The problem with Beyond Meat is that it is insanely expensive. I could buy a free range, organic and grass fed beef burger for the price of their ultra processed burger.
Don’t get me wrong, as a vegetarian, I think they taste nice. They are just too damn expensive and not particularly healthy which goes against why I am a vegetarian. In Europe we have so many alternatives that are insanely cheaper and, as an Indian, we have so many alternatives that haven’t been processed to within an inch of their life.
One thing I found to be a great homemade burger maker is simply getting some dried minced soy protein, mix with some eggs, breadcrumbs and seasoning before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty. Tastes great, holds it shape and has a burger like texture.
The rule of thumb is that the ultra-processed food should not account for a too large part of your diet. The protein powder is usually taken as a supplement and in small quantities, as opposed to food like twinkies people can easily overeat on. But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
Do you think that the poster who used the phrase "processes food hysteria stuff" unprompted is intending to make a statement about the broadness or usefulness of the category.
The bulk of the harm from ultra-processed foods was specifically from meats, with smaller contributions coming from sugary drinks and dairy desserts. It’s the pink slime, reconstituted McRib, and hot dogs that are causing the most significant health problems.
Beyond burgers have no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. They’ve got significantly lower saturated fats. Studies have shown that swapping out regular burgers for Beyond burgers lowers your LDL cholesterol and TMAO.
I’m not going to pretend they’re as healthy as a burger made out of black beans and carrots. But if concerns about UPFs are your primary reason for avoiding them then you can relax; they’re not that bad.
No, nothing to do with hysteria. We simply have not had access to the substance long enough to be able to accurately say what the long term effects on health are and I cannot help but to assume that there has been a lot of unnatural processing in-order to turn a small, green, pea into a patty which resembles beef.
Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.
Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not?
Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate?
Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it?
If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?
Thanks for linking that. Their rubric for ultra-processed is easy enough to grow that folks could use this at a grocery store. We're on a kick to remove "parameters" from tasks right now, so this definition is clearer than thoughts like "stick to the outside of the store."
It was more unhealthy in the past due to the sodium, saturated fat, and possibly some of the additives/preservatives. It was unhealthy enough that the company even changed to a new formula with avocado oil, which might be better, but I haven't looked into it.
Many vegetarian meat substitutes, including the Beyond Burger, contains methylcellulose. It is one of several emulsifiers both often associated with "ultra-processed foods", and known from several studies to affect the mucus lining the intestinal wall, increasing the risk for infection and suspected of increasing cancer risk.
Being a vegetarian, after having suffered colon cancer twice, I now too eat only burger patties I've made myself (similar recipe to the one above), and also use only real mayo and sour cream, so as to avoid those emulsifiers.
What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.
> clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed
The processing is done with a purpose.
> All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption
Source?
Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
Do you have some studies proving out that control for vegetables and sugar is all that is needed? I am skeptical that just controlling for those would eliminate the risks with other processing ingredients such as cured meats.
Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general.
European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory.
Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
“Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements.
For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns.
Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.
> They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.
This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"
In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary.
The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".
Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction…
When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
It allows you to add some pressure to the patty while providing it a restricted space in which it can expand. By doing so the ingredients seem to form a much stronger bond (from my experience). I used to do the same with beef when I ate it.
Also, rolling it into a ball and then wrapping before flattening gives a much better shape to the resulting patty
Is this really a problem with Beyond Meat or a problem with our policies not correctly pricing meat due to not caring about the environment or animal welfare?
It's the same policy whether it's real meat patties or beyond meat, because beyond beef has the same main ingredient as the feed for the cattle: soybeans.
Besides the reasons of sheer taste, another good reason is culture. Meaning, the preexisting meat-eating culture at a place. One of the reasons why vegan / vegetarian / etc options are often lacking is because there is no longstanding culture of eating those dishes at that certain place, and so, a vegan dish will likely come from a meat dish, minus the meat. But that dish is created around the meat, so without the meat, it will be lacking, like taking the patty out of a burger, or taking the meatballs out of the spaghetti with meatballs.
