In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge set up a six-foot folding table in the cafeteria of Cane Bay High School in Summerville, South Carolina, to conduct a taste test. When the first rush of about 150 hungry students hit, he was waiting with slow cookers filled with steaming marinara sauce and meatballs.
Kids love a taste test, but they’re also discerning, and Dodge wasn’t sure what they would make of his product, a blend featuring both meat and mushrooms. As students swarmed the table and tapped out their opinions on an iPad or scanned a QR code to use their phones, Dodge asked those who lingered to guess what kind of vegetable might have been mixed into the meat. Few of them could—the meatballs had tasted like moist, flavorful beef.
The school enrolls a few thousand students, and Dodge estimates that the majority of them came by. In the end, the survey showed that 92% of those who tried the meatballs wanted them on the menu; they easily cleared the bar to be added for the 2026–2027 school year. Comments described their flavor as “bussin’.”
Through his consulting company, K–12 Food Solutions, Dodge was testing a new product called 50/Cut from the company Joyn. The proprietary blend of seemingly simple ingredients—available as meatballs, burgers, and ground meat—could help solve one of the most intractable challenges of the climate crisis, at least on the individual level: getting people to eat less meat, particularly beef.
Livestock production accounts for somewhere 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. 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.
Unlike other polluting sectors, such as electricity and transportation, cattle farming has little potential for a big fix. Ruminants produce about 30% of the methane associated with human activity, and this gas has 28 times more global-warming potential than carbon dioxide. What’s more, it would be virtually impossible to raise them in a perfectly climate-neutral manner. “We don’t have a technical solution to change the stomach of a ruminant,” says Fredrik Hedenus, a professor in sustainability and systems analysis at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Technologies to dampen the impact of their burps have been in the works for a while but have yet to scale. They also 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 around the world.
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, Hedenus says. 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.
He’s far from alone in his conclusions: 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. People have to eat less beef. “Essentially, you need a culture shift,” Hedenus says.
Yet the culture has proved intractable. Not only do people like the taste of meat, but across most of the world, meat-eating tends to be associated with status. As societies have grown wealthier, it has increased. 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.
What could move the needle is a carbon-light and delicious meat replacement. But from a food-tech standpoint, all we have to show is a menu of mostly failed solutions. Lab-grown meat has generated endless headlines since the 2000s but has yet to become commercially available (and affordable) at scale. And while breakthroughs in taste and texture inched plant-based meats from companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat toward mass adoption, the hype—and the appetite—has somewhat fizzled.
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So instead of asking people to change their preferences, startups like Joyn are trying a different tack. They’re creating what are broadly referred to as blended meat products, which combine plant proteins with the real deal. The logic: The best meat replacement is … better meat.
Paul Shapiro, cofounder of the startup BMC Ingredients, which markets a plant protein related to mushrooms, says the math is easy to understand: If we imagine that Impossible Whoppers at Burger King account for about 2% of sales, that’s only a 2% reduction in meat. But if a conventional Whopper were 20% plants, that would be a 20% cut right off the bat.
Those aren’t quite the numbers climate models are calling for, but some estimates say they could lead to outsized gains relative to the status quo: A 2022 study in Nature found that replacing 20% of beef globally could halve the annual rate of deforestation. And unlike the other solutions tried thus far, this particular Hail Mary is one a lot of omnivores seem open to giving a try.
The idea of blending meat and vegetables together is, of course, nothing new. Food cultures from around the world boast an array of dishes that combine small amounts of meat with plants. Today, home cooks still add veggies and legumes to dishes to stretch tight grocery budgets or to sneak extra greenery into their children’s supper.
But in the mid to late 2010s, however, the focus was largely on companies that appeared to have cracked the code for ditching meat entirely. When Impossible debuted its namesake burger in 2016, it impressed with an ingredient called heme, an iron-rich molecule in the protein soy leghemoglobin that allowed all-plant burgers to “bleed” like beef.
