When it comes to meat and its vegetarian alternatives, tempers run high. Opinions clash with enormous force, on social media anyway, but also in politics. After heated debates, Italy’s right-wing conservative government was the only country in the EU to decide to ban imitation meat made from animal stem cells. Opponents contemptuously call it “lab meat,” while supporters call it “meat from a fermenter.” The battle between the meat industry and veggie suppliers has long been a struggle for the sovereignty of interpreting words. From now on, plant-based alternatives in Italy must be called something different than their animal-based originals. The government’s justification is emotional. They want to protect the Italian tradition of food and butchery.
In Germany, however, meat alternatives based on new technologies are seen as an opportunity, both economically and for climate goals. Less than a week after the decision in Italy, the Bundestag released 38 million euros for a comprehensive program to promote a more meat-free diet. The aim is to change agriculture from animal feed to protein-rich plants for food. In addition to our own soy varieties, we also produce protein plants such as field beans, peas and alfalfa. Companies with new manufacturing processes for vegetarian products are also financially supported.
Animal feed is currently grown on 70 percent of the fields. In addition, the EU has to import 35 million tonnes of soy from South and North America every year for animal feed production, the majority of which is genetically modified. An economic dependence that is viewed critically by the EU and is due to today’s high-performance livestock species. The optimized dairy cow with almost ten tons of milk per year or the slaughter chicken that weighs two kilos just six weeks after hatching need the high protein density of soy from overseas.
But why give plant proteins to an animal for slaughter when they could be processed directly into food that not only tastes good, but is also healthy and even similar to meat? The “protein plant strategy” has existed in Germany and the EU for around ten years, but the annual funding in this country was rarely in the double-digit million sums and the money was mainly used for the protein plants that farm animals eat. That should change. In this respect, the 38 million euros could be interpreted as a commitment to change.
In any case, Godo Röben is satisfied. With more courage than knowledge, he once transformed the former Rügenwalder Mühle sausage company into Germany’s leading veggie supplier. Today he’s turning bigger wheels. As one of the stakeholders, as it is called in modern German, he decides how the million-dollar budget is used as effectively as possible. Politically, Renate Künast and Dr. Zoe Mayer from the Greens. It is not yet clear which associations from the agricultural and food sectors will be added.
“A few other countries are investing more, but at least Germany can keep pace with the top group. And it is an important signal to all participants in the value chain – from farmers to food retailers,” says Röben. His personal dream: to build a leading competence center for alternative proteins in Germany, such as “Food
When it comes to plant proteins and vegetarian products, Godo Röben has a passion that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a down-to-earth guy from the Oldenburger Land. Röben is firmly attached to his soil and has always lived in Brake on the Lower Weser. A film team had chosen the location in search of the most depressing location possible, he says, not without local patriotism.
The topic of vegetarian nutrition struck him at Rügenwalder back then. With little knowledge and hardly any experience, they built a new brand, not only opened up a market, but largely created it themselves. Röben had a hand and nose in the entire veggie value chain like no other. From the product idea, food technology, sourcing the ingredients, recipes, production, sales to marketing and lobbying in politics. Today he drives the German veggie scene forward as a networker, investor and consultant on various advisory boards. He advises, among others, the Rewe Group, food manufacturers such as InFamily Foods on their vegetarian spin-offs, invests in startups and is on a first-name basis with many in politics.
However, Röben is not a veggie missionary. “If I’m somewhere with friends and there’s currywurst, I don’t turn it down. But if there are delicious vegetarian alternatives, I go for them,” he says. Humans have been hunting, keeping and eating animals for tens of thousands of years; this is deep within us. Meat will always be eaten, says Röben. The only question is how much. In any case, things cannot continue as they are at the moment. The meat industry is one of the biggest climate and environmental sinners, from the cultivation of feed and animal husbandry to the transport of animals and the storage of manure. Ruminants such as cattle in particular produce a significant amount of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide during digestion. Although methane and nitrous oxide are more volatile than CO2, they are many times more harmful to the climate. Overall, livestock farming contributes around 15 percent of the greenhouse gases produced by humans.
From a global perspective, time cannot be turned back. You can no longer go back to the 1960s, when the farmer brought his handful of pigs to the butcher and thus covered the meat needs of his customers. “Back then there were three billion of us on the planet, today there are eight of us and it won’t be long before we’ll be ten billion. The Bullerbü era is over, this number can only be fed with alternative proteins and new processes,” it says for Röben. His goal is a share of alternative proteins of up to 40 percent in Germany by 2040.