So, a quick solution is to create a substitute to the missing thing. That way, the culture problem is immediately solved, as the alternative dish will the be the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted. As a bonus, it will be very similar to the existing, accepted culture, so the participant doesn't become an outsider. Also, for many, it's easier to adopt, than changing the culture entirely.
Why do so many people ask this question about burgers? It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.
These replacements have value because sometimes you want the thing that gives you that nostalgia kick or whatever specific feeling you associate with food. Old school plant based replacements don't always feel right for this.
I became vegetarian early in life mostly because of the industrialisation of meat production, and the treatment of animals within that system, and the perception that it's just an incredibly unhealthy production line (e.g. steroid use in livestock, etc)
I recall enjoying meat flavours, so I'd be tempted to try this fake meat for occasional, one-off enjoyment.
And I say one-off as my experience says there are enough flavours and alternatives out there such that a replacement like this isn't really needed at all. That might be the real market issue for Beyond Meat (in my life, anyway).
I always feel like people are being intentionally obtuse when making these arguments. I'm vegan and know many vegans who enjoy beyond meat. We didn't go vegan because we didn't like the taste of things which were traditionally derived from animal flesh, and it's nice to be able to enjoy effectively the same foods without the animal exploitation.
Why do you fucking think? Because it's tasty. You can disagree with the ethics of how we make animals suffer because they taste nice and still think they taste nice.
This is a non sequitur, but I don't know. I don't. I think the reason is people aren't used to eating plants and find the tastes and textures disagreeable. It's a taste that can be acquired at any time, though. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, but I'd only go back if I was literally starving. Vegetables taste so much better, but you need a cuisine that does vegetables properly, like Indian or Mexican. Trying to do a bland cuisine like American or British without meat isn't going to be a good time.
"The entire population" doesn’t want to eat only beef and drink milk, however those are way more subsidized than other food. The real winners are food mega corps and a few rich farmers.
Remove the targeted subsidies and "the entire population" will eat less meat and more peas. Subsidize the peas and not the meat and you’ll see vegans skyrocket.
Colonialism was great. It literally took continents out of pre history and brought them to the civilized world. So your moralization doesn't stand true even today.
Colonialism ENDED the genocide that was going on in most of Africa before the Ottoman empire was defeated. A genocide generally referred in older texts as "the islamic slave trade", because islamic economies were entirely dependent on the slave trade for more than a millenium, oh and because it's part of the religion/state that islam was at the time.
Economically it was quite accurate to say that the islamic slave trade WAS islam. As in, everything else was a rounding error. Even now, because the slave trade is still easily 95% of the entire existence of the religion.
For "some" reason people are now trying to rename it "African slave trade". Not at all to get people to focus on the 1% of slaves that went to work in western colonies in the New World (which is what Americans historically called it).
Like the one the aztecs regularly unleashed upon their neighbors? Or any pre-colonial tribe in the Americas or Africa (in this case up until this day really). What did the Romans brought us really?
An excuse like "everyone else was doing it!" only goes as far as making my ancestors "not spectacularly evil", it definitely does not make them "good".
The railways are in the plus column, but would you accept your country being taken over by several different groups of aliens who draw random-seeming lines on the maps that even split up your existing cities between them, each forcing their own language and religious customs on their bit of your land, being really brutal in their suppression of any resistance campaigns, in exchange for a network of teleporter booths?
The implication of this statement is probably supposed to be that it's the west that did that. However, colonialism never conquered Africa. They took over Ottoman/muslim colonies. Muslims, and by that I mean the now dead state that is the religion, conquered 90% of the colonies, and inherited the remaining 10% from the Romans. The only big exception to that is the US.
In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
I'm not sure how that justifies war. It just means that the outcome of a war can be better than if there never was a war. Obviously both sides in any given war believe that. Ask a few Ukrainians how that works, they can explain.
That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those subsidies.
If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
> That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those subsidies.
