As the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest progresses, global climate tipping points loom. The primary culprit is a massive global food system of livestock production requiring endless expansion of soy farming to feed animals destined for slaughter. At a recent conservation summit that I attended focusing on this crisis, one stark reality became clear. Our world urgently needs a strategy for large-scale meat reduction and we don’t yet have one.
There are a handful of ways to reduce meat consumption in addition to eating traditional plant-based proteins like beans. The alternative protein sector offers promising solutions. Plant-based meats have advanced with various options and better texture and taste. Cultivated meat continues to progress toward market viability. However, despite these innovations, alternative proteins represent only 0.5% of global animal meat production.1 The health of our planet depends on meat alternatives to deliver crucial carbon reductions. The IP, innovation and know-how exist today, and the market is clamoring for accessibility. The question is, knowing this, why aren’t we scaling this solution beyond 0.5%?
The Production Challenge
The longer I serve as both a builder and observer in the alt meat industry, the clearer it becomes that production technology and optimization — separate from product development or ingredient innovation — is the primary force determining whether alternative proteins can replace conventional meat at scale.
I often ponder why a single leg of the product lifecycle disproportionately impacts the outcome of global meat replacement efforts. Many delicious products have entered the market, achieving remarkable success in their niche. For nearly a decade, one glaring critique has gone unaddressed by alt meat: price parity. We need alt-meat products to compete with the 700 billion lb. per year edge of low-cost, automated animal meat production. I’m confident the answer isn’t marketing or consumer acceptance. It’s production efficacy.
Scaling a Solution
As the environmental movement comes to embrace, and even depend on, the carbon reduction impacts from meat replacements, we need to understand that the effect only comes with the scale of that solution. How do we get there for alt meat?
We need to understand the production roadblocks critically and not just quantitatively. It’s easy to say, “our costs will come down when we scale,” but doing that in the real world requires a whole different vocabulary. In fact, there are just a handful of companies that have scaled production of plant-based meat, but not reliably at COGS on par with animal meat.
For the last eight years, our engineering team at Rebellyous Foods has been breaking down the steps of plant-based meat production and understanding how it needs to be changed to achieve quality at scale and price parity. The first epiphany was to see that current methods did not scale, understand why and find new methods that would scale.
The Role of Physics Making Price Parity So Elusive
Fundamental physics is why most plant-based meat production doesn’t scale. In conventional plant-based meat production, as volumes increase, forces of gravity and shear intensify, generating more heat, ultimately ruining the processes. We tolerate these impacts because changing methods and equipment is difficult and often requires capital investment. From designing new equipment to deploying such equipment in the real world, plant-based meat production is an insular industry ripe for change, but seemingly not ready for it.
In alt meat, the manufacturing methods are as diverse as the products, although mix-and-form and high moisture extrusion dominate for products in the market today. Current production tools for these manufacturing methods have been common across food industry production facilities for 70 years, yet minimal design adaptations have been made to focus on alt-meat production — with a few concentrated exceptions for high moisture extrusion. Without optimized equipment, small manufacturing issues become big as you scale, and as a result, small losses scale to big losses in production and lead to higher cost products instead of lower cost ones.
Quality at Scale: The Entropy Dilemma
“Quality at scale” comes from a fundamental understanding of entropy – the level of disorder in a system – in production, and I would contend that real-world minimization of entropy also applies to facility operations as well.
Entropy manifests in production as unwanted energy waste, heat generation, waste streams, material transfer or anything in production that must be undone or compensated for by bringing more energy into the system to finally reach a finished product.
Disorder is inherent in all systems, but scaling a loss-generating system only amplifies those losses. If these losses are low or even just cheap to tolerate, they are seen as acceptable. However, disorder becomes unacceptable at scale as it results in poor quality products, safety issues, equipment breakdowns or instability in quality control – and of course, costs more to produce. Redesigning to minimize entropy requires an out-of-the-box approach to think about where the entropy is occurring and designing to avoid it.
As an example, plant-based meat has been produced in batch processes since the 1900s but continuous production minimizes entropy – the work-heat entropy, waste entropy (physical losses) and the equipment wear/tear entropy (machine breakdown). In many cases, entropy results in direct increases to COGS and at times, it causes indirect increases to COGS, such as intermittent poor-quality products that result in losses in customer confidence and lower sales.
A Path Forward for Low-Entropy Production
After years of engineering innovation, I’ve developed a four-part playbook for designing production systems that can achieve price parity and quality at scale through entropy reduction:
1. Simplify: Get to the essence of the process. Eliminate extraneous equipment or steps, combine duplicative processes and continuously ask “What is wasteful?” Do you have two pieces of the same equipment doing the same thing in different locations? Are two ingredients seeing the same processing in different steps? Redesign to simplify, removing opportunities for disorder to occur in the system.
2. Optimize: Reduce energy requirements, processing time, surface area, equipment size and electrical connections for the same functionality. True optimization is rethinking how functions are performed and the associated costs.
3. Shrink: Make equipment smaller, cabinets smaller, wiring smaller and equipment lighter. Question where systems are overdesigned or too heavy. The functionality-to-volume, to-weight and to-surface ratio is critical to minimize entropy.
4. Scale or Twin: Determine whether doubling equipment versus making it larger creates more value. Physics often dictates that twinning smaller, optimized systems maintains better surface-to-area ratios rather than scaling up a single system – a different approach that challenges conventional high-volume manufacturing.
The Human Role in Alt-Meat Evolution
Finally, even with these tough engineering and operational design challenges, the lowest entropy system still has to be operated by real people.
Operators are the final challenge in a technology transition, and they won’t use it if they don’t want to. Perhaps it’s seen as a threat. Lower cost may mean lower wages, or learning a new system may be objectionable. Whatever the reason, people won’t change if they don’t have to. Determine what’s needed to secure human adoption.
Moving the Path Forward
In a world that desperately needs to replace meat on a large scale, alternative proteins can replace conventional meat at a meaningful scale, but only if we confront the production entropy challenge head-on. My liberal application of the concept of entropy as an explanation extends here as well.
Production is the “whole game” because it is the most prone to disorder. Production has a strong inherent bias for accelerated entropy. Bringing order to the disorder through a redesign of process, equipment and facilities takes time, patience, capital and a lot of persistence, but minimizing entropy enables price parity and quality at scale.
Saving the Amazon and addressing climate change through food system transformation isn’t just about creating better products; it’s about creating fundamentally better production systems to make those products affordable and accessible to everyone. Production isn’t just part of the game — it is the game.
1 Based on a calculation. Roots Analysis reports $17 billion per year in global plant-based meat sales in 2024. At an estimated average price of $4 per pound, then the global production volume of plant-based meat is 4.25 billion lbs. per year. Statista reports global meat production is 350 million metric tons (772.65 billion lbs.) per year. Global plant-based meat (4.25 billion lbs.) divided by animal-based meat (772.65 billion lbs.) equals 0.5%.
