Umaro bacon If you’ve ever tried vegan bacon, you probably didn’t mistake it for pork. But when I recently made a vegan BLT with a new type of plant-based bacon, it was fairly hard to tell that it wasn’t the real thing. It was crispy. It had a similar appearance. And the flavor was surprisingly spot on.
The startup that makes the bacon, Bay Area-based Umaro Foods, says that seaweed is the secret that makes it so realistic. The ingredient had a long journey to sandwiches: CEO and cofounder Beth Zotter began working with kelp a decade ago as part of a company trying to develop seaweed-based biofuels. Like other biofuel startups, it struggled to compete with fossil fuels and didn’t last. But Zotter started to think about other potential uses for seaweed.
“I knew that I wanted to do something commercial and that biofuel was not going to be commercially viable anytime soon,” she says. “This is about the same time that the alternative protein movement was really taking off, and Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods were becoming household names. The idea occurred to me then, Well, what if seaweed could be a protein source?”
Per acre, grown in the ocean, kelp can produce five times as much protein as a field of soybeans, Zotter says. Separately, she also started working with aquaculture engineering experts at the University of New Hampshire, and engineers at the San Francisco innovation company Otherlab, to develop seaweed farming equipment that could work automatically offshore in the ocean. (Last summer, there was a pilot demonstration of the tech off the coast of Maine.) And she partnered with Amanda Stiles, a plant biochemist who previously worked with pea-based milk company Ripple, to start working on the first food product.
“We started with the texture,” says Zotter. They studied gels that are components of seaweed, and realized that the ingredients could hold five times their weight in oil. “We were just playing around with these textures and realized that we got something really crispy with a fat delivery,” she says.
The startup also developed a way to extract the protein from the seaweed. Once the team had a seaweed-based formula to make faux bacon crispy, they partnered with the food innovation lab at Oregon State University to develop a recipe for the final product, and spent four or five months on rapid iteration. Part of the meaty taste comes from the seaweed itself; the word “umami,” which foodies use to describe a savory flavor, originally came from research on seaweed. (Another type of seaweed, dulse, is known for tasting very similar to bacon on its own.) The company also uses a combination of chickpeas, coconut and sunflower oil, salt, and other plant-based ingredients to mimic pork bacon. But the most important part was the “fat encapsulation” from the seaweed gel, which gives the final product a crispy, fatty mouthfeel. The flavors also attach to the fat molecules.
Right now, while some plant-based burgers are fairly convincingly similar to beef, vegan bacon has fewer converts. “There’s no good bacon on the market,” Zotter argues. “They’re all pretty awful. It’s just a testament to how desperate vegans are for something that remotely resembles bacon. Plant-based bacons on the market are basically being purchased by people who don’t remember what bacon tastes like.”
Umaro’s bacon launched in a few restaurants this summer, and now is in a few dozen. Plantega, a plant-based deli counter in multiple New York City bodegas, tested the bacon in a breakfast sandwich, and now plans to roll it out across its more than two dozen locations next year. Umaro also plans to begin selling in retail stores next year. It’s currently working on a new automated piece of equipment that it says will bring down the cost of production and help it quickly scale up. “Once that’s completed, we should be able to beat the price of pork bacon,” says Zotter.
