You know Impossible and Beyond burgers. Now meet West Sacramento’s vegan meat startup

Some vegan dishes embrace natural flavors, letting tastes of the earth shine through. Others use technology and product mishmashing to replicate meat or dairy flavors, enticing the vegan-curious and offering nostalgic tastes once again to people who gave them up.

Impossible and Beyond burgers have become commonplace not just at all-vegan restaurants like Plant Power Fast Food, but at Denny’s, TGI Friday’s and Carl’s Jr. You can find mock orange chicken at Panda Express, faux ground beef at Del Taco and meatless meatballs at Subway. In fact, chain restaurants saved more than 700,000 animal lives in 2021 by adding fake meat to their menus, according to a World Animal Protection report.

The Better Meat Co., based in West Sacramento, is part of that process. As Sacramento residents grow more accustomed to “alternative meats,” more are being born right in their backyard.

The Better Meat Co. has expanded from CEO Paul Shapiro’s Sacramento kitchen table in 2018 to a 12,500-square foot West Sacramento facility with 15 employees, and plans to fill a full-scale industrial plant within the next 18 months.

Housed in a former trampoline park now plastered with Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall quotes, The Better Meat Co. wants to help slow large-scale animal farming’s environmental impacts by producing a competitive product, executive vice president of operations Doni Curkendall said.

A harpoon hangs by the entrance as a reminder that people stopped using whale oil in lamps not out of kindheartedness to the huge mammals, but because kerosene came along as a cheaper alternative.

“Ultimately, a lot of what’s pushing this is our understanding that the planet is not getting any bigger as far as land and space, but our population is getting bigger,” Curkendall said. “Our footprint is getting much bigger, especially by what we eat and how we eat.”

The Better Meat Co. makes an adaptable mock product from mycelium, the fungal micro-organism that makes up mushrooms. It’s fed sugars and starches in North America’s largest mycelium fermenter, then cut, dried and packaged in airtight bags, about a day’s work from start to finish.

The Better Meat Co. calls the finished product “Rhiza,” Latin for “root.” It’s beige and bland, looking somewhat like shredded chicken or tuna. Per 100 grams, it has more iron than beef, more potassium than bananas and more fiber than oats, Curkendall said.

There’s not much of a public-facing component; The Better Meat Co. sells Rhiza business-to-business to companies like Hormel, the $10 billion maker of Spam and many other meaty foods, which can then make their own proprietary products from the mycelium base or blend it with real meat to make the animal products go further. Perdue, one of the nation’s largest chicken processors, is another customer.

Once companies purchase Rhiza, the world’s their oyster — or canned tuna or chicken tenders or bacon or gyoza. With thickening agents, supplementary ingredients and flavor and color additives, food scientists can turn Rhiza into just about any kind of imitation meat with close taste and texture, Curkendall said.

That includes the meatiest of meats. Bennett’s American Cooking in The UV shopping center, formerly known as University Village, became the United States’ first steakhouse to serve an animal-free steak when it debuted Rhiza steak as a special last August.

Jared Goldstein, The Better Meat Co.’s in-house chef, once put foie gras eclairs on the menu of an upscale Chicago restaurant where he cooked after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America — Hyde Park.

Now, Goldstein makes Rhiza-based foie gras eclairs with truffle shavings and edible flowers for groups touring The Better Meat Co. They’re near in taste, and no ducks or geese are force-fed in the making of the product. Other samples include breakfast sausage, bacon and crab cakes, and more options abound on The Better Meat Co.’s website.

“Our ingredient is so versatile that you really can use it for anything,” Curkendall said. “The sky’s the limit.”

This story was originally published March 4, 2022 at 3:25 AM.