Good-tasting alt meat is a scientific problem we can solve: $10M RFP for Alternative Protein R&D

By Coefficient Giving, abhi_kumar @ 2026-06-08T15:59 (+78)

By Abhi Kumar, Associate Program Officer in Farm Animal Welfare

Note: We used AI (Claude) to draft this post from other documents related to this RFP. All content was reviewed by Abhi and the CG team for accuracy.   

Over 100 billion animals are farmed and slaughtered for food every year. At Coefficient Giving, we think one of the highest-leverage, long-term ways to reduce that number is to fund the development of meat alternatives that are good enough for people to adopt. Since 2016, we've allocated several million dollars toward the development of better and cheaper alternatives to animal products. We now see an opportunity to go deeper on a set of specific, neglected scientific problems related to taste. This Request for Proposals (RFP) is our attempt to accelerate progress, with up to $10 million available. 

Why taste, and why now

Alternative proteins have the potential to reduce animal suffering at enormous scale — but only if consumers actually opt to eat them. Right now, they're not. Plant-based meat household penetration peaked at 20% in 2021 and has since fallen to 13%. One of the primary reasons is taste: 51% of first-time triers say they wouldn't buy plant-based meat again because the taste didn't resemble animal meat, and among lapsed consumers, 36% say better taste and texture would bring them back — the single most-cited factor. At the current scale of factory farming, even small percentage-point shifts in consumption would spare an enormous number of animals. Closing the taste gap is one of the most direct ways to get there.

So why haven’t we already solved taste? I think a big part of the answer is that the field hasn't been rigorous enough about measurement. Most R&D today relies primarily on sensory panels, with food teams iterating on tasters' scores. Sensory data is essential and irreplaceable — products are ultimately eaten, and only humans can tell you whether they taste good. But panels are often underpowered for the subtle differences that separate an okay plant-based burger from a delicious one, and they can tell you something is off without telling you what is off at the level of specific compounds, release timing, or cooking chemistry.

Analytical methods have their own limits — matching volatile fingerprints doesn't guarantee matching perception, and compound-level data alone won't predict what consumers will love. But paired with well-designed sensory work, tools like GC-MS, GC-O, and release-kinetics measurements can give the field something it currently lacks: a clear, measurable benchmark for what meat tastes like, and a diagnostic framework for understanding why a given product does or doesn't match it.

"What is good taste?" is a very hard question — there's no universal answer, and what people like varies by culture, context, and genetics. But "what does meat taste like, and how do we replicate it?" is much narrower and much more tractable — and a place where we think the field can be far more rigorous than it has been.

What we're funding

We're launching an RFP across four priority areas. These are foundational, pre-competitive research problems. They are unlikely to be solved by any single company and are systematically underfunded by both public agencies and private R&D budgets, making them strong candidates for philanthropic support. 

1. Off-flavor reduction in plant and fermented protein ingredients. "Beany" and "grassy" notes in plant-based products are the most common reason consumers reject them. These off-flavors arise from well-understood chemical reactions during harvest, storage, and processing. Known interventions exist: better supply-chain practices, breeding different crop varieties, simple washing and heat treatments. The issue is that nobody has systematically mapped which interventions work best, for which ingredients, at what cost. There are also poorly understood sources, such as off-flavor precursors, that are harder to detect in individual ingredients. We want to fund work that maps existing interventions, and tests techniques to reduce off-flavors from poorly understood sources.

2. Improved fat systems for flavor generation. When animal fat is heated during cooking, it produces aroma compounds that make meat smell and taste like meat. In comparison, plant-based products tend to use vegetable oils where flavors are generally added as a pre-made mix, not generated dynamically during cooking. We're looking for new fat systems — structured fats, novel plant-derived lipids, or purpose-bred oilseed crops — that replicate the taste and mouthfeel of meat when cooked.

3. Egg reduction and replacement. Eggs are one of the most functionally complex ingredients in food — they emulsify, foam, gel, and bind, often all at once. There has been little progress in replacing them despite growing pressure from avian influenza and feed costs. We're most interested in enzymatic approaches that are already showing industry traction for reducing egg use in bakeries, and in hybrid systems that combine multiple partial replacers to cover the full range of what an egg does, particularly in high-volume applications like industrial baking.

4. Characterizing flavor in welfare-priority fish species. Species like carp, tilapia, milkfish, catfish, and pond loach are farmed in enormous numbers and processed into unstructured formats like sauces, pastes, fish balls, and surimi, making them tractable targets for replacement. But two problems block progress: 1) There is almost no public data on what these species taste like at the level of specific compounds, and 2) the analytical methods most labs use today to study flavor correlate poorly with human perception, especially for fish. We want to fund work on both improving analytical-sensory methods and using those methods to build open flavor profiles for welfare-priority species.

Who should apply

We welcome proposals of varying sizes and scopes. Individual awards are expected to range from roughly $100,000 to $1 million, with 2–3 year typical durations (3.5 years maximum). We encourage applications from across the R&D ecosystem: universities, research institutes, startups, established companies, nonprofits, and interdisciplinary teams. We strongly encourage applications that include industry partners or articulate a credible pathway to industry uptake.

The alt-protein field has historically attracted good biologists and good food scientists. We're hoping to also reach analytical chemists, food physicists, breeders, formulators, and engineers. If you're a flavor chemist who has spent a career on dairy aroma, or a food physicist who has never thought about meat alternatives, or a plant breeder working on something completely different, we want to hear from you.

How to apply

We've published a detailed technical context document describing each priority area, the metrics we care about, and the rubrics we'll use to evaluate proposals. Applicants should read this document carefully before applying — proposals that ignore the metrics and methodology preferences described there are unlikely to be competitive.

Applications are open until August 10, 2026. For full details, please see here. Awards will be announced on a rolling basis, with final decisions shared by November 30, 2026.

If you have questions about the application process, please email altproteinrfp@coefficientgiving.org. Please note we can't provide detailed feedback on draft proposals before submission.