Beyond Meat Debuts Vegan Beyond Sausage

Vegan food company Beyond Meat debuted its newest product, Beyond Sausage, today at the vegan burger bar inside a Boulder, CO Whole Foods Market. The new vegan sausage—which will be available in bratwurst, hot Italian, and sweet Italian flavors—has been in development for one year. The company recreated the texture and flavor of traditional pork sausages using rice, peas, fava beans, coconut oil, paprika, and beets. To mimic the distinctive snap of sausage casing, Beyond Meat used algae-derived alginate. “This is part of the continuum for us,” Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown told Fortune. “It’s really been a mantra for us that we want to relentlessly and rapidly innovate. We just always want our product to be indistinguishable. This is one I felt we could get closer to the animal equivalent than other categories.” Beyond Meat debuted its increasingly popular vegan Beyond Burger in a similar way in 2016—in the meat department of the same Whole Foods Market in Boulder, CO—before expanding to more than 5,000 points of distribution earlier this year. Beyond Meat, which recently received $55 million in capital funding, some of which came from meat company Tyson Foods, will announce its plan to expand distribution of Beyond Sausage to other cities in January.