UK’s first meatless burger that “bleeds”: Start-up on the vegan ingredients that make the difference

16 Mar 2018 --- The market for vegan-friendly products has seen rapid growth in the past years. New launches are rife in a range of product categories from dairy alternatives to meat analogs, with companies seeking to recreate the “real thing” – i.e. animal-derived products – using new processing techniques and innovative ingredients.

The growing popularity of new product development on vegan platforms is substantiated by new product launch data from Innova Market Insights, which note a 58 percent increase in product launches recorded with a vegan claim in 2015 from 2014, with a further 35 percent increase in 2016 from 2015.

NutritionInsight spoke with Simeon Van der Molen, Founder of Moving Mountains, about the company’s B12 Burger – touted as the UK’s first vegan-friendly burger that “bleeds,” thanks to the addition of beetroot juice.

“The overriding ambition of Moving Mountains is to provide a real solution for food that is sustainable but doesn’t compromise on taste. By creating the B12 Burger, we wanted to provide a plant-based product that enticed traditional meat eaters, as well as appealing to vegans, vegetarians and flexitarians,” van der Molen explains.

“The Moving Mountains B12 Burger has taken scientists, chefs and farmers over two years to make and is the closest replication to animal meat in the UK, but requires less land, less water and produces less greenhouse emissions. Throughout this process, one of the main challenges was competing with a regular burger on every level – taste, nutrition, minerals and satisfaction,” he adds. 

The B12 burger is 100 percent raw plant meat, protein-rich and aims to mimic the look, smell and taste of regular meat.

Van der Molen further explains which products are key to mimicking meat in the burger:

•    Mushrooms maintain a succulent texture.
•    Peas provide a source of protein.  They are blended with wheat and soy proteins to make the burger 20 percent protein.
•    Potatoes provide a slightly crispy, grilled crust.
•    Wheat and soy proteins give a fibrous texture akin to the bite and depth of a traditional burger.
•    Beetroot juice allows a juicy “bleed” at the center of the patty.
•    Coconut oil provides a fatty, consistency.
•    Vitamin B12, traditionally associated with red meats, has been added so that the Moving Mountains burger can compete with a beef burger on a nutritional level.

As well as appealing to the vegetarian and vegan community, Moving Mountains aims to tap into the burgeoning flexitarian market.

“By tapping into this broad consumer base, Moving Mountains will be able to secure a share of the £284.1 million meat-free category, the flexitarian market – a food movement currently accounting for 41 percent of meat-eating Brits – and cut into the 511 million kilos of red meat consumed in the UK a year,” van der Molen notes.

“Plant-based consumers are no longer satisfied with bland meat-free options and demand products that are innovative, exciting and use ground-breaking techniques to provide the best possible taste,” he adds. “Driven by the growing awareness of the environmental and health benefits reaped from eating less meat – larger made popular from Netflix and YouTube documentaries such as What the Health and Cowspiracy – people also want to feel good by choosing food that requires less land, less water and is more sustainable than animal meat products."

So how does the B12 burger stack up against a “regular” burger regarding nutritional credentials?

Van der Molen reports that each Moving Mountains B12 burger contains 150 calories, zero cholesterol, 20g of plant protein and is free-from antibiotics and hormones. To compete with a meat burger on every level, it contains 15 percent of the recommended daily allowance of B12, which is the same amount as would be found in a regular beef burger of the same sized quarter pounder.

Our sister website, FoodIngredientsFirst, has previously reported on the hot topic of alternative meat patties, such as the Impossible Burger and Beyond Meat.

Interestingly, the scientific approaches to creating “bleeding,” yet bloodless, burgers are growing. With the Impossible Burger, we saw creators extracting the heme molecule from plants to replicate the effects of hemoglobin. Yet, beetroot juice is the go-to blood replicating agent in various products, including the B12 Burger, Beyond Meat and a similar product on sale at Dutch retailer Albert Heijn. This range of approaches signifies a new dawn of exciting, meat-free possibilities for the market. 

The Moving Mountains B12 Burger is exclusively available at Mildreds, Dalston, UK, with further availability announcements to follow.

By Lucy Gunn