Plant-based diets, often cited as a craze driven by millennials, are gaining increasing popularity. According to research by HealthFocus, 60% of consumers are reducing their meat intake - and a massive 17% of 15-70 year olds now follow a ‘predominantly’ plant-based diet. What’s more, 55% of people who start eating a more plant-based diet say they plan to stick with it permanently. What was once called a ‘food fad’ looks like it’s here to stay.

Today we welcomed Leonardo DiCaprio to the Beyond Meat family as an official investor and advocate. Our relationship with Leo began a few years back when he first visited our research center and subsequently provided feedback on early iterations of The Beyond Burger. Leo shares our vision that we can positively impact climate change by bringing satiating, appealing, plant-based meats to the center of the plate, and we are thrilled to have his partnership.

Uma Valeti remembers the first time he really thought about where meat comes from. A cardiologist turned founder, Valeti grew up in Vijayawada, India, where his father was a veterinarian and his mother taught physics. When he was 12, he attended a neighbor's birthday party. In the front yard, people danced and feasted on chicken tandoori and curried goat. Valeti wandered around to the back of the house, where cooks were hard at work decapitating and gutting animal after animal to keep the loaded platters coming.

The in vitro meat cookbook presents 45 recipes that explore and visualize what in vitro meat products might be on our plate one day. As in vitro meat is still being developed you cannot cook our recipes just yet, however, they will provide abundant food for thought and discussion.

Millennials have a reputation for killing all sorts of food-related industries and products, including casual dining chains like Applebee's, cereal, light yogurt, and even beer. Meanwhile, Generation Z is shaping a billion-dollar food market. Fake meat is a fast-rising food category that could change the way we eat. It replaces animal products with alternatives made from plants that look and taste like meat, with the goal of reducing the global dependence on animal agriculture. Generation Z is embracing the trend.

This morning, I walked down the street from my home in San Francisco to grab breakfast. On the menu? A dish that could change the multi-billion-dollar egg industry, forever. I had the chance to taste Hampton Creek’s long-awaited Just Scramble: a 100% plant-based product that is vastly more sustainable than any egg from a factory-farmed chicken and is free from antibiotics and cholesterol!

There is a “hospital-themed restaurant” in Las Vegas called the Heart Attack Grill. Inside, customers are invited to tempt death with food. The waitresses dress as provocative nurses and deliver “prescriptions,” which are enormous hamburgers. Depending on the number of beef patties between the buns, they’re known as single-, double-, and triple-bypass burgers. The system goes all the way up to octuple bypass. Past that point, it would be ridiculous.

Meat lovers rejoice! Beyond Meat is bringing a revolutionary plant-based breakthrough to the dinner table: Beyond Sausage. The newest product from Beyond Meat delivers on the juicy, satisfying taste and texture of pork sausage but with added health benefits of plant-based meat, including...

Get ready for a lot more plant-protein-based burgers and chicken, as large food producers and big-box stores start to pour money and attention into the sector.

Facts, figures and busted myths: Why going vegan is on the up, and why you might even like to try it yourself.As the UK finishes the last of its turkey sandwiches, eats all the cheese it can handle and drinks the last drops of wine, the focus shifts to changes to be made for the new year. And each year, more and more people are going vegan.

Talk about progress! Interest in vegan and vegetarian diets is soaring in China. This is great news considering China has the world’s LARGEST market for beef, pork, and poultry. Even with a massive meat market, a report by research firm Euromonitor shows the demand for meat has declined in recent years.

Feed Fido first, then humans next?

Vegetarians have long touted the ethical and environmental problems with meat production and consumption. Start-ups such as MosaMeat, JUST and Memphis Meats are tissue-engineering meat in a lab to allow people to enjoy being a carnivore without any of the environmental or ethical hang-ups. Dubbed clean meat, the efforts are distinct from "fake meat," like the soy protein "chicken" you can find in your grocery store today. Unlike Morningstar or Boca Burgers, clean meat really is meat; it just grows in a lab instead of being part of an animal. But lab-grown meat leads most skeptical diners to think of a big hurdle: taste.

Any company that’s looking to replace the more than 5 billion pounds of ground beef making its way onto tables in the U.S. every year with a meatless substitute is going to need a lot of cash. It’s a big vision with lots of implications for the world — from climate change and human health to challenging the massive, multi-billion dollar industries that depend on meat — and luckily for Impossible Foods (one of the many companies looking to supplant the meat business globally), the company has managed to attract big-name investors with incredibly deep pockets to fund its meatless mission.

As the fight against "fake meat" rages on in the U.S., Silicon Valley-based Impossible Foods is expanding beyond the country. The food start-up, which manufactures a plant-based burger it calls the "Impossible Burger," is now taking its flagship product to Hong Kong. Speaking with CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday, Impossible Foods CFO and COO David Lee said the company's mission is to be "everywhere," and Hong Kong was chosen as the first city for the international expansion due to its reputation as a culinary "epicenter."

At least one-third of early deaths could be prevented if everyone moved to a vegetarian diet, Harvard scientists have calculated.

Food technology will never cease to amaze us! Eric Schulze, Ph.D., Vice President of Product and Regulation at the lab-cultured meat company, Memphis Meats, recently shared an amazing fact at the American Conference Institute (ACI) food law conference. Schulze said that Memphis Meats can produce up to 10,000 cows’ worth of meat … with just ONE SINGLE biopsy. Whoa!

Lab-grown chicken, beef, and duck products are edging toward the U.S. market—despite enduring confusion about how they’ll be regulated. But language buried in a draft spending bill released by a U.S. House of Representatives appropriations panel this week suggests some lawmakers are eager to get rules in place. A one-sentence proposal in the bill would put the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in charge of regulating products made from the cells of livestock or poultry, and instructs the agency to issue rules about how it will oversee their manufacture and labeling.

Lab-grown meat is on its way, and the government is trying to figure out how to regulate it. This week, the US House of Representatives released a draft spending bill that proposes that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulate lab-grown meat and figure out how it should be labeled — which is a contentious topic since Big Cattle doesn’t want it to be called “meat.” Regulation is important, and there’s plenty more to learn, but the USDA shouldn’t be the only one regulating. And when the product comes to market, yes, it should be called “meat.”

In 2013, producing the first lab-grown burger cost $325,000. By 2015, though the cost had dropped to around $11, Mark Post, the Dutch researcher who created the burger, thought that it might take another two or three decades before it was commercially viable. But the first so-called “clean meat,” produced from animal cells without an actual animal, may be in restaurants by the end of 2018.