This morning NBC’s Today Show showcased an in depth segment featuring some of the best plant-based meat alternatives on the market.

We were thrilled to taste four of these companies’ delicious products (Lightlife, Before the Butcher, Abbott’s Butcher and Good Catch Foods) at Plant Based World Conference & Expo this past June in NYC. My personal favorites are all of Good Catch’s plant-based seafood products, but I also could NOT believe how the Uncut breakfast sausage from Before the Butcher tasted so much like the real thing!

It’s amazing to see the plant-based meat market getting the kind of mainstream media attention it deserves. The best part is, we are still in the very early phases of this industry. The flavors and the health benefits will only continue to improve, so stay tuned!

Read the full article and watch the full video on NBC’s website here: 

Health aside, there is one additional argument in support of opting for plant-based meats: environmental responsibility. Harvard researchers note that there is an “urgent need to reduce meat and dairy consumption” and that “getting protein from plant sources instead of animal sources would drastically help in meeting climate targets and reduce the risk of overshooting temperature goals.”

According to the International Livestock Research Institute, livestock farming used 45% of Earth’s land surface and contributed to more than 18% of global greenhouse gases in 2011.

Plant-based companies can produce a burger with a fraction of the water, land and greenhouse gases of a conventional burger. Beyond Meat claimed it produces 14 Beyond Burgers with the same amount of land it takes to produce one beef burger and 60,837 Beyond Burgers using the amount of water in an average swimming poolversus 312 beef burgers.