Beyond Meat Building New R&D Center In Manhattan Beach

MANHATTAN BEACH, CA – Plant-based but beef-tasting Beyond Meat announced that it's building a new 26,000 sq. ft. research and development (R&D) center at headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., according to Feedstuffs.

The new facility will have more than 100 employees and will be the new home to the company's Manhattan Beach Project, its ongoing initiative to bring the best and brightest scientists, engineers, food technologists, chefs and researchers together in service to the goal to perfectly build a piece of meat directly from plants, according to the announcement.

“The expansion of the Manhattan Beach Project here in Los Angeles (Cal.) reflects our belief that building meat from plants is an opportunity of global importance — one that is deserving of investment levels consistent with what you'd find in alternative energy or health sciences, sectors with which we certainly share common goals,” Beyond Meat chief executive officer and founder Ethan Brown told Foodstuffs.

Brown said he wants to perfectly replicate 80/20 beef and not stop until they get there, according to Specialty Food. There's no fundamental obstacle to achieving the goal, it just takes time and money, Brown said.

The center will be seven times the size of the company’s existing facilities, and will feature a gourmet kitchen to host chefs and culinary experts, as well as a sensory space for real-time consumer testing and panels, Specialty Food reported.

Ninety percent of Beyond Meat’s research-and-development staff come from biomedical research, the company statement said. The team is refiguring the use of existing imaging technologies toward a better understanding of the complexity of meat, and applying this knowledge to rebuild meat from plant material, according to Specialty Food. Only natural, non-GMO ingredients are used.

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