Nestle has a new herbal burger, and it's great

At first there was the vegetarian burger. And it was … not so good. Then came Beyond Meat. And it was better. And then came Impossible Foods, followed by the Impossible Whopper. Big Food found that all this sparked a lot of excitement and said, "We should stick to that." So earlier this month, Kellogg announced its own fake meat, which it has improbably decided to call Incogmeato. Finally, Nestlé, the largest agribusiness company in the world, has joined the battle with Awesome Burger, which has already begun shipping to grocery stores. The largest food company in the world surely has the resources to make a better name.

This detailed CNN document does not address this issue. Since Nestlé is so huge (308,000 employees worldwide), it probably avoids the heavy losses, as well as the staff and supply chain issues that have made expansion so difficult for startups like Impossible and Beyond. (This helps Nestle not build its meat counterfeit division from scratch, but rather take control of California-based Sweet Earth.) It will also benefit Nestle's public relations department: more early this year, the company had to deal with allegations of animal cruelty at one of its suppliers and continues to be criticized by activists for producing its water in a bottle.

Awesome Burger is composed of pea protein, coconut oil, wheat gluten and canola oil. It contains more protein and fiber and less fat than beef or its dummy competitors. I myself saw Awesome Burger at Foodscape, a food innovation fair that I attended yesterday afternoon. I did not have the chance to taste it, but from sight, I do not confuse it with a real patty of ground beef. But that's the big thing about burgers: put in enough stuff and meat matters less.