“Not that long ago, electrical cars were considered nonperformers, and when Prius came out, a lot of people didn’t think there was a market for it,” said Yves Potvin, founder and chief executive of Gardein Protein International, which makes the Gardein line of meatless products. “Now people are willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla, and more than one million Prius cars are sold each year.”

MorningStar Farms accounts for more than 60 percent of the market, according to Mintel, while new competitors like Beyond Meat and Hampton Creek have sprung up in the last five years. Gardein, founded a little more than five years ago, is the granddaddy of new companies making meat substitutes. Its products, sold by conventional retailers like H-E-B and Target as well as specialty groceries, include “chicken” wings, “fish” fillets, “beef” tips and breakfast patties.

“The category was stuck between the bun for many years,” Mr. Potvin said. “We came along and developed a new process that creates fibers that are very meaty from a plant base, and now we’re in 20,000 supermarkets and responsible for 75 percent of the category growth year over year.”

Creating from plant proteins something that will pass as meat is complicated. Companies must first identify the right plant and extract its proteins, then figure out how to reassemble them to taste like meat and develop the technology to do it.

Hampton Creek Foods, a start-up working to develop egg substitutes from plant proteins, tested thousands of varieties of Canadian yellow peas before it identified what would mimic the functions of eggs, including emulsification.

The goal? A mayonnaise that was nutritionally equivalent to one made with eggs.

The company tested 2,200 prototypes before landing on Just Mayo, the plant-based protein now sold in some 70 Whole Foods stores and arriving in Safeway and Costco stores.

Beyond Meat’s proteins come from yellow peas, mustard seeds and camelina, among other plants, and yeast. The company had a three-year setback when it decided to remove an artificial sulfide and had to find a natural substitute.