Are plant-based meats really indistinguishable from animal-based products?
Frey Lindsay | 2 June 2025
Alternative meat products are close enough in taste and texture to their animal-based counterparts as to be indistinguishable, according to new research.
Nuggets in particular are singled out as a product that is virtually the same whether made from real chicken or alternatives.
But is this really true? Impact Loop puts these results to the test.
The biggest barrier to wider adoption of plant-based and alternative meat products has long been taste – but that hurdle may soon be a thing of the past. So suggests a new report from Nectar, an American research house specialising in plant-based alternative proteins.
According to their ‘sensory research,’ plant-based nuggets have approached animal-based so much in taste as to be virtually indistinguishable.
Such news, if true, would be great news for an industry that’s struggling to maintain its sales growth. As cost of living crises bite, and anti-green backlashes in some countries push people away on ideological grounds, the industry needs all the boosts it can get. And with the environmental benefits of a diet free from animal meat already known (the UN estimates annual carbon savings of over 2 tonnes per consumer), global uptake of alternatives is clearly in demand.
Is the 'flavour gap' finally closing?
Plant-based and alternative meats have been around a long time, and popular consensus throughout that time has generally been that such products are inferior in taste and texture to their animal-based counterparts.
Innovations in recent years, such as the Impossible burger and Just Egg’s plant-based egg products, have suggested that ‘flavour gap’ is closing, and the Nectar report set out to see just how far.
Using blind taste panels, the researchers set out to test plant-based products across five categories: burgers, hot dogs, bacon, nuggets and tenders (basically another kind of nugget).
The results, broadly, were very encouraging. A third to half of survey participants ranked the flavour of the leading plant-based products as passably similar to their meat-based counterparts, with breaded products like nuggets and tenders the clear stand-outs.
However, we here at Impact Loop decided to do our own (highly unscientific) test. Here we go!
The nugget test
Along with my vegan friend Diana, I decided to run my own experiment. I live in the South of France, so I wasn’t expecting a huge selection of vegan products but to my surprise, my local supermarket had both vegan and chicken nuggets at reasonably similar prices (380g for €5.99 and 400g for €4.99, respectively).
We also ordered vegan nuggets from V&V House, a vegan burger place in Marseille’s trendy Cours Julien district. Setting up a simple blind test at home, Diana laid out three plates for the two sets of vegan nuggets and the one set of chicken. My task was simple: identify which of the three were the chicken nuggets. It was surprisingly tricky.
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