Mar 25, 2025

To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How This was the second time the organization has conducted blind taste tests with plant-based protein brands. For this round, Nectar solicited more than 2,000 participants who said they eat certain meat products at least once every month or two. They selected 122 vegan products designed to look and taste like real meat across 14 categories — including breakfast sausage, meatballs, pulled pork, and steak — and prepared them alongside their animal-based counterparts. (Participants weren’t told which products were vegan and which contained meat.) The testing was conducted in New York City and San Francisco restaurants instead of sterile white rooms because Cotto wanted to replicate a familiar environment. Nectar also plated the products in conventional ways — hot dogs in buns, pulled pork in sandwich form — instead of presenting each food item in its “naked” form. If participants were testing, say, hot dogs, they could add condiments — as long as they applied the same condiments to every hot dog they tried. Nectar found that 20 plant-based products were rated the same or better than their animal counterparts in terms of overall liking by at least 50 percent of participants. These included five unbreaded vegan chicken fillets, five vegan burgers, and two vegan chicken nugget brands. Four of those products performed so well they almost reached taste parity, which Nectar defines as there being no statistically significant difference in how participants scored the vegan product versus the animal one in terms of overall liking. Those four are Impossible Foods’ unbreaded chicken breast, chicken nuggets, and burger, as well as Morningstar Farms’ nuggets. The results show that the plant-based chicken products are leading the industry in terms of closing the flavor gap, said Cotto. It might help that chicken breast is essentially a blank canvas. “From a flavor perspective, I think chicken has a more subtle flavor that’s actually easier to replicate,” she added. Vegan chicken cutlet samples served at an awards ceremony for the winners of Nectar’s taste tests — products that received the same or better score as their animal counterparts from at least half of the participants. Nectar The plant-based products that Nectar found most need to improve on taste — such as bacon — are some of the hardest cuts of meat to imitate. Unlike chicken fillets, chicken nuggets, or burgers, strips of bacon are not generally homogenous in texture and flavor. Mimicking fatty parts of bacon as well as the striated meat is extremely challenging to do with just plants. Sewell, from the Good Food Institute, said additional research and development could help. “Continued investment in alternative protein R&D is essential to accelerating innovation and ensuring these products deliver on flavor and affordability for consumers,” she told Grist. Of course, there’s a difference between liking a vegan product in a taste test and actually choosing to buy it in a grocery store, when there aren’t any researchers around. “Even if taste and price parity are achieved, it’s not a surefire” guarantee that people will choose, say, vegan hot dogs and burgers over the beef kind, said Cotto. In the United States, meat is tied up with national identity and masculinity ; it won’t be so easy to win every type of consumer over. Still, Derrick, who wasn’t involved in Nectar’s study, says that younger consumers “absolutely” do not want to feel like they’re compromising on taste at the grocery store — and that research like Cotto’s will help brands figure out how to satisfy them. “I think that blind testing is objectively done as the best way to” improve plant-based products, said Derrick. More testing would provide “a road map of what’s possible, what’s better.” Next Story