Plant-based meat and dairy formulation challenges: overview
- Plant proteins struggle replicating animal texture, flavour and functionality
- Dairy alternatives face stability and protein functionality challenges
- Manufacturing scale-up often requires reformulation and ingredient sourcing changes
- Unwanted flavours and nutritional parity remain difficult formulation hurdles
- Innovation improves performance, but key technical barriers persist today
There are a number of reasons that plant-based meat and dairy face challenges in gaining consumer acceptance.
Many consumers consider prices too high, and these products have also been affected by the backlash against ultra-processed foods.
Yet taste and texture remain important to consumers. While plant-based meat and dairy have seen significant progress in recent years, many formulation challenges remain.
1. Plant-based meat: Plant proteins do not behave like animal proteins
One of the biggest challenges for plant-based meat is that plant proteins do not naturally behave like animal muscle proteins, explains Valentina Gallani, health and nutrition research manager at non-profit ProVeg International.
This creates a whole slew of difficulties. Plant proteins must be structured and organised to reproduce a fibrous architecture that resembles meat, says Gallani. While processing technologies such as extrusion have advanced a lot, reproducing meat’s firmness, chewiness and juiciness remains an active area of research.
Alongside this, formulators must get the colour, flavour, cooking behaviour, and nutritional quality of the product right.
2. Plant-based dairy: Reproducing the functionality of milk proteins is tricky
Plant-based dairy faces similar bottlenecks in terms of functionality.
One of the main obstacles with plant-based dairy is reproducing the functionality of milk proteins and caseins, explains Devika Suresh, head of the ProVeg Incubator.
This can vary with different plant-based dairy products. In plant-based drinks, for example, plant ingredients behave very differently from milk proteins or fat, leading to stability challenges and making it difficult to prevent sedimentation, creaming or separation.
Emulsifiers, stabilisers and homogenisation can help address these issues.
3. Plant-based meat: Products do not always behave the same outside the lab
Just because a plant-based meat recipe works well in the context of a lab or kitchen does not mean that it will work on a manufacturing line.
“Recipes that perform well on lab equipment frequently behave differently on a co-manufacturer’s line,” explains ProVeg Incubator’s Suresh.
In fact, she says, reformulating around available equipment, and maintaining quality across order batches, is a common challenge among plant-based meat manufacturers.
4. Plant-based meat: Difficult to get the right ingredients in the right quantities
One of the big challenges facing small plant-based meat companies in particular is getting the necessary ingredients, explains Gallani.
Obtaining the protein fractions or functional ingredients needed to produce their products at the volumes or prices they need can be a key bottleneck for those without the capital to afford to do so.
Therefore, they are often forced to reformulate in order to deal with this problem.
5. Plant-based dairy: Cheese remains a challenge
“Founders in this category tell us that cheese is where the technical and commercial challenges collide most sharply,” says Suresh.
Plant-based cheese involves numerous functionality challenges, including melting, stretching, firmness, creaminess and flavour. Yet providing the right functionality adds cost.
“The ingredient systems that deliver credible melt, stretch and flavour are frequently the most expensive part of the formulation, and fermentation-based approaches add time and process control requirements that are difficult for a young company to manage without pilot-scale facilities.”
6. Plant-based proteins can bring unwanted flavours
There is also the problem of flavour. Plant-based proteins often bring with them unwanted flavours, explains Suresh.
For example, in plant-based meat, “plant proteins can bring unwanted beany, bitter or astringent notes, while reproducing the complex savoury flavour of cooked meat requires careful formulation and processing.”
However, approaches such as fermentation, extrusion and flavour optimisation are helping to address this.
Undesirable flavours can be a problem for plant-based dairy as well, with beverages and cheese both facing obstacles in this area.
7. Achieving nutritional parity is difficult
For both plant-based meat and dairy, nutritional parity is difficult. It is also important, considering the controversy around the healthiness of these products.
For plant-based meat, elements like protein quality, micronutrient content and, depending on the ingredient, nutrient digestibility and bioavailability are crucial to get right, explains Gallani.
For plant-based dairy, says Suresh, nutritional equivalence is also important, and many plant-based drinks rely on fortification to achieve better nutritional value.
What has plant-based got right?
Despite these remaining challenges, there has already been substantial progress in plant-based meat and dairy, although many have been mitigated rather than solved outright.
Advances in protein structuring and extrusion for plant-based meat have enabled fibrous textures to be more convincing, explains Suresh. Research and innovation have also helped improve meat-like flavour and colour, and reduce undesirable flavours.
For plant-based dairy, improvements in emulsion and suspension stability, fermentation, homogenisation, and fortification have improved nutrition, consistency and sensory quality. New technologies, such as high-pressure and ultrasound-based approaches, are being explored.
Furthermore, the infrastructure is better. From a ProVeg Incubator perspective, says Suresh, “functional ingredient systems, flavour-masking solutions and contract manufacturers willing to run plant-based lines are all far more accessible than they were five years ago.”
Start-ups now spend less time building capability, and more time on differentiation.
Plant-based has come a long way in recent years. Yet formulation challenges remain, and plant-based companies must be willing to grapple with them if they are to increase appeal to consumers.
