance of bacon cooking _ but I tasted more grease than beef as I was eating it, and it left a strange aftertaste. The patty had a more rubbery texture than the Impossible Burger, and it didn’t look as much like beef. Instead of being pink in the middle, the Beast Burger was light brown and spotted with yellowish globules.
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Soylent
Verdict: Tastes OK, not very satisfying.
Price: About $3 a bottle.
Where to get it: Online at soylent.com.
Nutrition facts: The original flavor has 400 calories, 21 grams of fat, 20 grams of protein and 9 grams of sugar.
What’s in it: Soy protein, algal oil, rice starch and a long list of chemicals and vitamins.
Taste test: I decided to skip breakfast one morning and drink a bottle of Soylent Coffiest, which is supposed to have all the nutrients of breakfast plus the caffeine of a strong cup of coffee. It was convenient and quick, I sipped the drink at my desk while working.
It wasn’t bad. It tasted like thick iced coffee with milk, and didn’t have the chalky texture or vitamin taste I had feared.
But after drinking three-quarters of the bottle I was feeling a bit light-headed and nauseated from having caffeine on an empty stomach. And by 11 a.m. I was pretty hungry, which meant I was especially glad when one of my co-workers brought doughnuts to the office.
A few days later I tried two other bottled Soylent flavors, both of which I ended up liking better than the coffee. The original Soylent, which is the color of milk but has a thicker consistency, tasted like Bisquick or another thin, flavorless batter. And the Cacao flavor tasted like a melted chocolate milkshake. Both tasted OK, but throughout the work week as I thought of skipping lunch and opting for a Soylent instead, the prospect made me incredibly sad, as if I were snuffing out one of the small joys of office work by denying myself a sandwich or a Trader Joe’s salad.
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MealSquares
Verdict: Give me a granola bar instead.
Price: $2.99
Where to get it: Online at mealsquares.com.
Nutrition facts: 400 calories, 20 grams of fat, 20 grams of protein and 12 grams of sugar.
What’s in it: Eggs, whole grain oats, milk, chocolate chips, sunflower seeds and dates.
Taste test: The idea behind MealSquares is to provide quick, no-hassle nutrition via whole ingredients instead of chemicals. The company’s founder, Romeo Stevens, usually eats MealSquares for breakfast and lunch.
While the flavor of the dense, plastic-wrapped squares is fairly pleasant _ think bland banana bread _ the bars are very dry.
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One co-worker compared them to overcooked pumpkin bread, while another called the texture “just pretty awful.”
MealSquares have a much better protein-to-sugar ratio than the granola bars I usually snack on at work, but I don’t think they qualify as a meal. When I skipped lunch and dined on a MealSquare instead, I was still hungry when I finished, and I was craving some fresh fruit or vegetables.