Impossible and its biggest competitor, Beyond, swaggered through the media and the markets. In 2019, Impossible’s founder told the New Yorker he intended to wipe out all animal agriculture by 2035. Beyond’s 2019 IPO was the most successful since the 2008 financial crisis. A flood of imitators followed.
But within a few years, tastes shifted. In 2023, Impossible employees’ stock values tumbled 89% from a 2021 high. That same year, Beyond laid off 20% of its staff, and a bruising Businessweek feature labeled the entire sector a fad. Sales have been slipping for years, with a 10% year-over-year drop in 2025, according to the Good Food Institute, a think tank focused on alternative proteins.
Any quest to wipe out animal agriculture could now seem farcical. In 2025, Americans downed $45 billion worth of beef.
Several factors were likely at play. Megan Krogius, a spokesperson for Impossible Foods, says the dip is a “correction not a crisis” after “an outsized pop in demand” between 2020 and 2022. She also says that a flurry of plant-based products muddied the category’s reputation. Indeed, some disruptors (and their imitators) have struggled to compete on the sensory level. Nectar, an organization that conducts research on meat alternatives, has found that taste and texture are among the major factors that keep people from adopting plant-based meats. “Our consumers identify products as having bad aftertaste and off flavors five to six times more than in animal counterparts,” says Caroline Cotto, the group’s director.
At the same time, discourse around processed foods tarnished plant-based meat’s halo. In 2019, the Center for Consumer Freedom, a since-dissolved lobbying group backed by the meat industry, launched an ad campaign against plant-based alternatives, demonizing them as “ultra-processed imitations.”
While Impossible’s Krogius warns against conflating processed food with junk food (she points, for example, to a study in The Lancet finding mock meat to be nutritionally preferable to red meat), some of the bad press stuck. Now, the term “ultra-processed” has become something of a political cudgel—one wielded by the meat-loving MAHA movement and the US secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In 2025, he flipped the food pyramid and stacked a steak on top.
Any quest to wipe out animal agriculture could now seem farcical. In 2025, Americans downed $45 billion worth of beef, and consumption rose by 4.3% over the previous year, according to an industry report. Rising prices could be slowing this down a bit, but cost can dampen only so much demand.
Blended meat, which has meat’s own juiciness and texture, rose alongside the plant-based superstars, but it did not get New Yorker profiles or headlining IPOs. At the height of mock-meat hype, companies like Tyson and Perdue launched blended products, and firms working on lab-grown meat explored cutting their products with plants.
The big advantage of blended meat is that large numbers of consumers—what some call “flexitarians”—are curious about it, and when they try it, they like it. A blind taste test co-funded by the USDA in 2022 showed that diners preferred blended burgers to fully plant-based ones. And a report from the major food processor ADM found that large proportions of every generation of Americans were interested in trying blended meats, including 75% of millennials. “This is a solution that we can do today, that consumers will accept today,” says Tim Dale, a director at Food Systems Innovations, the nonprofit group that oversees Nectar.
At this point, even Impossible has acknowledged the potential. In a wide-ranging interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2025, the company’s former CEO Peter McGuinness admitted the brand’s struggle to win over consumers, and suggested a hybrid burger could bridge the divide.
Plenty of newcomers are entering the fray. “Shiitake-infused beef burgers” from Australia-based Fable Foods are in restaurants and moving “incredibly well” at the high-end grocery store Central Market in Austin, Texas, says CEO Michael Fox. The Both Burger from Los Angeles–based 50/50 Foods is available in a smattering of California stores and eateries. And Spare Food in New York signed a deal with Premier, one of the nation’s biggest spenders in the health-care sector, for its blend of surplus produce and ground beef.
One major insight for all these upstarts is that consumers react best when marketing focuses on pleasure, not environmental virtues or health benefits. Though many companies actually create a burger or meatball with a better nutritional profile (fiber!) and fewer of meat’s downsides, like saturated fat, that doesn’t get people to buy it. They like that it tastes good. Beef and mushrooms, for example, contain complementary flavor compounds, including the glutamates that yield deep umami, which is why they’re so often paired in dishes like beef Wellington and stroganoff.
