These startups hope “blended” food will cut our appetite for red meat

In the fall of 2025, Jeff Dodge set up a six-foot folding table in the cafeteria of Cane Bay High School in Summerville, South Carolina, to conduct a taste test. When the first rush of about 150 hungry students hit, he was waiting with slow cookers filled with steaming marinara sauce and meatballs.

Kids love a taste test, but they’re also discerning, and Dodge wasn’t sure what they would make of his product, a blend featuring both meat and mushrooms. As students swarmed the table and tapped out their opinions on an iPad or scanned a QR code to use their phones, Dodge asked those who lingered to guess what kind of vegetable might have been mixed into the meat. Few of them could—the meatballs had tasted like moist, flavorful beef.

The school enrolls a few thousand students, and Dodge estimates that the majority of them came by. …