Food technology company, Redefine Meat, has unveiled the world’s first Alt-SteakTM plant-based products, with market testing at select high-end restaurants to start later this year.

Created using Redefine Meat’s patent-pending 3D meat printing technology, the company’s Alt-Steak products are designed to have the texture, flavour and appearance of beefsteak and to be produced in the volume and cost to enable large-scale market launch.

Working with butchers, chefs, food technologists and the close collaboration of taste expert, Givaudan, Redefine Meat claims to have digitally mapped more than 70 sensorial parameters into its Alt-Steak products, including premium beef cuts’ texture, juiciness, fat distribution and mouthfeel.

Layer by layer, the company’s proprietary industrial-scale 3D food printers creates the Alt-Steak products using Redefine Meat’s Alt-Muscle, Alt-Fat, and Alt-Blood plant-based formulations. By printing with multiple materials, Redefine Meat says it can create sustainable, high-protein, no-cholesterol steaks that look, cook, and taste like beef.

“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,” says Eshchar Ben-Shitrit, CEO and co-founder of Redefine Meat.

He continued: “To enable mass adoption, we knew that creating an alternative meat product that was both high in quality and nutritional composition would require new technologies and production processes never seen before in the food industry. Today’s announcement marks the start of a new era in alternative meat – the Alt-Steak era – driven by production processes that will accelerate the development of a wide range of alt-meat whole muscle products and create a sustainable alternative to raising and eating animals.”

The 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 says it will then ramp up production of its 3D meat printers and alt-meat formulations ahead of market distribution in 2021.