- Beyond Meat’s Beyond Burger uses 22 ingredients in its attempt to perfectly recreate the taste and texture of a beefy burger.
- Ingredients include pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, and coconut oil.
- “If you look at it long enough … you begin to understand that meat is knowable and material,” Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown told Business Insider following the company’s explosive IPO.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Beyond Meat reached its $1 billion-plus unicorn valuation due in large part to the success with which its Beyond Burger has replicated the taste and feel of chowing down on a hamburger.
However, the plant-based burger uses more than a few veggies to recreate the taste of a classic, bleeding burger.
“If you look at it long enough from different angles and as much as you possibly can, you begin to understand that meat is knowable and material,” Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown told Business Insider on Thursday, following the company’s explosive IPO.
“It’s essentially these five things. It’s amino acids, lipids, trace minerals, trace vitamins, and water,” Brown continued. “None of those are exclusively the animal. They’re all present in the plant kingdom.”
With Beyond Meat, Brown has worked to find these five elements in plants and use them to perfectly recreate the texture, taste, and experience of eating meat products. For the company's most famous product, the Beyond Burger, this recreation is no easy feat, requiring 22 ingredients.
Here's what is in a Beyond Burger:
- Water
- Pea Protein Isolate
- Expeller-Pressed Canola Oil
- Refined Coconut Oil
The Beyond Burger also contains 2% or less of:
- Cellulose from Bamboo
- Methylcellulose
- Potato Starch
- Natural Flavor
- Maltodextrin
- Yeast Extract
- Salt
- Sunflower Oil
- Vegetable Glycerin
- Dried Yeast
- Gum Arabic
- Citrus Extract (to protect quality)
- Ascorbic Acid (to maintain color)
- Beet Juice Extract (for color)
- Acetic Acid
- Succinic Acid
- Modified Food Starch
- Annatto (for color)
According to Brown, this recipe isn't set in stone. Beyond Meat is continuing to innovate and improve products. Ultimately, Beyond Meat wants to create the "perfect replication" of meat products. Right now, Brown says, the company is about 70% of the way to the goal.
"More so than worrying about competition, I worry about how we make the products that we currently have on the shelf obsolete by improving them," Brown said.