Meat’s Expanding Its Horizons, Giving The Livestock Industry Pause

The U.S. meat industry is gigantic, with roughly $200 billion a year in sales and growing. But the industry faces emerging threats on two fronts: plant-based meat substitutes and actual meat grown in labs.

Plant-based meat substitutes are a lot more, well, meaty than they used to be. They sear on the grill and even "bleed." They look, taste and feel in the mouth a lot like meat.

Savannah Blevin, a server at Charlie Hooper's, an old-school bar and grill in Kansas City, Missouri, said the vegetarian Impossible Burgers on the menu are even popular with the meat-eating crowd.

"I had a vegetarian actually turn it away, because it reminded them so much of meat, they sent it back," said Blevins, adding, "It's delicious."

The industry that makes these products is taking off, growing 20 percent last year. 

"Business is booming," said Todd Boyman, co-founder of St. Louis-based food company Hungry Planet. "We just can't keep up. We're actually having to expand our production facilities to keep up with the demand that's out there for this type of food."

Plant-based meat substitutes tend to be more expensive than meat, and high in saturated fat. But, obviously, animals aren't killed in the making, and Boyman said the substitutes are more efficient from a production standpoint.

"When you look at how conventional meat is produced, it's plant protein going through a cow or chicken or pig, et cetera, and getting turned into a different form," he said. "All of us in this category, we're doing the same thing, but without the service of animals."

Regulation station

Of course, taking the animals out of the meat business is not good news for people who raise meat animals for a living. The meat industry is focused on shaping the regulatory environment for its new plant-based and lab-grown competitors, taking into account lessons learned from the rise of plant-based milks.

Photo Credit: Liz West/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

After more than a decade of fast growth, plant-based milks have now captured about 13 percent of the liquid milk market, according to the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that promotes alternatives to animal protein.

But the plant-based milk success story is a cautionary tale for the meat industry.

Danielle Beck, director of Government Affairs for the National Cattleman's Beef Association, said lax oversight helped plant-based milk.

"Soy milk and almond milk under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic act are legally misbranded," Beck argued.

Beck said that milk in the United States has a legal "standard of identity" — a legally binding definition of a product that guarantees consumers know what they are actually buying.

The default is that milk comes from a cow. And Beck believes the very word "milk" carries nutritional expectations that plant-based products don't. She said the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates milk, is falling down on the job in allowing companies making plant-based products to represent them as "milk."

"At the end of the day, words have meaning and product labels need to provide consumers with enough information to make informed purchasing decisions," Beck said.

But plant-based food advocates, and probably many consumers, would say there really is no confusion about the origin of something called almond milk any more than there is about a product like peanut butter or milk of magnesia.

Still, the livestock industry is lobbying to try to stop plant-based meats from gaining market share with ambiguous labels. It promoted a new law in Missouri that forbids "misrepresenting a product" not derived from a dead animal as meat.

The law is tied up in court, but its language is interesting, because it also addresses a distant but ominous threat to the livestock industry: real meat produced without slaughtering animals —meat grown entirely in laboratories.

(This is part two of Frank's story. Listen to part one in the player at the top of the page.)

In the lab

Joshua Tetrick, co-founder of the food company Just, said so-called cell-based meat will upend the meat market.

"I grew up growing lots of meat in Alabama, but I didn't get a chance to eat some of the best meat in the world. Through this process we're going to be able to feed people all around the world — Wagyu hamburgers and Bluefin tuna and some of the most premium meats in the world," he said.

After all, if only a few cells from a living animal are required, and it doesn't have to die, why not use cells from the very tastiest animals? Whale taco, anyone?

The technology here is promising. About two dozen companies worldwide are trying to scale up production of cell-based meat. Famous investors like Bill Gates and meat companies like Tyson and Cargill are involved, but the technology isn't there yet. It currently takes huge amounts of money and effort to bring even tiny helpings to the table.

Still, Tetrick predicted cell-based meats will undercut traditional beef, chicken and fish with in a decade.

"Probably the biggest obstacle outside of the scientific ones is getting folks used to the idea that we don't need to slaughter animals en masse and deal with our waste to enjoy a nice turkey dinner for Thanksgiving," Tetrick said.

But the cell-based meat industry also faces a rocky regulatory landscape.

Mark Dopp, the North American Meat Institute's senior vice president for regulatory affairs and general counsel, insisted his industry wants a "level playing field." From his perspective, that means regulating this new product just like everyday meat — but labeling it differently.

"If these products are going to be marketed and sold and represented as meat, then the companies that make them should meet all of the other regulatory requirements that some company making ground beef out there has to meet today," he said.

And Dopp believes that would be best done under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the FDA.

"Lessons learned," Dopp said, referring to the plant-based milk controversy.

The USDA already regulates meat production, and since it also promotes agriculture, it may be tougher on the emerging industry.

Federal regulators already have come up with a compromise: The FDA and USDA will oversee cell-based meat, with the USDA in charge of the production and labeling. But Congress may yet try to take FDA out of the oversight process together, and leave the USDA in charge of regulating the most fundamental change in meat production since people began raising animals for food.

Frank Morris is a senior reporter at Harvest partner station KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on Twitter: @franknewsman.