CHICAGO — Two members of a panel at IFT FIRST, the Institute of Food Technologists’ annual meeting and food exposition, asked whether the plant-based industry’s attempts to exactly replicate meat would ever be a winning strategy. Dasha Shor, agile innovation and human intelligence senior manager at Mars, Inc., suggested moving to a “plant-forward” approach from a plant-based approach in the July 15 session at Chicago’s McCormick Place.

“There is a subtle difference,” she said. “We’re moving from this mindset of elimination of what’s not in my food to what can be incorporated. How can we create foods and offerings that are leaning into the power of plants without alienating consumers?”

She gave an example of startup brands exploring the global flavors of beans.

Daniel Kennedy, director of sales, healthful solutions and protein fortification at Ingredion, Inc., said companies may seek to create new experiences with plant-based alternatives instead of mimicking all the traits of meat and dairy products. The new plant-based alternatives could be free of cholesterol and contain low levels of unhealthy fats and sodium.

“We are trying to replicate the biochemistry that happens naturally,” he said of meat and dairy alternatives.

Mimicking the stretch of a creamy cheese or the acidic bite from a yogurt may take years.

“Let’s be serious,” Kennedy said. “The cow has amazing biochemistry. It has an amazing biochemistry that is incredibly hard to mimic.”

Plant-based alternatives have advantages in that they offer dietary fiber for gut health and polyphenols for other health benefits, said Hualu Zhou, PhD, assistant professor in food science and technology at the University of Georgia. Since many plant-based alternatives contain protein isolates, they should have higher protein digestibility levels than animal-based meat and dairy, but they often do not, Zhou said. To improve texture and stability in plant-based alternatives, other ingredients are added that may inhibit the digestibility of macronutrients, including protein, she said.

Milk alternatives, with the exception of soy milk, generally have less protein content and less protein quality than cow’s milk, said Mark Messina, PhD, director of nutrition science and research at SNI Global. The calcium absorption of soy milk is similar to the calcium absorption of cow’s milk.

“We don’t know about the calcium bioavailability from some of these other plant milks,” Messina said.

Plant-based cheese alternatives are low in protein, he said, but producing animal proteins in plants through molecular farming shows promise.

“I think that very soon will change the types of plant-based cheeses that are on the market,” Messina said.

Yet how much do consumers care about the levels of protein content and the quality of the protein? Their awareness is “very, very low” in those two areas, Shor said. With some exceptions, they perceive plant-based protein as good for them and do not seek further details.