Transforming “too big to fail” meat production
Part 1: Meat and climate emissions by the numbers
Project Drawdown, one of the most prominent, science based think-tanks on climate change, has identified plant-rich diets as the second most impactful thing you can do to reduce your carbon emissions.
They state, “ Animal agriculture is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. Favoring plant-based foods reduces demand, thereby reducing land clearing, fertilizer use, and greenhouse gas emissions.” “If 50–75 percent of people adopt a healthy diet …and reduce meat consumption overall, we estimate at least 54.19–78.48 gigatons of emissions could be avoided from dietary change alone. Since agriculture, particularly for cattle and animal feed production, is the leading driver of tropical deforestation, reducing meat consumption can avoid additional forest loss and associated greenhouse gas emissions.”
In addition to the threats to our climate, the meat industry is dealing with its own set of inherent problems. Meat production also tops the charts of greenhouse gas emitters due to the intensive refrigeration needed to process and preserve carcasses and raw meat. A typical 200,000 square ft. meat processing facility is entirely refrigerated using massive amounts of energy to keep meat cold. This means workers in these facilities must be bundled up while working for 8–10 hours a day in facilities below 40F –all while warming our planet.
And it gets worse: Just months ago, several meat processors in Wisconsin and Missouri were fined $1.3M for employing more than 100 children as young as 13 years old in sanitation jobs in meat processing plants. Sadly, the response from lawmakers in Ohio, Missouri, Minnesota and Arkansas was to try to legalize child labor in meat plants in response to the labor shortages and the unwillingness of most Americans to take such dangerous, gut wrenching jobs. This is a deep violation of our social progress to protect children from dangerous environments.
Meanwhile, it is predicted that we’ll produce the highest volume of meat on record in 2023, with production of over 771B pounds (350 million metric tons) of meat globally, up 2% or more over the last 4 years. In the US alone, we produce 108B pounds, or 14% of global meat production despite only having 4% of the world’s population!
Hence, we are not making much headway in reducing meat consumption. But we know that 1) we have to change our trajectory and 2) we need concrete strategies to do this. So, how do we steer our collective ship away from so much meat?
Part 2: Transformation of “too big to fail” meat production
Most people eat meat. It’s offered in nearly every school, hospital and grocery store with few exceptions. But, we’ve known for a very long time that meat has deleterious impacts on climate, our health, land and water, and animals, including wildlife. We’ve sacrificed Amazon rainforests for meat and polluted rivers and oceans to support dairy, egg and chicken production. We’ve come to believe that meat is “too big to fail” just like the big banks of the 2008 financial crisis. If you are too big to fail, who is supposed to change the status quo?
Plant-based meat offers a competitive market solution to replace meat for consumers. The pioneers of this industry first commercialized plant-based meat in 1899 with a nut-based meat called Protose. Later versions focused on mimicking the texture and flavor, and today’s plant-based meat products frequently outperform animal meat in taste tests and always win on nutrition. However, in the US today, we only produce around 700M pounds per year of plant-based meat or roughly 0.5% of what we produce in meat. Globally, plant-based meat only accounts for about 0.2% of that 771B pounds of animal meat. At this rate, we aren’t even replacing the amount of meat wasted (around 17%), let alone the volumes of meat contributing to climate change.
As with any climate solution, we have to make our own climate-friendly choices. We live in a capitalist democracy and our votes at the ballot box and our dollars for food define the future of the meat industry. But right now, plant-based meat costs 2–5 times the cost of animal meat. It’s also difficult to produce and it’s not widely available. We need an industrial scale solution, and that’s what we are doing at Rebellyous Foods.
Rebellyous Foods is a production technology company dedicated to making plant-based meat available and affordable for everyone. We are a team of animal-loving and climate-caring engineers, professionals and technicians who design, test, prototype and deploy Rebellyous’ new, automated food processing equipment. This enables us to make high-quality plant-based meat at the same price and quality as animal meat. This allows us to reach consumers that would otherwise choose cheap meat over plant-based, climate-friendly choice.
But consumers aren’t the only ones making choices in our meat industry. Meat producers also make choices about what is available in our grocery stores and cafeterias. There are roughly 6,500 meat processing facilities in the US processing chickens, pigs, and cows into chicken nuggets, hot dogs, and hamburgers. It’s a little known fact that these are the same facilities that also produce plant-based meat, such as the Beyond Burger or the Impossible Burger. Our plant-based meat products are made in meat processing facilities with the same equipment used to make animal meat. And therein lies the problem with the cost for consumers.
If you think about the ingredients for a hamburger or a chicken nuggets, it consists of slaughtering animals, removing skin or feathers and grinding muscle into hamburgers or nuggets. From there, these products are seasoned with flavoring and sometimes have added preservatives to slow decomposition. But the ingredients for plant-based meat are entirely vegetable proteins extracted from beans or seeds, combined with vegetable oils, and then also seasoned with flavorings. Unfortunately, meat processing plants use the same equipment to chop up carcasses as they do to make plant-based meat. This mis-match of equipment is costing us 3 times the labor, time and energy to make the plant-based meat because they’re the wrong tools! At Rebellyous, we know we need the right tools for the job. So, we went back to the first-principle of physics and designed custom tools for emulsifying, mixing and hydrating plant-based ingredients.
Now, we are now in the process of building our new Mock 2 production system, which is a commercial scale system for making high-quality plant-based meat efficiently and at the same price as animal meat. Our system will be deployed this December right here in the PNW. Our entire Rebellyous team is supporting the deployment of this new clean, processing technology that will make high-quality, price-parity plant-based meat a reality. But we have even bigger plans.
Remember those 6,500 meat processing facilities in the US and countless more worldwide? Remember those processors resorting to child labor? Rebellyous’ Mock 2 can be used to convert those meat processing plants into plant-based meat production facilities. Only part of the equipment in meat processing is wrong for plant-based meat. When we replace that equipment with Rebellyous’ Mock 2, we can make the facility cleaner, safer, and more energy efficient. Further, we can dramatically reduce the refrigeration necessary to run these buildings, with an 80% reduction in refrigeration costs. We have the opportunity to actually transform meat processing facilities into plant-based meat production facilities rather than starting from scratch. It’s better for the environment, better for workers, better for our energy usage and better for animals.
Roughly half of all meat is consumed outside the home, and at Rebellyous, we focus on servicing these foodservice customers, specifically our public school systems that participate in the USDA National School Lunch Program, our national public anti-poverty school feeding program. This allows Rebellyous to offer climate-friendly food choices to those who will be most impacted by climate change. We also sell our products into hospitality, corporate cafeterias, universities and correctional facilities.
While there is a clear demand for plant-based meat with more than 60% of consumers seeking to cut back on meat, we won’t be able to meet that demand while plant-based meat is unaffordable. We’re flipping the script to focus on affordability to make plant-based meat accessible to all. At Rebellyous, we have a cultural commitment to creating the change we want to see in the world. That’s what we’re doing every day.
Christie Lagally is the founder and CEO of Rebellyous Foods, a plant-based meat manufacturing and production technology company based in Seattle, Wash.