By global average, under 15% of farm revenue is derived from government subsidies. USA is below that, at about 10%. Not sure if I'd call that massive, but that's semantics so it's a little hard to argue against. Does potato agriculture get massive subsidies?
> If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
The assumptions being that 1. potato farming get relatively much less subsidies as beef (and other meat) farming; 2. cost is such a factor in consumption that price change would cause "a lot" of difference. I don't think either are very safe, and as a general statement it doesn't follow that just reducing agricultural subsidies increases ratio of beef to potato (or meat to vegetable): EU subsidies are much higher than US, but USA eats far more beef per capita.
The market decides the price, but politics decide the constraints of the market. Agriculture in particular is heavily involved with the government, because agriculture is very risky, and needs large investments. The government already decides what we care about, and is already pretty corrupt because of the "market" powers - the different lobbies - influence it.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
All in all, despite the fact that it is not real meat, nothing proves that Beyond Meat production is better for the planet. If you factor production materials, energy,... Not sure what it gives.
From what I understood why BM production was limited and expensive is that nothing beats nature. Cow meat manufacturing process was refined by nature for ten of thousands of years to be the most optimized possible.
That's a political decision that needs to be applied to the alternative protein industry. However, given the current political climate and the acceptance of disinformation, that's going to be challenging.
So the biggest problem here is that Beyond Meat has a huge debt due in just 2 years:
That’s a problem given that $1 billion in convertible bonds come due in March 2027. Beyond Meat has no way to repay that debt, and the credit markets know it: The bonds currently trade at about 17 cents on the dollar.
To put the "$1B" number into the context, Beyond Meat sold $300M worth of plant-based meats last year, and made a net operating loss of $156M. Their total assets are $600M, and the market capitalization is only $260M as of today.
If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
> The company expects the figure to reach about $330 million in 2025, roughly 10% higher than it was six years earlier despite a huge increase in the number of products offered.
It’s not like they have any growth potential to speak of that would enable them to service that debt.
It’s a bit hard to see who their target market is or, rather, it’s a bit hard to see that the market segment they’re aiming for is big enough for them to grow at an appreciable rate. To me it reads like they just didn’t do their homework up-front - e.g., an in depth segmentation - in determining their addressable market.
Vegetarians and vegans I know want protein sources in their diets but they don’t necessarily want meat substitutes, so perhaps BM’s products aren’t that appealing to them.
Meat eaters possibly have low awareness of BM and, unless they’re particularly principled - and wealthy enough to absorb the additional cost - are unlikely to pay the same price, or more (at least here in the UK), for meat substitutes than they’d pay for actual meat.
Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.
If BM’s products were more affordable and better advertised they’d have a better chance at widespread adoption but it’s very hard to plot a route from where they are now to there. Also, this doesn’t solve for the portion of the market who aren’t looking for explicitly meaty meat substitutes.
As you say, it does appear hopeless.
(FWIW, I’ve eaten BM burgers on several occasions. They’re excellent but I’m not normally willing to pay the premium for them versus actual beef patties, or making our own.)
I would guess the primary target market is ex meat eaters that are trying to go vegetarian but have been raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat. I am in this group. I agree it’s not a very large market for the reasons you stated above. However, maybe BM hoped they could grow that market, I.e. convince more meat eaters to give it up for ethical reasons.
I am in a similar group; the mostly-vegetarian. Chicken when I don't have a real choice, red meat at a wedding like once a year or something.
I like beyond meat products, the price is obviously a problem but they go on sale locally frequently enough to be a good substitute for us.
Something about them I HATE though is that they have two burger products that are extremely similar with one main difference: product A is kept frozen and requires thawing to cool properly and product B is kept frozen and cooks from frozen.
They are so similar that we accidentally get the wrong one all the time.
Once cooked, both products are indistinguishable from an eating perspective. Get product A the fuck outta here, please.
> If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
Why is that hopeless? Maybe I'm too green or optimistic but that just requires long-term planning.
Also inflation will make it a bit easier.
