It looks like meat, it smells like meat, it cooks like meat and it bleeds like meat, but this burger is entirely plant-based.

Plant-based meat alternatives have long been regarded as the realm of vegans, devoid of the primal satisfaction that can only be found in meat.

But technology companies across the world are scrambling to change this, investing millions in start-ups that claim to be able to make plant-based alternatives that are healthier, more sustainable and better for the environment.

One of the leading companies, Beyond Meat, already has products on the market and has received backing from Bill Gates, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, and the venture capital firm behind Google and Amazon, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

Companies making this kind of highly-scientific meat alternative boast that "almost no-one can tell the difference" between their product and the animal-based real thing.

Chilean company, The Not Company, is set to begin releasing its products in four major supermarket chains in Chile on July 15.

"The company is The Not Company because we are actually not a company, we are a movement," co-founder Matias Muchnick said.

"There is something wrong with the food industry itself," he said.

"It is super inefficient, and the science behind the food industry itself is mainly based on how we can get better margins — by synthesising and chemically manipulating things, often losing sight that the agent that is consuming the products is a human being."

Crafting the impossible in the lab

Companies such as The Not Company are taking food production off the land and into the lab.

"When I try to tell someone who doesn't understand the science or technology at all, I say what we do is try to take ... whatever product we think is inefficient in its sources, in terms of ingredients — chemical or animal-based — and we created a computer that takes molecular X-rays of products," Mr Muchnick said.

"What the computer does is it understands the molecular composition.

"It has been trained to see which vegetables, or which plant-based ingredients, combined together can make the exact same molecular structure of the product you are trying to reproduce.

"So these are molecular copycats of animal-based products, but just using plants.

"Maybe a combination of mushrooms and pumpkin seeds and whatever can really have the same taste and texture of a chocolate..

"To the human brain that might sound really stupid and crazy, but to a computer it doesn't. It works under unbiased parameters."

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Joel Gilmore, a Brisbane-based science communicator who gives public lectures on food science, said the real problem was that meat was possibly the most complex thing we ate.

"What we are talking about when we eat, for instance, a steak, is muscle from the animal, which is made up of long bundles of protein," Dr Gilmore said.

"These proteins have fat, water, lots of different chemicals, absorb all the different sorts of flavour compounds inside the animal.

"Those hundreds of flavours compounds multiply into thousands, maybe millions of flavour compounds when you cook it.

"All these things work together to create a really distinctive texture, flavour, aroma of meat."

Dr Gilmore said recreating the complex structure of this muscle was the real challenge.

To mimic the make-up of a product like steak, its structure is isolated, then reverse-engineered using proteins, fats, amino acids and vitamins found in plants.

"What they do is they mash these [bundles] up ... stretch them out and force them out through little, tiny openings so they form spaghetti-like strands — but very small — and then twist them in together and create these long bundles of protein, which are then cut up and used to replicate what we find in meat," Dr Gilmore said.

The Not Company uses an algorithm, known as Giuseppe, to create its products. ( Facebook: The Not Company )

New way to feed the world's growing population

Impossible Foods, another start-up working in the field, is about to launch its first product, a burger patty, in select restaurants around New York City.

The California company is the brainchild of former biochemistry professor Patrick Brown, who conceived the idea while on sabbatical from Stanford University.

"We believe our plant-based meats will play a vital role in solving one of the planet's most pressing challenges: feeding a growing global population while consuming far less of the Earth's precious resources," a spokesperson from Impossible Foods said.

"A cow creates meat from plants. We're doing the same thing, but without the cow."

In addition to the burger, the company said it was developing methods that would allow it to produce plant-based alternatives for steak, bacon, fish, chicken, milk and cheese.

"Making meat and dairy products from plants is affordable and has a much lower environmental footprint compared to their conventional counterparts," the spokesperson said.

Beyond Meat's plant-based meat alternatives are already on the market and being sold across the US. ( Facebook: Beyond Meat )

According to Impossible Foods, production of their signature burger requires only one-12th of the land, one-ninth of the water, and generates one-quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions of its meat-based alternative.

The Not Company uses a receptive algorithm, named Giuseppe, to craft the most sustainable and affordable product possible.

Mr Muchnick said all foods were scored on a metric, giving penalties to ones that used a lot of resources.

"The computer is giving out formulations to replicate animal-based products, but also gives you a formulation that is sustainable," he said.

The future of food

Could plant-based alternatives actually provide a viable alternative to meat?

"For what it is worth, I think this is definitely the future of meat — whether that be in 10 years or 100 years," Dr Gilmore said.

"And I don't think it will be a matter that it will be able to make something as good as conventional meat.

"I think this sort of technology will be able to produce something better."

Mr Muchnick said, "Will plant-based things become the new normal? Totally."