Guess What’s Printing for Dinner? Israeli Veggie Steak!

Tel Aviv startup unveils its new ‘Alt-Steak’ technology for creating a healthy, sustainable plant-based steak that tastes like the real thing but is made with a 3D printer.

By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel

Israelis are big on vegetarian food, and one company of meat-lovers with a conscience and a great concept have developed a vegetarian steak that not only tastes like the real thing but is made by a 3D-printer.

Located in the Rehovot high-tech industrial park just south of Tel Aviv, the company Redefine Meat says their “Alt-Steak” plant-based products will begin market testing at selected high-end restaurants later this year. It’s not just a veggie steak, the company has filed a patent application for the technology used to make the artificial meat products that have the texture, flavor and appearance of beef steak and can be produced in the volume and cost to enable large-scale market launch.

“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,” said company co-founder and CEO Eshchar Ben-Shitrit.

Ben-Shitrit said the team behind the idea knew that to enable mass adoption, they had to create an alternative meat product that was both high in quality and nutritional composition. To do so would require new technologies and production processes never seen before in the food industry.

Redefine Meat says their product is ushering in a new era in alternative meat – the Alt-Steak era – that will “create a sustainable alternative to raising and eating animals.”

The company worked with leading butchers, chefs, food technologists and had the close collaboration of taste expert Givaudan, digitally mapping more than 70 sensory parameters into its products, including the texture of a premium beef cut, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel.

The company’s industrial-scale 3D food printers create the Alt-Steak products layer by layer using plant-based formulations developed to mimic muscle, fat and blood.The ersatz-meat is printed with multiple materials that create sustainable, high-protein, no-cholesterol steaks that look, cook, and taste like beef.

“The importance of using precision 3D printing technology to achieve texture, color and flavor—and the combinations between them—cannot be overstated,” Ben-Shitrit said. “By using separate formulations for muscle, fat and blood, we can focus on each individual aspect of creating the perfect Alt-Steak product.

Redefine Meat’s Alt-Steak products will be put to the test at a limited number of leading chef restaurants later this year. Incorporating 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.