It's interesting that the material turns into a fluffy mostly-air material when pulled hard. There's a long history of materials that suddenly change properties when processed mechanically in an unusual way.
Tungsten: one of the early breakthroughs was when General Electric figured out how to make ductile tungsten wire and coil it. Tungsten powder is compressed into slugs, which are forced through successively smaller dies. At some point, ductility appears. The rods can then be pulled through still smaller dies until very fine wire appears. This is how incandescent light bulbs were made. (Revisionist history of the light bulb: In 1840, Warren de la Rue invented the light bulb. Basic concept: use a coil of thin wire with a very high melting point. He used platinum. Worked fine, cost too much. Then there was a detour through carbonized paper led by Edison. Not as good, but cheaper. Then, in 1905, William Coolidge figured out how to make tungsten ductile. Now de la Rue's approach was affordable. Carbonized paper was abandoned.)
Steel: It's been known since ancient times that you could heat up a piece of iron and punch a hole through it, widening the piece at that point. That concept can be taken to an extreme. Within a narrow temperature range, you can push a piercer through a long steel bar endwise and turn it into a pipe.[1] That's how thick-walled pipe is made.
Food: The Beyond Meat process is more mechanical than chemical. The basic feedstock is peas. The trick that gives it a meaty texture involves extrusion with both steam and cold. The exact process is proprietary but not that complicated.
This is an area where development has historically required either a huge amount of tries or a lucky accident. Which makes one wonder what new tricks can be found that way by hooking up machine learning to hydrodynamic simulation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_piercing