Alt-Steak is a plant-based product, which will undergo market testing at select high-end restaurants later this year.
Israeli startup Redefine Meathas served up the world's first 3D printed vegan steak. Alt-Steak is a plant-based product, which will undergo market testing at select high-end restaurants later this year.
Created using Redefine Meat's patent-pending 3D meat printing technology, the company's Alt-Steak products have the texture, flavor and appearance of beef steak and can be produced in the volume and cost to enable large-scale market launch.
Last September, Redefine Meat completed a $6 million seed round led by CPT Capital and with the participation of Hanaco Ventures, PHW Group Germany's largest poultry company, and leading Israeli angel investors. The company hopes to benefit from the worldwide popularity of plant-based meat products led by companies like Beyond Meat.
Working with leading butchers, chefs, food technologists and the close collaboration of taste expert, Givaudan, Redefine Meat has digitally mapped more than 70 sensorial parameters into its Alt-Steak products, including premium beef cuts' texture, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel. Layer by layer, the company's proprietary industrial-scale 3D food printers create the Alt-Steak products using Redefine Meat's Alt-Muscle, Alt-Fat, and Alt-Blood plant-based formulations. By printing with multiple materials, Redefine Meat can create sustainable, high-protein, no-cholesterol steaks that look, cook, and taste like beef.
Redefine Meat cofounder and CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit said, "Since day one of the company, we have been working on creating a tasty and affordable plant-based alternative to steaks, one of the most cherished food products and the driver of the entire meat industry. To enable mass adoption, we knew that creating an alternative meat product that was both high in quality and nutritional composition would require new technologies and production processes never seen before in the food industry. Today's announcement marks the start of a new era in alternative meat - the Alt-Steak era - driven by production processes that will accelerate the development of a wide range of alt-meat whole muscle products and create a sustainable alternative to raising and eating animals."
With feedback from high-level chefs and butchers, the company will then ramp up production of its 3D meat printers and alt-meat formulations ahead of market distribution in 2021.