We tried burgers from 2 companies that want to replace meat with veggie patties that 'bleed' — and the winner is clear

beyond burger 7704 The Beyond Meat Burger from TGI Friday's.Business Insider/Jessica Tyler

New companies focused on creating plant-based alternatives to animal-derived meats are on the rise. They aim to re-create the meat-eating experience with veggie burgers that smell, sear, and "bleed" like beef.
Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are two young companies that have developed cutting-edge veggie burgers.
The products can now be found at a Major League Baseball stadium, at TGI Friday's, and at major grocery chains nationwide.
We tasted burgers from the two companies to see which was better.

Raising meat for human consumption is tough on the environment. More than one-third of all raw materials in the US are devoted to raising animals for food, according to the animal-rights group PETA, and it takes 1,847 gallons of water to produce a single pound of beef.

To combat this, new companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are exploring new ways to create sustainable meat alternatives.

While there have long been plenty of soy-based meat alternatives on the market, Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods aim to be different. Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods don't create "lab-grown meat" — a separate innovation that involves growing actual meat in a lab — yet their burgers still smell, sear, and "bleed" as beef does, aiming to please meat eaters by re-creating the experience of eating animal-derived meat without the ethical and environmental drawbacks.

Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio are among investors who have partnered with Beyond Meat to help propel its success. Since launching in 2016, Beyond Meat has sold more than 11 million of its Beyond Burgers, which can now be found at TGI Friday's and in grocery stores nationwide.

Impossible Foods, on the other hand, recently raised an additional $114 million in venture funding in a round led by Singapore's Temasek and Sailing Capital. Most recently, the Impossible Burger made its debut (for a limited time) at Disney's California Adventure and at the Oakland Coliseum, home of the Oakland A's.

We set out to taste both vegan burgers at Bareburger and TGI Friday's in New York City, and while both burgers are healthy and sustainable alternatives to meat, we had a clear favorite: