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I am sitting in a Manhattan restaurant on a frigid Thursday in January, eating six mini servings of steak and mashed potatoes, one after another. The first steak I am served has a nice texture but is sort of unnaturally reddish. The second has a great crispy sear on the outside, but leaves behind a lingering chemical aftertaste. The next is fine on its own, but I imagine would be quite delicious shredded, drenched in barbecue sauce and served on a bun with vinegary pickles and a side of slaw.
If you peeked into this restaurant, you’d see nothing out of the ordinary – just a diverse range of New Yorkers huddled over plates of food. But everyone present is here for more than just a hot meal. We’re participating in a blind taste test of plant- (or sometimes mushroom-) based steaks, organized by a group of people who hope that better-tasting meat alternatives just might be a key to fighting the climate crisis.
“We’re looking at food as a key driver of decarbonization,” said Caroline Cotto, director of Nectar, the group behind the taste test. “Taste is the largest primary purchase criteria for consumers, and for these products to gain mainstream adoption, they have to taste good.” But in the past, she admitted, a lot of plant-based meats “have not met consumers’ expectations”.
She and her colleagues are on a mission to change that, in part by revolutionizing the way that plant-based meat companies taste-test their food. Nectar isn’t affiliated with any specific plant-based meat company; it is an initiative of the climate philanthropy group Food System Innovations (FSI), and it exists to help speed up the world’s transition away from animal products by making meat alternatives like veggie burgers and mushroom steaks taste better. Nectar does not necessarily care which plant-based meat company “wins” the market, so long as there are plant-based winners on the market, period.
The group does that in part through taste tests like the one I am participating in. These trials stand out in that they mimic people’s actual eating experiences far better than the industry standard: rather than being conducted in sterile, lab-like environments, Nectar conducts its tests in real restaurants, where the products are cooked by food service staff on standard food service equipment such as flat-top grills. And where many companies taste-test their products by serving them solo (think a single meatball on a toothpick), Nectar presents the product being tested in a format more similar to how it’s likely to be eaten by consumers (think meatballs served in tomato sauce over spaghetti).
Nectar also uses a demographically diverse cross-section of everyday people, rather than taste-testing professionals, to try and get a sense for how the general public would respond to a product. The group screens participants to ensure that the person testing a plant-based steak eats real animal meat steak often enough that they have a baseline of comparison.
“We don’t want these products to just taste good to people that don’t eat meat. We want them to taste good to people that are eating meat multiple times a week. We want this to be as representative of a general population consumer as possible, because the vegan market is very small,” she said.
Nectar’s approach has rendered some interesting takeaways: in a blind taste test, omnivores actually preferred the leading plant-based nugget over animal-based chicken nuggets. Vegan hot dogs are pretty universally disliked. Burgers made of real meat blended with mushrooms actually perform better in taste tests than burgers made from 100% beef.
This seemingly humble mission to make tastier food has nothing less than planetary ambitions at its heart: “If we’re going to make a dent on climate change,” Cotto said, “we need to capture that mainstream audience.”
Animal agriculture takes a serious and demonstrable toll on the environment, especially in the form of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. An estimated 14% of global emissions come from animal agriculture, according to Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, with big ruminants like cattle being some of the worst climate offenders.
“This is the wild card that will make or break climate change – food. It’s gonna be a long fight against fossil fuels, but renewable energy is better and cheaper and faster; it’s going to win at some point,” he said. “But I don’t know if a climate-friendly food system is going to win or not.”
Unlike energy or transportation, where decarbonization is happening, however slowly, food is a rare sector where “we’re making almost no progress at all”, Foley said. He blames that in part on the powerful food industry, which regularly spends more money lobbying the US government than big oil or the defense industry does, according to a 2024 report from the Union of Concerned Scientists. In other words, there’s a whole web of money and politics that shapes what we eat, as much as we’d like to think we’re buying groceries based simply on our personal preferences and budget.
Still, some experts think that having more and better plant-based protein options could help smooth the transition away from excessive meat consumption, even if it’s not a silver bullet.
To do that, Cotto would argue, you have to make the alternatives taste good. She’s not alone in thinking so: the Plant Based Foods Institute published a study in 2024 that found that people who used to buy more plant-based products in the past than they do now named flavor as “the most important attribute driving their decision to decrease their purchase of plant-based foods”.
That tracks with the conclusions that Holly Wang, an agricultural, food and resource economics professor at Michigan State University, has come to by studying other kinds of plant-based foods. She points to the rise of plant-based dairy substitutes – think vegetable oil-based butter, coconut milk ice-cream, or oat, almond and soy milks – as an example of food categories where plant-based alternatives do seem to have displaced at least some consumption of animal products.
“Among these categories [of plant-based food replacements], we see that the relatively more successful category is milk,” she said. “It’s getting accepted by even the non-vegetarian.” That’s in part, she posited, because “the texture of almond milk, for example, is so close to the texture of traditional milk”.
When choosing a plant-based option over an animal product doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, in other words, people are more likely to choose it.
Cotto likes to joke that she was destined to work in food: she grew up in a town called Sandwich, her last name means “cooked” in Italian, and her parents own an ice-cream store called Sweet Caroline that they named after her.
