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On Wednesday, Dunkin' became the first chain to serve Beyond sausage for breakfast.
Dunkin's new Beyond sausage breakfast sandwich is now available at the chain's locations in Manhattan, New York, and will eventually be served nationwide, according to an announcement from the chain.
Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown told Business Insider's Kate Taylor that the company's partnership with Dunkin' is part of an effort to democratize the plant-based "meat" trend and make Beyond Meat products available to a wider range of consumers.
I, a consumer, was skeptical when I heard of this odd couple. When I think of Dunkin', I think of donuts.
But as Business Insider's resident chow chomper, I had a solemn duty to give Dunkin's new Beyond sausage breakfast sandwich a fair chance.
I made my way to a nearby Dunkin' restaurant, and after a brief ordering snafu, I lugged my haul of two sandwiches back to the office. On the table: Dunkin's new Beyond sausage breakfast sandwich and its standard sausage breakfast sandwich.
Two peas in a pod are nothing alike. While the accoutrements are the same, the sausages look very different.
Dunkin's sausage breakfast sandwich is hot, greasy, and heavy.
The buttered and toasted English muffin is soft, the fried egg characteristically overcooked, and the cheese as lopsided as the top bun was before I adjusted it to look nicer.
The real meat sausage is thinner and wider than its Beyond counterpart.
The cheese and sausage carry most of the flavor load while the egg and muffin function more as sidekicks.
That means the sausage has to be full of flavor — and it is. It's juicy, fatty, spiced, and really, really salty. Almost too salty.
Overall, the real meat sausage breakfast sandwich delivers the umami kick you crave from a sandwich of its kind. However, it did leave me feeling the tickle of nascent heartburn.
The Beyond patty is thicker but smaller in circumference, and it's a lighter shade of brown.
The patty looks noticeably different from Dunkin's meat sausage, but it also looks like some meat sausages I've eaten in the past.
Upon first bite, the Beyond sausage tastes like meat. But chewing it reveals that it's not.
Although Beyond has done an excellent job of creating a meat-like texture to its sausage, there's a noticeable pea-like aftertaste. It also isn't bursting with salt and fat like the real sausage is.
The Beyond sausage has a clear plant-based taste and a milder flavor than the real sausage, but it feels better in digestion. If it were saltier and fattier, it'd more closely mimic the flavor of the meat sausage, but I'm not sure I'd want it to.
I'd say that the real meat sausage sandwich still tastes better. After all, the breakfast sandwich recipe was crafted around it. But Beyond's sausage isn't really much worse. It just tastes more like the suggestion of sausage than like a real sausage.
If I hadn't had the meat sausage as reference, I might have been fooled by the Beyond sausage. And when it comes down to it, the Beyond sandwich gave me everything I wanted out of a sausage breakfast sandwich without the carbon footprint of beef. It's the one I'll order next time.
