

A Beyond Burger patty contains 20 grams of vegetable protein, mostly from peas, while lacking gluten and soy. If you prick a Beyond Burger, does it bleed? Yes, the company says, though its blood is pulverized beet juice. Beyond Meat took a completionist approach to its hamburger doppelganger: The Beyond Burger had to look, smell and feel like meat.



This was no easy task. Animal meat is not a uniform product, but plants, on the other hand, don't come marbled with fat or sprout gristly connective tissues. (Even lab-grown beef patties, a different beast from Beyond Meat's burger, have struggled to mirror the heterogeneous chow you'd buy from a butcher.) It was up to researchers like Stanford University structural biologist Joseph D. Puglisi, a scientific adviser to Beyond Meat, to devise a way to deposit plant fat in layers. "We were able to get fat distributed throughout a patty — but in meat, fat is distributed in sheets," he told The New York Times.



Beyond Meat's ability to replicate meaty layers out of plant matter is among the company's greatest trade secrets — what puts it in a different category, perhaps, than the long line of faux meats that have come before. Biz Stone, one of Twitter's founders and a Beyond Meat backer, described the company's fake chicken to Fast Company as having a meaty mouth feel. "It feels fatty and muscly and like it's not good for you when you're chewing it," Stone said in 2012. "For a long-time vegan, it's a little bit freaky."