There is a worldwide concern regarding the supply of protein source for both
human food and animal feed. In this context, meat has a major impact on the
environment and consumers and health professionals have been expressing growing
concern over high meat consumption. In this respect, meat analogue products - defined
as compounds structurally similar to meat, however, differing in composition - have
been attracting ever-increasing attention and interest of the environment and health
concerned consumers. Furthermore, the number of people identifying as vegetarian and
vegan have been increasing as they look for more sustainable options due to a unique
lifestyle. In this chapter, the main aspects of bottom-up and top-down strategies are
presented and discussed. The literature describes different approaches to simulate
animal meat, such as cell culturing, mycoprotein and spinning techniques (bottom-up
strategies) extrusion, proteins and metal-cation-precipitated polysaccharides, freeze
structuring and shear cells technology (top-down strategies). Meat analogues have to
present typical sensory and nutritional properties of animal meat for both vegetarian
and non-vegetarian consumers. Thus, food scientists ought to test texturization
techniques, develop more industrialized meat analogue products, evaluate the
scalability of production process and quality control of meat analogues, improving the
existing technologies and developing new ones that meet consumer demands.
Keywords: Bottom-Up Strategy, Cell Culturing, Extrusion, Polysaccharides,
Protein, Shear Cells Technology, Top-Down Strategy.