Impossible/Beyond Taco

Take a standard taco and change one thing in the middle. An Impossible or Beyond taco keeps the whole frame, a warmed tortilla, a savory crumble, onion and cilantro and salsa and lime, and replaces the browned beef or pork with a commercial plant-based ground engineered to behave like it. What separates the two brand names is the trick each uses to read as meat.

Beyond builds its crumble from pea and rice protein colored with beet and apple extract. Impossible stakes everything on a single molecule, soy leghemoglobin, the iron-carrying heme protein it brews in genetically engineered yeast and adds to make the cooked ground turn from pink to brown and taste faintly of blood. Drop either into a tortilla and the format does not have to be rethought; the substitute is asked to do the meat's job and is dressed exactly as the thing it replaces would be.

That heme is the part of the story specific to this filling rather than to plant-based food in general. The FDA issued Impossible a no-questions letter on its leghemoglobin in July 2018, then in July 2019 approved the same ingredient as a color additive, the clearance that let the raw crumble be sold looking red in a supermarket case. It is the reason an Impossible taco can brown on a comal the way ground beef browns instead of staying a flat gray. Cooked timid, any plant ground stays pebbly and weeps moisture into the corn until the bottom tears; cooked hot, pressed thin, drained, and seasoned hard with cumin and chile, the crumble crisps at its edges and takes the lime cleanly. The work is a seasoning and texture problem, and the heme does the one thing seasoning cannot, which is the color.

The clearest proof that the swap can vanish into the format came from Taco Bell. In April 2021 the chain put a proprietary seasoned plant-based crumble into a single store in Tustin, California, as the Cravetarian Taco, a meatless build of its Crunchy Taco Supreme, and tested whether customers would notice the protein was not beef. The following year it turned to a partner. Beginning October 13, 2022, Taco Bell ran a Beyond Carne Asada Steak as a limited test in the Dayton, Ohio area, a marinated plant steak that customers could swap into any menu item at no extra charge, the rare case where the analog did not carry the usual markup. Most other Impossible and Beyond tacos do cost more than their beef versions, because the manufactured ground is dearer than the meat it stands in for.

Order one and the protein is named on the board by its brand, an Impossible taco or a Beyond taco, the company standing in for the cut the way carne asada or al pastor would. These are a menu fixture more than a street-stall tradition, the kind of thing a taqueria adds to reach plant-based diners or a chain runs as a meatless line. Done right, the taco eats like a well-made taco where the protein simply happens to be plant-based, hot and savory and acidic in the right places, close enough that an unsuspecting eater often does not stop to question it until told. Done wrong, the substitution is the only thing on the plate.

A Silicon Valley protein on a Mexican frame

The taco is old and the filling is new. The plant-based ground at the center of this dish comes from two California companies founded within two years of each other. Beyond Meat was started in 2009 by Ethan Brown with the goal of building meat without animals. Impossible Foods was founded in 2011 by Patrick O. Brown, a Stanford biochemistry professor and former Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator who set out to reverse-engineer what makes ground beef taste like beef and decided the answer was heme.

Both chose ground beef as the first target on purpose, because a crumble is more forgiving than a whole muscle. Impossible launched its burger in July 2016, and by 2019 was demonstrating its ground in tacos, sliders, and empanadas to show the product could carry beyond the patty. The taco became one of the proofs that the crumble could pass, an unstructured filling that hid the texture gap a steak would expose.

So the dish has no folk origin and no inventor in the usual sense. Its hardest fixed fact is a corporate one. As recently as 2022 Taco Bell was still testing a Crispy Melt Taco built on its own plant protein in Birmingham, Alabama, more than a decade after Patrick Brown first brewed leghemoglobin in yeast and dropped a Northern California laboratory protein into a tortilla whose form predates it by centuries.