In a South Carolina high school cafeteria, a taste test of meatballs blended with mushrooms won over students: 92% wanted them on the menu. The product, called 50/Cut, is made by Joyn and is part of a broader push by startups to sell "blended" meat—products that mix plant proteins with real meat rather than trying to replace it entirely.
The motivation is climate. Livestock production is responsible for an estimated 10-20% of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, with beef herds especially carbon-intensive. Ruminants produce about 30% of human-related methane, and there is no practical way to make cattle climate-neutral. Researchers say cutting emissions enough will require dietary change, but people have been slow to shift: vegetarianism has held steady at about 4% in the US since 1999.
Earlier alternatives have struggled. Lab-grown meat is not yet available at scale, and plant-based burgers from Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have lost momentum. Blended products offer a different logic: if a conventional burger contained 20% plants, that would cut meat consumption by 20% without asking consumers to change their habits. A 2022 study in Nature estimated that replacing 20% of beef globally could halve annual deforestation rates.
The approach revives an old culinary tradition of stretching meat with vegetables. Whether it can scale beyond school cafeterias remains to be seen, but the early taste-test results suggest at least some omnivores are willing to try it.