Joyn’s Blended Meat Passes High School Taste Test as Startups Target Beef Demand

Dodge was testing the product through his consulting company, K–12 Food Solutions. When the first rush of about 150 hungry students reached the table, he was waiting with slow cookers filled with steaming marinara sauce and meatballs. Students tapped out opinions on an iPad or scanned a QR code to use their phones; Dodge asked those who lingered to guess what vegetable had been mixed into the meat. Few could. The meatballs tasted like moist, flavorful beef, according to the article. Dodge estimated that the majority of the school’s few thousand students came by, and comments described the flavor as “bussin’.”

Joyn’s 50/Cut is a proprietary blend of seemingly simple ingredients and is available as meatballs, burgers and ground meat. The product is one of a set of “blended meat” products that combine plant proteins with real meat. Startups pursuing them are trying a different approach from asking consumers to abandon meat: they aim to reduce beef consumption by mixing in plant ingredients while preserving the taste and texture of familiar foods.

The article cited emissions data for beef production. Livestock production accounts for between 10% and 20% of all greenhouse-gas emissions related to human activity, and nearly two-thirds of that comes from ruminants like cows raised for meat and dairy products, according to the article. Beef herds create four times the emissions of dairy herds per kilo of food produced, and for US households, food makes up as much as 30% of emissions. Ruminants produce about 30% of the methane associated with human activity, and methane has 28 times more global-warming potential than carbon dioxide.

“We don’t have a technical solution to change the stomach of a ruminant,” Fredrik Hedenus, a professor in sustainability and systems analysis at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, said in the article. Technologies to dampen the impact of ruminant burps have been in the works for a while but have yet to scale, and they fix only part of the problem with red meat. Cows need a lot of land for pasture and for feed, which has made livestock a top driver of deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere, according to the article.

Hedenus said even if the world stopped burning all fossil fuels tomorrow, emissions from agriculture would push the planet past 2 °C over preindustrial temperatures by 2070. According to his research, more efficient livestock farming methods would still leave agriculture eating up over half of humanity’s carbon budget by that time. Only with the addition of dietary changes does his model show a winning scenario. A 2024 survey of more than 200 climate scientists conducted at Harvard found that the vast majority believe reducing emissions from livestock is important to meeting climate goals, according to the article.

Meat consumption has proved hard to shift. People like the taste of meat, and across most of the world meat-eating tends to be associated with status; as societies have grown wealthier, it has increased, according to the article. A United Nations report showed that global meat production quadrupled between 1961 and 2022, while vegetarianism has held steady at about 4% of the population in the US since 1999. Lab-grown meat has generated headlines since the 2000s but has yet to become commercially available and affordable at scale, and while plant-based meats from companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat made gains in taste and texture, the hype and appetite have somewhat fizzled, the article said.

Paul Shapiro, cofounder of the startup BMC Ingredients, which markets a plant protein related to mushrooms, offered a hypothetical in the article. If Impossible Whoppers at Burger King accounted for about 2% of sales, that would be only a 2% reduction in meat; if a conventional Whopper were 20% plants, that would be a 20% cut right off the bat, he said.