“I believe such major changes always follow the same pattern over a period of 40 to 60 years, whether it is the mobility transition, the energy transition or the transition from meat to veggies,” says Röben. The energy transition began in the 1980s with the anti-nuclear power movement. “The first ones are always the freaks, who make everyone else think about what they actually want.” At first this group was against nuclear power and then turned its attention to fossil fuels. A good 20 years later, the attitude, which was once suspected of being outlandish, has finally become suitable for the masses and therefore politically acceptable. About 40 years after the first “nuclear power no thanks” stickers, Germany gets 40 percent of its energy from renewable sources and wants to be at 80 percent in the near future.
It will be similar with the change in diet. It is not vegetarians or vegans that are crucial to success, but rather flexitarians, meat eaters who are open to alternatives. According to surveys, they make up 45 percent of potential veggie customers in Germany. Flexitarians like meat and sausage, but would switch for reasons of animal welfare and climate concerns – if the product alternatives can keep up with the original.
“For the first vegetarian meat-like products a good 20 years ago, you had to be a deeply convinced hardcore vegetarian. It didn’t look good, it didn’t feel good, and it didn’t taste good either,” remembers Röben. Today we have already made a step further; we can make meat sausage, meat salad, burger patties and salami quite well. But this still doesn’t convince most flexitarians. “They try it, but then say no, I don’t like it and won’t come back for another year or two. That’s also the reason why the industry isn’t getting up to speed quickly enough. We have to get better here faster,” says Röben.
This also applies to the ingredients. “With the first veggie products, the developer said to me: What do you want? No additives or good taste? Both are not possible,” recalls the ex-Rügenwalder manager. “It was clear to me that the only way to get people to have a taste for these alternatives.” The first meat substitute products ten years ago used plant proteins, spices from well-known sausage recipes and a number of additives. They weren’t squeamish about that. The inner values played no role in this phase. Nor where did the plants come from? The soy was imported from South America because it was cheap. Many products would have had the nutritional value of edible paper.
From there, it took nine years of research and development until the meat alternatives were healthy and tasty. In the salami and ham from the new “Billie Green” brand from Plantly Butchers, the proteins do not come from overseas, but from German wheat. The wheat is fermented, which means the protein yield is a third higher than with the older processes. Additives are no longer needed, says Röben. This marks the beginning of the next stage of development: away from being a butcher and becoming a food technician.
To date, most vegetarian meat alternatives have been produced using traditional sausage processing machines. For example with the meat sausage. Instead of meat, vegetable proteins, spices, water and oil are mixed into a mass in the so-called cutter and pressed into shapes. This would not be necessary as many vegetarian ingredients are supplied in powder form. However, manufacturers save on purchasing new machines. But that is exactly what is changing. The old technology could be used to produce vegetarian meat sausage, mince or a veggie meatball, but it is unsuitable for more complex products.
In the search for vegetarian alternatives that actually feel like a steak or a salmon fillet, traditional craftsmanship and its machinery have largely become obsolete. Vegetarian raw materials can be processed in a 3D printer, grown from animal stem cells or built using precision fermentation. The future of food sounds like food IT.
Suddenly startups from completely different industries come around the corner. Project Eaden from Berlin brings know-how from textile technology. They transform plant proteins into muscle fibers and connective tissue. Millions of these thin fibers are then joined together to form large pieces of meat. They can use it to imitate the structure of meat, from steaks, roasts, to ham, with a realistic look and chewing feel,” says Röben enthusiastically. “And they have also recently made great progress in terms of taste and roasting behavior.” Röben finds it particularly interesting that, in contrast to meat from a 3D printer or fermenter, Project Eaden can use textile technology to bring large quantities to the market at low prices.
A project by BioMedical Printing Technology at TU Darmstadt is at least thematically closer to meat. The mechanical engineering department, which is only three years old, deals, among other things, with printing implants for regenerative medicine. That may sound unappetizing, but whether the spare parts from cells are built into people or eaten by them is technically irrelevant. The scientists are convinced that they can create the finest muscle fiber-like structures with their screen printing process. Layers of cells half a millimeter thick are stacked on top of each other, which then grow together to form a solid structure. So far it only works in the laboratory.
Such images do not detract from Röben’s joy of experimentation. “I ate a steak from Redefine Meat that was really good. The feel, grain, color, everything was very close to the original. They achieved this with a 3D printer that creates the tissue from muscle cells and fat cells from commercially available proteins prints,” says Röben. Or Jucie Marbles from Slovenia. “If you want to treat yourself to something really good, then you order a 750 gram steak from them. You cut it into fillet pieces and fry it in butter. Fabulous! It’s almost indistinguishable from real meat,” Röben is in his element . The downside to all of these cutting-edge techniques is that they don’t scale. Only small quantities can be produced at a non-marketable price.
And here Röben is back to his time horizon for major changes: it took ten years for meat substitute products to be accepted on the market, ten years were needed to actually turn the products into healthy foods and it will then take another ten years until meat alternatives are mass produced , which are very similar to real meat in taste and feel.
