Everyone wants nutrient-dense products these days. Packing protein, fibre and a few tactical micronutrients into small-portion products is considered key to unlocking healthy eating opportunities in the post-Mounjaro age.
Easy work. If people are paying the same price for tiny portions, how hard can it be to stick in some positive nutrition? And for products containing chicken, fish or low-fat dairy, it’s actually not that hard.
The issues tend to come with plant-led innovations. The real golden health ticket is a delicious, nutrient-dense, plant-led product with tonnes of protein and fibre, all from pulses, beans and vegetables to score maximum plant points. Nail that and you’ve pretty much ticked every health box.
What product developers quickly run into is a protein problem that’s hard to resolve. There is no shortage of sources of affordable, healthy plant proteins, but if you want to hit a big headline protein target such as 30g per portion, as many brands desire, then most plant sources come with some excess baggage.
In an average pulse, bean or lentil, for every gram of protein there are a couple of grams of starch and about a gram of fibre. This means that your 30g protein dish will contain enough water-binding thickeners to gelatinise a small hot tub. Packing that much protein into a meal, wrap or salad is near impossible without making a slab of food that has more use in hand-to-hand combat than it does in healthy eating. No wonder it’s been hard to persuade gym people to eat more plants.
The higher-protein plant ingredient alternatives all have issues. It’s possible to remove some of the starch from legumes to make protein isolates or concentrates, but these are widely considered ultra-processed, and many brands won’t touch them with a clean-label bargepole. Soya has naturally less starch than other beans, but many shy away from it because of a poor reputation, associations with GM, and rightful allergen concerns.
Nuts are great sources of nutrition, but again they are allergens and hardly any factories handle them. Many seeds are higher in protein than legumes, especially if you can press out some of the oil, but these have the irresolvable problem of being seeds – not always the most delicious things in the world, having largely evolved to avoid being consumed. Beyond that, there’s not much left.
There is always the possibility of growing proteins in a fermenter, or even producing animal-free meat cells in a laboratory. But given that protein concentrates, which are essentially protein-rich fractions of pulse flours, are considered too processed for modern health-conscious consumers, I am not sure that lab-grown genetically modified beef cells are ever likely to pass muster.
The transition to consumption of more plant protein is one of the most important goals for our food system, for a wide variety of reasons. But the difficulty of creating clean-label, protein-rich meals shows just how hard this challenge will be. The options appear to be either taking our attention away from absolute amounts of protein towards more holistic measures of health, or perhaps increasing the public understanding of ingredients such as protein concentrates, so that they are not wrongfully demonised by the clean label police.
Anthony Warner is a development chef at New Food Innovation
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