Between the Bleeding Burger and the Bean Patty: The Case for the Middle

How the third wave of plant-based is finding power in the space between mimicry and mediocrity

ABBOT’S Whole Burger

Six years ago, Kerry Song sat across from me in a podcast studio in West LA, talking about the future of plant-based food with the kind of quiet conviction that makes you lean in. She'd been building Abbott's for a few years by then, and the industry was drunk on impossibility: bleeding burgers, sizzling sausages, products designed to fool your tongue into thinking plants were animals.

Fast-forward to this week's episode of Eat for the Planet, and Kerry's conviction hasn't wavered. But everything else has.

The market has sobered up. Consumers have started reading labels. And the binary that defined the early plant-based movement — mimic meat perfectly or accept mediocrity — is finally giving way to something more interesting.

What Kerry calls "plant-based food that doesn't pretend."

The False Binary That Trapped Us

Here's the thing about binaries: they're seductive in their simplicity, but they rarely reflect reality.

For too long, we've framed plant-based as an either-or proposition. On one side, you had the high-tech replicas. These products promised transformation through deception; if we could just fool people completely, they'd make the switch without looking back.

On the other side sat the originals: black bean burgers that announced their bean-ness proudly, lentil loaves that crumbled with vegetable honesty, quinoa patties that never pretended to be anything other than what they were. Noble in their authenticity, but often relegated to the freezer aisle of your local co-op, speaking primarily to the already converted.

But what if the most powerful innovation was happening in the space between these extremes?

The Middle Path Is Not a Compromise

Kerry's new burger doesn't bleed. It won't trick your brain into thinking you're eating beef, and it's not trying to. But it also won't fall apart on your grill or leave you rifling through the pantry thirty minutes later, wondering where the protein went.

It's built from whole ingredients like mushrooms, lentils, chia, flax — chosen not for their ability to masquerade as something else, but for their function and flavor. It delivers chew, bite, and that savory umami satisfaction that keeps meat at the center of so many plates. Not as an apology for what it isn't, but as a celebration of what it is.

This isn't compromise; it's strategy.

At Plantega, we've watched this dynamic play out in real time. When we added Abbott's chorizo to a breakfast burrito — paired with plant-based egg, avocado, and spices — it became one of our top sellers almost immediately. That burrito wasn't trying to replicate a bacon, egg, and cheese. It was creating something new while delivering the same comfort and satisfaction that makes breakfast worth getting up for.

Customers didn't need it to "pass" some impossible taste test. Sometimes, they just needed it to taste good and feel like a real meal.

What the Third Wave Actually Looks Like

We're no longer in the first wave of plant-based, when tofu and tempeh were lonely pioneers in a carnivorous world. We've moved beyond the second wave too, which can be categorized as the period of aggressive mimicry when food technology promised to recreate meat so precisely that the transition would be invisible.

That second wave brought innovation, yes, but also confusion and backlash. Consumers started questioning how "plant-based" highly processed products really were; they began reading ingredient lists that looked more like chemistry experiments than recipes.

Now we're entering what feels like a third wave. It's less about spectacle and disruption, and more about integration and resonance.

Consumers still want plant-based options — the data on flexitarianism and reduced meat consumption makes that clear. But they're looking for food that makes sense in their lives: meals that support their health goals, align with their values, and deliver on taste without requiring a leap of faith or a PhD in food science to decode the ingredient list.

Abbott's approach reflects this shift perfectly. As Kerry explained during our conversation, their products aren't designed to convert committed carnivores overnight (though they might). Instead, they're built for flexitarians, health-conscious families, and anyone looking for something craveable, clean, and easy to integrate into their weekly routine.

That means no isolates, no seed oils, no gums or stabilizers that require a chemistry degree to pronounce. Just real food that works.

And it turns out, that's what more and more people are actually looking for.

Stop Choosing Sides. Start Expanding the Table.

The plant-based industry has a habit of getting stuck in false choices. Either you go all-in on molecular gastronomy and hope technology can solve taste, or you stick with vegetables in their most recognizable forms and hope people will accept less satisfaction for the sake of their values.

But that binary limits both our imagination and our impact.

What Kerry and Abbott's are proving — and what I see happening across the industry among the most thoughtful brands — is that there's real power in the in-between. Not everyone wants a burger that tastes like it was engineered in a lab, no matter how impressive the technology. But they also don't want to bite into a bland puck of beans and quinoa that requires significant mental gymnastics to enjoy.

They want food that feels familiar enough to trust, fuels their body the way they need it to, and fits seamlessly into their routine. They want to reduce their meat consumption without feeling like they're making a sacrifice.

Most importantly, they want to trust what they're eating.

Building Something Better Within the Rules

If our goal is to create a food system that's more sustainable, more inclusive, and more aligned with human health, then we need to embrace multiple paths forward. Precision fermentation and cultivated meat may have their place in that future. So do lentils and leafy greens. But let's not overlook the value of foods that are simply well made, flavor-forward, and culturally fluent.

Sometimes the most effective form of innovation isn't the one that breaks all the rules — it's the one that quietly builds something better within them.

Kerry's conviction five years ago was that plant-based didn't need to apologize for itself. Today, that conviction has evolved into something even more powerful: the understanding that plant-based doesn't need to pretend to be something else to win.

It just needs to be good.

Listen to the full conversation with Kerry Song on the latest episode of Eat for the Planet. We explore why plant-based isn't dying but detoxing, what she's learned from scaling a wellness-driven food company, and why the middle might just be the most interesting place to be.

Episode #198 - The Third Wave of Plant-Based: Kerry Song on Wellness, Cravings, and the Middle Path