Demolish Foods has unveiled the latest iteration of its platform for manufacturing plant-based meat cuts, Gen4, promising  ‘unprecedented precision’ in replicating conventional meat.

While innovation in plant-based alternatives to whole cuts of meat has increase in recent years, the meat alternatives category is still largely dominated by grounded and shredded formats.

In a statement announcing the launch, Demolish said the alt-protein industry has reached a ‘make-or-break’ point, requiring a ‘transformative’ whole cut manufacturing solution that delivers on taste, texture, nutrition, price and scalability.

The company’s latest platform builds on its Gen3 solution, which was announced last year, designed to replicate meat’s hierarchical structure from microscopic muscle fibres to complex whole cuts.

According to Demolish, the Gen4 platform offers a ‘dramatic advancement’ in technical capabilities and commercial viability, replicating all perceptible components and structures of meat with high precision while scaling up manufacturing throughput.

Conventional and Demolish chicken muscle fascicles and breasts

The Gen4 solution can customise meat beyond the species level and capture the natural variations found in typical animal cuts, Demolish said. Manufacturers can precisely engineer both chewy and juicy sections within the same piece to replicate the authentic texture complexity found in premium meat experiences.

Gen4 cuts can also fuse multiple structures, such as combining the major and minor pectoral muscles of a chicken breast, and is designed to ensure sustained juiciness.

The platform is fully certified for commercial manufacturing, sale and export, and can produce whole cuts in both chilled and frozen forms. Demolish said its flagship chicken breast, made using the technology, is gluten-free, non-GMO and uses just eight ingredients, responding to clean label demand and creating a nutritional profile that matches conventional meat in protein, fat, sodium and caloric content.

Improvements on Gen3 include a 6x increase in production throughput, a 35% reduction in operational expenditure, multi-vendor ingredient flexibility enabling supply chain resilience, and cost-optimised formulation options with minimal impact on final product quality.