Alternative proteins move beyond meat imitation as hybrid products gain ground
Alternative protein developers are moving beyond the pursuit of direct meat substitutes as hybrid products, improved nutrition and combinations of different protein technologies play a larger role in new product development, according to industry leaders speaking ahead of The Future of Protein Production Amsterdam 2026.
• Planteneers' Pia Meinlschmidt said consumers were looking beyond protein quantity to quality, digestibility, nutrition, taste and the overall eating experience.
• Didier Toubia said combining cultivated cells, plants, fermentation and other protein sources could deliver products around specific consumer needs rather than simple replacement.
• Cibus Nexum's Arjen van der Wijk said hybrid concepts involving pulses, vegetables, fungi and mycelium were already moving through product and manufacturing development.
The comments came during The Road to Amsterdam: The Biggest Questions Facing Alternative Proteins in 2026, a Protein Production Technology International webinar held on 16 July 2026 ahead of The Future of Protein Production Amsterdam in November.
The panel included Dr.-Ing. Pia Meinlschmidt, Head of Product Management at Planteneers; Didier Toubia, Co-founder & CEO of Aleph Farms; Arjen van der Wijk, Co-founder of Cibus Nexum; Robyn Eijlander, Program Manager & Science Innovation Manager at NIZO Food Research; Joško Bobanović, formerly of Sofinnova Partners; and Vince Sewalt, Founder of Sewalt Bioconsulting.
Meinlschmidt has seen the demands placed on protein products change considerably. Planteneers, part of the Stern-Wywiol Gruppe in Germany, develops functional ingredient systems, blends and application concepts for food manufacturers.
“One thing we have clearly seen over the last few years is that consumers have become much more informed and sophisticated, but at the same time also much more demanding,” she said.
Simply adding protein or offering an alternative to an animal product no longer provides enough of a reason to return to a product.
“A few years ago, the conversation was mainly about replacing animal proteins or simply increasing protein content, and that's not enough anymore today,” Meinlschmidt said. “Consumers evaluate products much more holistically.”
Protein content still carries considerable weight, particularly as high-protein foods have expanded well beyond sports nutrition. But consumers also expect products to deliver on more familiar measures of food quality.
“Of course, they still care about protein content. I mean, we see a lot of high-protein products out there, but they also ask: Does it taste great? Does it feel natural? Is it nutritious? Does it fit into my daily lifestyle? And ultimately, is it worth buying again?”
Healthy aging, longevity, metabolic health and the rise of GLP-1 medications have added new considerations for developers. Meinlschmidt said these trends were moving attention away from individual nutrient claims and toward the nutritional quality of the complete product.
Protein itself has also changed status.
“Over the last few years, protein has evolved from a fitness, gym-bro ingredient to a mainstream nutrient,” she said. “Protein remains one of the strongest drivers in food innovation, especially for active lifestyles, healthy aging, and increasingly also for people using GLP-1 medications.”
As the market has expanded, the questions surrounding protein have become more detailed.
“They are no longer just asking, how much protein does this product contain?” Meinlschmidt said. “Some do, but they are increasingly asking, okay, what does this protein actually do for me?”
Amino acid profile, digestibility, PDCAAS, bioavailability, satiety and muscle health are among the factors that can influence the nutritional value of a protein. Yet Meinlschmidt cautioned against treating protein as the only measure of a successful food.
“The most successful products combine high-quality proteins with, for instance, dietary fibers, micronutrients, and, most importantly, excellent sensory quality,” she said. “So taste is still number one.”
Getting a consumer to try a high-protein product and persuading them to buy it again are different jobs.
“Protein quantity, so high-protein claims, may get consumers to pick up the product from the shelf, but protein quality, overall nutrition, and the entire eating experience are what make them buy the products again and again,” Meinlschmidt said. “So these are the most important factors, besides price, of course.”
For cultivated meat pioneer Aleph Farms, the same consumer logic has encouraged a broader view of how different protein technologies can work together.
Toubia has increasingly used the term complementary proteins rather than alternative proteins, arguing that the industry has spent too much time dividing technologies into competing camps.
“Consumers today are not looking at either/or, or just replacing meat,” he said. “They're looking at a holistic product that is high in protein, nutritionally dense, convenient, indulgent, and at the right price.”
Meeting all of those requirements can mean combining ingredients rather than expecting a single protein source to do everything.
“We really need to look at all the tools we have in our toolkit, all the different types of proteins we have, in a holistic manner, and really be open to breaking down those silos and just delivering the best product for the same customer we're targeting,” Toubia said.
Aleph Farms itself is pursuing that approach. Its cultivated meat product combines animal cells with a plant-derived base rather than relying exclusively on cultivated biomass.
“Our product is a hybrid cultivated meat product, meaning we have animal cells and a vegetal base, which are complementary, synergistic, and allow us to really develop unique products with dedicated value propositions,” Toubia said.
Other combinations are emerging across precision fermentation, solid-state fermentation, mycelium and plant ingredients.
“At the end of the day, we're talking about proteins here, not meat versus non-meat,” he said.
Cibus Nexum is already seeing that approach reach manufacturing projects.
Van der Wijk said the company was working both with hybrid concepts and with ingredient developers whose products could eventually become components of hybrid foods.
“A lot of these innovations are from B2B or single-ingredient innovators,” he said. “We're talking about fungi, indeed, what Didier also mentioned, mycelium and those propositions. These are the innovations we're working on together with our clients, which play a part in a final hybrid solution.”
The activity is not confined to one technology.
“That's really picking up from a broad perspective - so pulses, beans, and vegetables, but indeed also mycelium and fungi solutions from different kinds of perspectives, fermentation included or not,” van der Wijk said.
Manufacturing could give some of these products an advantage over concepts that require entirely new production systems. Van der Wijk said a number of the ingredients and hybrid formats under development could fit into established food processes and equipment.
“From a manufacturing point of view, these solutions aren't aiming for totally or completely new processes,” he said. “They can already be embedded in existing processes or use existing equipment types.”
Some hybrid development is also becoming more technically sophisticated than simply replacing a portion of meat with a plant ingredient.
Cibus Nexum is working on one project where reducing the meat content also reduces the finished product's protein content. The other components are therefore being selected to restore that protein while delivering the required product characteristics.
“One of the hybrid components is replacing meat, and in order to compensate for the protein that's going down, the concept itself, the components, is focusing on increasing that protein level again to compensate for the reduced meat content,” van der Wijk said.
“So it's not just about creating patties with some kind of jackfruit or other pulse powders in there. It's more sophisticated.”
Much of that development has yet to reach supermarket shelves. Product development, scale-up and customer launch cycles mean the work underway now may only become visible to consumers over the next couple of years.
“You can't see it everywhere on shelves or in launched products yet, but we see it coming right now in new productions,” van der Wijk said. “It can take a year or two until it fully emerges and is launched, but it's happening, absolutely.”
The change in product thinking also raises questions about one of the alternative protein industry's oldest ambitions: how closely new foods should reproduce conventional animal products.
Meinlschmidt would like to see the sector become less preoccupied with imitation.
“I hope that in five years we'll spend much less time talking about technologies and much more time talking about products that consumers love,” she said.
She saw greater opportunity in foods capable of building demand on their own merits rather than being judged primarily against the animal product they were designed to replace.
“I also hope that we'll move beyond measuring success by how closely we imitate an animal product,” Meinlschmidt said. “The real opportunity, in my opinion, lies in creating products with their own identity.”
That could mean standalone products built around combinations of taste, nutrition, convenience and price, regardless of whether they fit neatly into today's plant-based, fermentation or cultivated meat categories.
“Standalone products, moving beyond imitation, that consumers actively choose because they are delicious, nutritious, affordable, and fit naturally into their everyday lives,” she said.
“If we can create more products that people enjoy, trust, and buy again, then I believe we have done an amazing job and achieved exactly what this industry set out to do.”
Toubia also expects the food system to draw from a wider range of protein sources over the coming years.
The past century, he said, had concentrated food production around fewer crops, fewer species, large companies and particular production regions. New protein technologies could add more sources rather than simply replacing existing ones.
“We are currently seeing a process where we go back to diversifying the food system again, with more and more sources of proteins,” he said. “That's our topic - not only animal, but also mycelium, cell-based, precision fermentation, and plants.”
For product developers, that leaves a much broader palette than the meat-versus-alternative debate that dominated much of the industry's early development. Consumers may ultimately care less about which technological category a product belongs to than whether it earns another place in their shopping basket.
Meinlschmidt, Toubia and van der Wijk will continue these conversations at The Future of Protein Production Amsterdam on 4-5 November 2026, alongside more than 130 speakers covering food and ingredient innovation, fermentation, cultivated meat, manufacturing, investment, regulation and commercialization.
Around 1,000 attendees and more than 65 exhibitors are expected in Amsterdam, with the event co-located with the Cultured Meat Symposium.
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