Until then, fermentation will be the key technology for meat alternatives. Fermentation is an old technique in which microorganisms such as bacteria or algae convert a raw material and thus give it taste, make it easier to digest or increase its nutrient content. Pressed grapes make wine, milk makes yogurt, or soybeans make soy or miso sauce. According to the “Good Food Institute”, 136 companies worldwide specialize in fermentation, and 100 companies operate product lines related to alternative protein fermentation, including industry giants such as Unilever and Nestlé. The US think tank “RethinkX” even believes there will be a fermentation revolution in the US -Meat and milk market, according to which the number of cattle will be halved by 2030.
In biomass fermentation, the end product is the organisms themselves: fungi. The Hamburg start-up Infinite Roots and Bosque-Foods from the USA are working on this technology. In large fermenters, the mycelium grows in a nutrient solution about 25 times faster than soy plants. It is then harvested, processed into a dough-like mass, seasoned and can then be formed into meat-like products: schnitzels, meatballs, meatballs.
Whether a meat alternative appeals to customers also depends on how it behaves in the pan. Does it fry well, does it stay solid in the oven or does the mixture fall apart when stewing? According to Infinite Roots, compared to other plant proteins, mushrooms maintain their stability even under heat because their structure is closer to animals than to plants. The Hamburg startup is also researching a climate-friendly raw material cycle. Theoretically, the nutrient solution for the fungi could also consist of waste products. Coffee grounds or pomace from fruit juice production would no longer end up in animal feed, but would go straight into the next veggie food.
The current cutting-edge technology is precision fermentation. In it, microorganisms produce ingredients such as flavors, enzymes, vitamins or dyes. Thanks to advances in bioinformatics, it is now possible to select bacteria specifically for a task or to program them using genetic engineering to produce the required substances. This allows vegetarian meat alternatives to be “tuned” and, for example, to add nutrients and the typical meat taste that can otherwise only be found in animal models.
But the technology could also permanently change the world of dairy products – and be good for the climate. Around 87 percent of the greenhouse gases in livestock farming come from keeping beef cattle and dairy cows. Sixty years ago, dairy cows produced 6,000 liters of milk per year; today’s high-performance breeds produce 10,000 liters or more. Keeping sensitive animals is complex and requires special feed, controlled environmental conditions and ongoing health checks. High costs that are offset by a brutal price war in the market.
More and more companies around the world are researching which animal amino acids are responsible for the typical taste and physical properties of cow’s milk. The amino acids are recreated in fermenters using appropriately programmed microorganisms. This means that vegetarian versions of milk, cream, cheese and yogurt that are very similar to the original are possible. Compared to animal breeding, significantly less methane and CO2 would be emitted and only a fraction of the amount of energy and water would be required. This is not a thing of the future. The company “Formo” from Berlin produces “nature-identical” cheese in this way. However, the veggie cheese is not available to buy in Germany; it is scheduled to come onto the market in Asia this year. The approval procedures there are less strict than in the EU.
When it came to the third meat production technique, even Godo Röben had to swallow at first: meat from the fermentation tank based on muscle or stem cells. Stem cells or muscle cells are taken from the animal via a biopsy and used after purification in the fermenter. Stem cells are body cells with an undetermined function. You can become anything. In the fermentation tank, they become muscle cells and fat cells, which grow around a framework made of soy and wheat proteins. At the end of the process, a steak falls out of the fermenter. In Israel, “Aleph Farms” is working on the process, in Germany “The Cultivated B”, a subsidiary of InFamilyFoods from Heidelberg.
“I’ll be completely honest. I found the idea of meat from the fermenter strange at first,” admits Röben. The more intensively he dealt with it, the more differentiated his picture became. What would an alien say, he wondered? “On the one hand, he would see a piglet that was penned up without daylight and fattened up within six months, only to be killed in a panic and dismantled by machines. On the other hand, he would see a fermenter made from a single animal cell Meat is produced. What would he consider to be “abnormal”?”, explains Röben his change of heart.
The production of plant-based meat alternatives has nothing to do with the image of happy animals, green meadows and rustic livestock farmers. “It will take two generations to get used to the fact that this production is unappetizing and technical,” Röben is certain. “But what we do today in meat production is much less appetizing. But we have been socialized that way and therefore find it normal. Every change is perceived as strange at first.”
But it will still take years of research and development before meat from fermenters and comparable alternatives fill supermarket shelves in mass quantities. Many alternatives such as meat from the fermenter or from precision fermentation fall under the EU “Novel Foods” regulation and are only released after intensive testing. The Italian government has therefore banned something that currently does not exist anyway. Until then, you can buy plant-based meat everywhere. Also in Italy.