One thing I find tough for them personally is that I like the Impossible burger a lot more. I find Beyond meat not tasting like meat, not enough. Since that's the case, I'd rather just have any mushroom/whatever veggie burger. I wonder how other consumers perceive this.
The article mentions this as an agreement between the bondholders and shareholders, I believe, who are both mutually incentivized to come to agreement. If I understood correctly the bondholders agree to a future convertible note of some sort.
That's got to be an incredible expenditure then. Considering their pricing compared to the better store brand alternatives, while not lacking any scale disadvantages, I expect high margins on the products themselves.
They need to announce that they are working on lab grown meat and expect to be shipping 10 million patties a month by the end of the year. Then at the end of year say you have a new formula that will halve costs and will be shipping 15 million a month by mid 2026. Rinse and repeat. Just like Tesla.
> If they could magically ... it would take 20+ years ...
It's worse than that - 10% profit on $300M sales is only $30M/year.
Vs. "risk-free" US Treasury bonds currently yield 4% to 5% - so parking $1B there would earn you $40M to $50M per year.
Nobody's insane enough to loan money to Beyond Meat at US Treasury rates. And even if someone was - Beyond would still fall deeper into debt every year, because they couldn't even keep up with the interest.
The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that. I rather see more and more friends and people avoid eating meat or reduce their consumption drastically. Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.
I have been eating plant based meat alternatives for four years now, and I am never going to go back to eating meat. Yes, these products may be ultra processed food, but I cannot justify the ecological consequences and the suffering brought upon the animals just so I can eat a piece of their muscle tissue.
Our lifestyle is not sustainable, we have to look for alternatives. And young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption.
> The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed.
I don't see this message in there. If you ask me the real message is that companies trying to sell overly processed, way too expensive, imitations of "something" will struggle. They're trying to sell a very expensive mechanical horse. Just give people a car.
Maybe it's a US thing where people are more emotionally attached to the concept of the burger. But I think these companies would be better off selling plant based stuff that doesn't need to be processed to the moon and back with the associated costs, just to imitate the real thing, and still fall short.
Plant based food has been around for millennia, focus on that. More people would eat plant based food if it was more accessible in terms of price and effort to prepare. Imitating a meat burger wastes resources and results in something most meat eaters won't actually find as a good alternative, beyond the novelty factor.
Often I think it's largely based on the types of food people grew up with. Meat and potato diets seem to struggle with reducing the meat part of their diet. People often try to eat the same stuff but substitute meat with bad imitations of meat. In other places, as an example, Indian food has plenty of choices without meat and is delicious.
As a meat eater trying to casually reduce my meat consumption, I find myself buying more tofu, lentils and beans, rather than processed meat-like substitutes. I think that is the issue. People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.
The biggest issue to me is that beyond and impossible aren’t just making replacements that are worse than meat, they are making things that are worse than the alternatives we already had.
A beyond burger might be more like meat than a patty made from beans or lentils, but it tastes worse and has a worse nutritional profile. Beyond chicken isn’t even all that similar to chicken and it’s a worse substitute than seitan for something like wings.
Beyond meat burgers taste like flavored plastic grounds, so until these plant based alternatives can close the taste gap its not going to go anywhere. And they have had years to make it taste better, so I suspect theres something fundamental that makes it very difficult.
It is just too much to ask the public to buy worse tasting food at a higher price, all to feel morally better about yourself.
> Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that.
Neither do I, but it's a highly competitive market that competes with both the established industrial meat market, as well as people actually educating themselves on cooking without "meat". I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy, let's just swap one thing out for another, instead of find / cook something different entirely. I see it as a kind of middle-class virtue signaling, which wasn't helped by the fact the meat replacements are (or used to be, I haven't checked) more expensive than meat. Even though on paper they should be cheaper because growing vegetables should be a lot less resource intensive and more sustainable than the meat equivalent.
Soy and oat milk is also incredibly expensive compared to cow for what it is. Same for most supermarket tofu in the West. The cheapest own-brand tofu in Tesco is the same as the beef mince (£6.50/kg).
