Plant-Based Meat Alternatives Taste Test: Four Products Worth Knowing About

Introduction

Meat alternatives have rocketed in popularity over the last five years, but the category is far from consistent. Some products are trying hard to imitate a specific meat, others celebrate a plant ingredient on its own merits, and the gap between those two approaches turned out to be the story of this taste test. We cooked four widely available products into proper dishes and judged them on flavour, texture, and whether they earn a place in a real weekly shop.

What We Were Looking For

Two questions guided the tasting. First, does the product taste good as food in its own right, rather than as a stand-in? Second, does it hold up when a competent cook builds a proper dish around it? The second point matters, because even a bland ingredient can shine when it absorbs flavour well, and even a convincing imitation can fall apart the moment the comparison becomes unavoidable.

Tiba Tempeh

Tempeh is a traditional Indonesian food made from soybeans, naturally fermented into a firm, compact cake with a nutty flavour and earthy aroma. On its own, the Tiba Tempeh wedge is terribly bland, but the whole beans visible in the block make a real difference: they give texture and create countless little nooks for flavour to soak into.

Cooked as gochujang and peanut butter fried tempeh with crispy garlic on top, it completely changed our view. Once fried, it develops a pleasant bite, and the flavour penetrates right to the middle. Sliced thin and fried off as small pieces, it works brilliantly as a side for a Korean-style meal. The honest advice is to treat it as tempeh, not as a bean burger substitute. It cannot fairly be compared to meat, and it does not need to be.

THIS Plant-Based Bacon

THIS is a soy protein product, explicitly marketed as plant-based food for meat lovers, and the smoky bacon rashers are its most persuasive offering. Straight up, the strips are intensely smoky and salty, almost overwhelmingly so, but not in a bad way. The flavour calls to mind everything that surrounds bacon and brisket, and a little goes a long way.

Used as lardons in a mushroom and garlic pasta, the smokiness behaves exactly like a seasoning, and the result was close enough to the real thing to genuinely unsettle long-held assumptions about plant-based meat. In a sandwich build, it lands somewhere between salted beef and thick pastrami. The company is also a certified B Corp, having gone through rigorous testing to verify its sustainability practices. This is unapologetically an imitation product, and it is the best tasting version of what it is not trying to be that we have tried.

Squeaky Bean Deli Slices

Squeaky Bean’s deli slices combine wheat protein, soy, and pea protein, and come in Milano salami, NYC deli pastrami, and Spanish chorizo styles. This is a meat alternative in its most exposed form, trying to replicate artisan charcuterie, and this is where the comparison problem bites hardest. The chorizo-style slice is laced with paprika and genuinely reads as chorizo, but the Milano style fares poorly against a original that many people consider some of the best in the world.

Judged away from the charcuterie board, the slices do not taste bad. The objection is more about positioning: if you have chosen not to eat meat, a product that leans this hard on imitating it can make you miss meat more, not less. If you cannot eat the originals and simply want something deli-adjacent for a sandwich, they do a serviceable job.

Omni Plant-Based Fish Fillets

The Omni Golden Fillet is a part-fried plant-based product designed to simulate a fried fish fillet, complete with a tempura-style coating. It is soy-based, with pea protein, rice protein, potato starch, corn starch, and wheat starch also in the mix. Once cooked, the proteins firm up and the interior goes pleasingly flaky.

The flavour lands closer to a processed chicken nugget than to fish, which the tasters did not consider a flaw. If your benchmark is a nugget or a McChicken-style sandwich, you are on safe ground, and as a fried tempura-style item it is genuinely tasty. Think of it as a big flat nug rather than a fish fillet, and it delivers.

Buying Advice

The clearest pattern from this test: products that celebrate what they are made from tend to succeed, while products that chase an exact meat imitation live or die by how close they get. Tiba Tempeh is the best pick if you cook with sauces and want a versatile, absorbent protein. THIS bacon is the strongest imitation here and worth trying if you miss smoky, salty depth. The Omni fillets are a safe, nugget-adjacent crowd-pleaser. The Squeaky Bean slices make sense mainly for anyone who needs a deli-style option and is not seeking a charcuterie replica.

Conclusion

Imitation meat has come a long way, even if it has not come all the way. A broader mind and a good chef go a long way with this category: the tempeh and the bacon earned genuine enthusiasm, the fillets pleasantly surprised, and the deli slices reminded us that honest positioning matters as much as flavour. Pick based on what you actually want on the plate, not on what the packaging promises.