Plant-based meat formulations are becoming more and more similar to real meat. With certain plant-based ingredients, however, it’s more difficult to mimic the taste, texture and juiciness of animal-based meat.

These natural limits of purely plant-based formulations are paving the way for B2B start-ups specialised in particular ingredients. The goal of Dutch start-up Peace of Meat is to help with one such ingredient: fat.

The company uses a proprietary process to cultivate animal fat cells to add to plant-based formulations. These plant+animal products are, in fact, a hybrid formulation that producers of meat analogues are very likely to use, a recent survey conducted by Peace of Meat found.

According to the results, 58% of plant-based companies would ‘likely’ or ‘very likely’ use cultivated meat ingredients in their products. When asked specifically whether they would use them in order to drive clean label or improve texture in plant-based products, positive answers went up to 68%.

Such openness of producers to hybrid products is consistent with the ‘Plant Forward’ trend, which Innova Market Insights' identified as one of the Top Ten Trends for 2021. As the plant-based phenomenon becomes mainstream, consumers are demanding new formats and more sophisticated alternatives, and may well be open to meat alternatives containing animal ingredients if - like cultured fat – these were produced without slaughtering.

Using cultivated fat can also work as a naturally-produced shortcut to improve texture with fewer ingredients and less processing, in line with the clean label trend.