And even though I like tofu, it's 90% water and that's a terrible deal. A 500g pack of tofu doesn't go nearly as far as 500g of beef mince.
Meanwhile you can buy it in a UK Chinese supermarket for under £3.50 per kg.
Perhaps there isn’t much demand in your Tesco. Store brand (organic) soy milk is 0.9€ here in Paris which is cheaper than the organic cow alternative - which is subsidized btw.
6.5£ for seems super cheap for beef and I’m sure tofu can be even cheaper when optimized. I find it here at the same price but it’s organic and grown in France. I wish it become more popular where you live so the prices become more competitive.
Beyond Meat is industrial plant-based protein. The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants. That means their market is is poor and lower middle-class folks—hence the distribution through fast food and mid-grade grocery channels.
They’re not buying plant-based proteins. (The conscientious are already eating plants.)
Beyond Meat is broken as a mass-market brand. It should be restructured as a niche play.
> young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption
> don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand
It’s not. The premium options for plant-based foods are vast, fresh and more expensive than BM.
Beyond Meat isn’t serving premium. It’s premium to the lowest-grade ground beef. But that’s like saying a basic economy seat is premium to Greyhound. Technically true. But misleading relativism.
> The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans
Globally? Sure. In developed countries, of course not.
Delicious vegetarian food is already a thing, and doesn't require new technology, and it's not necessary to completely eliminate meat-eating to significantly reduce your ethical-harm footprint. It's a matter of changing food culture. Once you adapt to an omnivore diet that contains tasty meals from both meat and non-meat cuisine, it's actually quite easy to reduce your meat intake further.
I was raised as a meat eater and ate it for 30 years. I’ve been vegetarian for about a decade for ethical reasons that I do believe are incompatible with eating any meat. I consider myself a good cook and make vegetarian/vegan meals for my family every night. However: I will never stop thinking that the taste of chicken, pork, beef and lamb are desirable. The conditioning is too strong. Sticking with vegetarianism is still an act of willpower for me. This is why I like meat alternatives.
Everything comes down to world population, which has quadrupled in a century, making the previously-sustainable now unsustainable.
But even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'. And 'growth' is most easily obtained by creating more consumers and more workers.
Whether it will happen "naturally" because of climate catastrophes and war, or whether we will somehow understand this and do something before it's too late, I can 100% assure you that the world economy in 2100 will be smaller than today.
Reddit-tier take. You probably live somewhere extremely urban. I don't, and everyone I know is tired of the forced veganism meme. Tired of them putting their not-meat next to actual meat, and not-milk next to actual milk, trying to trick people into buying it. I have never seen a person put it in their shopping basket. Stores are now finding that this crap isn't selling like they want it to, and they're forced to scale it back.
Your experience is not universal and just because you haven't seen anybody do it doesn't mean that people haven't. If anything it is your take that is reddit tier. Nobody forces you to buy that stuff, people who want to eat that stuff do. Have you tried being any less entitled?
Considering that this manufacturer of ersatz meat is unprofitable and bordering on insolvent, it seems that people do not, empirically, want to eat it.
Whether they taste nice is debatable. They had an odd aftertaste for me. I would much rather have a good mushroom or black bean burger. They taste better to me, are cheaper, and probably more healthy.
It’s interesting that alternative meat consumption in the U.S. is struggling but taking off in Europe.
One thing I noticed after moving to the UK: alternative milk is normalized here. Like, it’s so common to avoid milk that if you order coffee without specifying, you will be asked what kind of milk you want.
Here in hill country Texas, even Walmart sells MorningStar corn dogs. H-E-B carries most of the Impossible line including meatballs. I made some dirty rice with the IF ground "beef" and it was awesome. There's almost no oil in it, browning onions and peppers required adding some avocado oil (never use olive oil for high temperature cooking).
PS: I'm a lazy vegetarian who will eat a real burger every few months. When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
> When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
Cheese I really doubt will get there any time soon. It's pretty doable to make milk-free cheese alternatives with eggs - at least in terms of taste - which is probably per gram a lot more sustainable than proper cheese, but there wouldn't be any market for it.