Her early career journey wound through an internship at the White House with Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” public health campaign, a Fulbright fellowship in Taiwan and a UN World Food Programme job in Cambodia, among other roles. She went on to co-found a brand called Renewal Mill that upcycles the byproducts of food manufacturing – the brand turns the pulp leftover from oat milk into oat flour, for example – into things like gluten-free cookie and brownie mixes. That innovation earned her a spot on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list.
Cotto isn’t vegan or vegetarian – she describes herself as a flexitarian, and doesn’t seem interested in shaming people for eating meat or dairy. But as her career progressed, and she learned about the role that animal agriculture plays in accelerating the climate crisis, she felt she had to do something about it.
“It became increasingly imperative for me to focus my energy on how we can decarbonize the food system,” she said. “Because it’s a huge lever, and it’s grossly underfunded and overlooked in the larger climate conversation.”
As a former food startup founder herself, Cotto understands just how much the funding piece matters. The role Nectar plays as a third-party taste tester that offers some of its data for free, and the rest of it for 75% less than what it would cost otherwise, is a huge boon to the businesses in the space, which are mostly startups that are often strapped for cash. Many of these companies are weathering a “nuclear winter” landscape for funding after overvaluations and hype in 2020 and 2021 resulted in an influx of funding that was followed by a spectacular crash.
“There was a big bubble in the sector,” explained Rosie Wardle, a partner and co-founder at Synthesis Capital. Wardle was an early investor in Beyond Meat, one of the best-established names in the plant-based meat category. She believes in the category’s potential – but says that companies need to prove that they can deliver on taste and price.
“Within the investment community right now, there is still quite a lot of negative sentiment around alternative proteins … because a lot of investors have been burned by investing in companies that really didn’t have what it takes,” she said. “The problem of the last couple of years is that consumers’ expectations just weren’t being met from a taste and overall eating experience perspective.”
Cotto hopes that Nectar can be “radically helpful” in this regard by giving businesses detailed feedback about how people perceive the flavor, texture, appearance and other aspects of their food. In the months since Nectar put out its first report last summer, companies have already begun using Nectar’s data to shape their products.
Umaro Foods, co-founded by Beth Zotter, is one such company. Umaro’s vegan “bacon” made from seaweed, chickpeas and coconut oil had already raised funding via a successful bid on Shark Tank, is sold on Amazon and in Whole Foods in California, and has plans to expand to grocery stores in the north-east in the next few months. The company is, by many measures, doing far better than many of its plant-based protein peers.
But when Umaro received feedback from Nectar that consumers found their product too salty and not smoky enough, it was like a “kick in the pants” to keep improving rather than resting on its laurels, Zotter, who’s also the company’s CEO, said. The company tweaked the formulation of its product in response, and that new version of the bacon is what you’ll get if you buy Umaro today. “Nectar has been invaluable to us,” Zotter said.
Other companies have found Nectar’s taste-testing feedback useful in different ways. Michael Fox is the co-founder and CEO of Fable Food Co, which makes meat substitutes mostly from shiitake mushrooms that it sells primarily to restaurants and food service clients, which turn Fable’s product into meals like mushroom tacos.
Fable’s blended burger – which combines mushrooms with animal meat – outperformed pure animal-meat burgers in Nectar’s recent taste-test report, which gave Fable a boost in its ability to sell chefs and restaurant owners on using Fable products.
“When an independent organization like Nectar can show that, in a blind taste test, consumers prefer our product to 100% beef in a statistically significant way,” said Fox, “that just makes it so much easier for us to take that to potential customers.”
How likely is it that a rise in plant-based meats will really make a dent in the amount of animal meat people are consuming? There’s not much consensus: advocacy organizations like the Plant Based Foods Institute have published research that seems to indicate that at least some segments of shoppers who increase their plant-based alternative purchases do buy fewer animal products, but experts like Foley and Wang say they haven’t seen much peer-reviewed data that’s conclusive either way.
Cotto said that reviewing various studies has led many in the plant-based space to believe that there’s about a 25% substitution rate for plant-based alternatives displacing animal products, but admits that substitution remains “tricky to pin down since price is still not at parity” between meat and meat substitutes.
Still, she’s convinced enough that she’s going to keep doing what she can to help companies make better-tasting vegan bacon and hot dogs, even if she can’t conclusively prove that it will mean fewer methane-burping cows roaming the earth.
“Our large goal is not necessarily 100% replacement of meat,” she said. “But any reduction is a positive thing for the climate. We’re hoping that if we can really make the taste as good as or better than meat, that will make it easy for consumers.”
Back at the Orion Grill in Manhattan, the stranger sitting across from me motioned for one of the people helping run the study. She, like everyone else in the room, had been selected because she self-identified as someone who eats beef steak at least every one or two months. She had just finished trying her fourth plant- or mushroom-based steak.
“Are you able to tell me the brands of any of what I just ate?” she asked. When the study staff member explained that he wasn’t allowed to disclose the brand names, she nodded, looking a little disappointed.
As he walked away, she looked across at me. “I just wanted to know because I would’ve looked out for some of these at the grocery store later,” she said.
