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A vegan meat giant has created what it describes as the ‘world’s healthiest burger’.
Spanish brand Heura, the fastest-growing vegan meat company in Europe, says its goal is to ‘accelerate the protein transition’. It wants to do this by ‘providing healthy, clean, and accessible’ alternatives to meat.
Vegan meat
Its new Heura Burger 2.0 has 64.25 percent less fat than a traditional beef burger. Also, it ‘contains 85.6 percent less saturated fat than beef, and has 11.3 percent more protein per calorie’.
It says its patty offers the ‘meaty and juicy experience of an animal burger with only 6.5 grams of fat’.
Healthiest burger
Heura says the biggest challenge facing the plant-based industry was ‘creating a burger with the juiciness of beef without using high amounts of fat’.
As a result, Heura developed the first fat analog made of extra virgin olive oil to create its new patty. It says its patty is the first plant-based burger made with extra virgin olive oil.
It is this fat analog that means the patty can retain the ‘juiciness of an animal burger in plant-based options’. Before, the only way to recreate the texture was to use high amounts of fat from oils.
This meant the plant-based burgers solved the problem of the environmental impact of beef, but not the health issues posed by high intakes of saturated fat, says Heura.
‘More sustainable’
The oil is rich in monounsaturated fats, which, when eaten instead of saturated fats, can improve blood cholesterol levels.
Also, Heura says olive oil is ‘more sustainable than coconut or palm oil’. Other ingredients include sustainable pea protein concentrate and vegetable fiber. It says its patty ‘contains 40 percent fewer ingredients than the market average’.
Plant-based industry
Marc Coloma is the co-founder and CEO of Heura. In a statement sent to PBN, he said: “Accelerating the protein transition is my passion and it is in technology where I find solutions.
“Pioneers in the plant-based industry have always been our inspiration and we hope that this innovation boosts the plant-based meat category worldwide and leaves livestock obsolete.”
Fat
Lorena Salcedo is the new product development manager at Heura. She added: “When we visualize the fat from a burger or the coconut oil in the supermarket, they are solid.
“This is because they both have high contents of saturated fat. We had to reproduce that with an oil that is liquid (monounsaturated) and minimize its use to reduce the amount of fat on the burger.
“We have analyzed both structures separately, the beef burger one and extra virgin olive oil to get the experience of one from the nutritional values of the other. When you see the essence of what you really need it’s easy to see the most efficient way to get there.”
Heura products are available in 10 countries. These include Spain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile, and the U.K.
