Pork belly is the rich, fatty cut of meat that bacon comes from. Given how popular bacon is, you can imagine there’s consistent demand for pork belly. But quality is important — specifically, how firm the meat is. Pork bellies that aren’t firm enough are harder to cut and tend to be lower quality.

Now, our clients at NutriQuest don’t raise pigs, but they provide feeds, nutritional supplements, and other products to the people who do. Their sales teams try to show clients the different effects of meat quality in order to explain how NutriQuest’s pig feeds improve meat quality and lead to higher sale prices for farmers. They used to take actual cuts of meat to events, but as you might imagine, that got messy.

NutriQuest asked us to create a collection of faux meat cuts they could display instead. First, they wanted a display to show how one common evaluation of pork belly firmness works. So we engineered two pieces of artificial pork meat showing different firmnesses. Like all our lifelike reproductions, our fake meat is highly realistic. One of the faux meat pieces is properly firm, and the other is noticably limp.

NutriQuest also asked for several smaller fake meat displays. One of them shows different levels of marbling within pork chops, representing levels 1, 4, and 10 on a ten-point scale. Another shows how meat quality affects sausages. The lower-quality sausages have “greased out,” leaving artificial fat inside the package, while the other faux sausages are free from extra grease. The last display is an example of the color samples used to evaluate meat.