Food-production companies are a big target. BMC Ingredients, which collaborated with Perdue on a line of blended nuggets, markets a plant-based protein that can be mixed with meat to up its nutrition and flavor. BMC grows mycelium—the root-like structures of fungi. It underpins popular meat alternatives like Quorn and also features alongside mushrooms in Joyn’s 50/Cut. Shapiro likens his factory to a brewery, but instead of yeast fermenting barley, a fungus called Neurospora crassa digests starch to produce a protein with a dense network of fibers that makes for a meat-like chew. “We grow four hours before we get a harvest,” Shapiro says. “It’s among the most efficient ways to produce protein on Earth.”
Joyn also sees its path forward outside the grocery store. Food eaten away from home accounts for more than half of what US consumers spend on grub, according to the USDA. Padraic Doherty, who joined Joyn from the meat distributor D’Artagnan and holds the title of chief growth officer, says its main areas of focus are K–12 and college cafeterias and other major food service providers, like stadiums. These organizations, he says, often have sustainability goals and also are pressured to find both nutritious and affordable options. The 50/Cut Joyn sells to cafeterias is between 5% and 15% cheaper than beef.
But can cafeteria mushroom burgers prompt a larger cultural shift?
The folks touting the idea of going halfway see it as a bridge. BMC’s Shapiro thinks the movement toward meat-light eating reflects the reality of how these changes happen. Nectar’s Cotto compares blended meat to a hybrid car. “Moving people toward blended products [is] a way to drive demand for some of the fully plant-based ingredients that don’t scale right now to bring the price down,” she says. “So it’s both a short- and a long-term approach.”
Not everyone is so sure market forces will be enough, though. Nil Zacharias, a longtime entrepreneur in food sustainability who offers plant-based options to New York City delis through his company Plantega, isn’t sold on the notion. “Too many people in the space believe that as long as we create meat that is not from an animal but tastes like meat and costs the same, people will eat it,” he says. “I think the plant-based backlash to ultraprocessed foods shows you that’s not necessarily how things are going to go.” He believes blended meat’s main impact will be on institutional dining, in places like schools and health-care facilities.
“People in this space believe that as long as we create meat that is not from an animal but tastes like meat, people will eat it.”
Nil Zacharias, founder and CEO, Plantega
Meat hybrids could, however, taste just familiar enough to open consumers’ minds to alternatives. Some research has found that thinking about mock meats prompts people to reconsider the whole system. In the 2010s, Clemens Driessen, a cultural geographer who teaches at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, worked on a project that asked people in pubs, supermarkets, and other public spaces what they thought of lab-grown meat. “There’s a first response, which is ‘Oh, that sounds horrible,’” Driessen says. Then people tended to reflect that the meat they consume is also heavily industrialized. “A whole train of thought emerges out of proposing something very new,” he says.
If the category succeeds, climate advocates will need to make peace with imperfection. A life-cycle analysis Joyn commissioned on the 50/Cut burger confirms that the product has half the greenhouse-gas footprint of a beef patty, which—if you go by company claims—means it has about five times the impact of a burger from Impossible or Beyond. Hedenus, the climate scientist, says that even if blended products don’t reduce impact as much as plant-based ones, he’s all for trying any solution that works. “It is very difficult to change how we eat, so I think most good suggestions should be explored,” he says.
Meanwhile, the products are finding their way to more plates. They’re in cafeterias, high-end grocery stores, and small burger chains. They’re in the catalogues of major distributors like Sysco. The Both Burger has even been at Disneyland.
The 50/Cut meatball is on the menu this school year in seven states. At Cane Bay High it’ll take the form of a sub. The school is buying 200 cases at a time, with 150 meatballs in a case. Jason Ciaccia, the systems specialist for child nutrition in the school district, says he won’t be using the word “mushroom” to describe it. “If they hear ‘mushroom,’ they’re going to skip over it,” he says.
He is, however, considering his branding. He’s asked AI to help him come up with something fun. He thinks “Marvelous Meatball Sub” has a nice ring.
Meghan McCarron is a food and culture journalist based in Los Angeles.