Part of their financial woes might come from them paying for shelf space at retailers and/or making sale guarantees. A grocery chain will gladly carry a poorly performing product if the manufacturer is paying them to do so.
I don't know I've been in Bristol and Cornwall last week and was always asked. I guess you can extend that to anywhere they might reasonably expect a Londoner to turn up.
According to Good Food Institute (which is a plant-based food lobbying group), 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023 and 33% of UK households bought plant-based meat alternatives at least once during 2023.
For a less biased source, a 2022 ipsos poll found that 48% of the UK uses alternative milk and 58% " use at least one plant-based meat alternative in their diet".
I think things dropped a bit since then due to cost of living crisis.
Having lived in both the US and Europe, I have to imagine at least some of that comes down to cost. In Europe, the plant based alternatives (at least where I lived) were actually cheaper, and meaningfully so.
Also, they taste better? I have been a vegetarian since 1999. Even in the small village I lived with my parents, the local supermarket had a meat replacement section. Later I moved to a larger city and the product selection at supermarkets is very large and nice. A few years ago, supermarkets also started carrying Beyond Meat products. We tried them a few times, but they taste absolutely horrible compared to local offerings that have been developed for decades now.
In my neck of the woods you can easily find plant-based alternatives, but I've found that the best ones are those that don't try too hard to mimic meat.
From a "macro" nutrition perspective they're also much, much better (more protein, less carbs) and don't usually contain a bunch of weird oils and other crap.
However, they're usually a bit more expensive than actual meat.
Same in Germany (~1€/l for milk, 2€/l for pretty much all milk replacements.
You can obviously buy more expensive milk to, which would give it price parity... But there are also more expensive replacement products. On average, the replacement products cost about 50-100% more.
The only way to save money via vegetarian meals is by making everything yourself and not the finished products from the supermarkets (at that point the relationship reverses - making meat meals about twice as expensive)
And I feel the urge to point out the obvious: the reason why the vegetarian replacement products get ever more space in supermarkets is precisely because they've got a gigantic profit margin, whereas the "traditional" milk/meat products have razor thin margins
Lidl has oat/soy milk for 99 cents, and the NoMilk clones for 1,50. In fact, Lidl had a respectable replacement line up now. If you only buy Alpro Milk then yeah, it's gonna be more expensive, but prices have come down tremendously, especially once the discounters hopped on that train.
Yesterday I bought some oat-based milk-like at Aldi for 90c/l (regular price). It's labeled "oat drink", so might not substitute milk. The (literal) "almost milk" product is listed online for 1,09€/l. They also had options based on other stuff for a similar price.
First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.
Sure, but if nobody buys them, a 1000% profit margin won't get them very far. So I think that it's a good enough indicator that more people are buying these products.
Here in Korea where soy milk has been a staple forever, its price has more than doubled over the last 5 years, now ~$1.4/L. Still cheaper than milk currently at ~$1.7/L, but it used to be twice as cheap as milk.
BM is getting rarer on the shelves in Austria. When it first showed up, it was something special, but now there are heaps of great other alternative meats, often cheaper and made here. I guess BM is struggling because of increased competition. During my 20 years of plant based dieat it has never been easier to find fancy plant based things.
I posted before: I care more about the nutritional content being close to meat than the look and taste; specifically, similar macro-nutrient ratios and whatever micro-nutrients are rare outside of meat.
I also care about it being cheap in theory, even if it's more expensive in practice because the company hasn't scaled up. But really, as long as it's not ridiculously expensive, and isn't missing some nutrient or balance that would mess up my diet, I'd buy it for the environment.
I remember when veggie burgers first came out and they actually featured veggies and tried to taste like veggies instead of psuedo-meat patties. They were so good! Then everything tried to just clone meat, poorly, in taste and texture and they were so much worse. But those first ones that really tasted like veggies were delish.
Are you a vegetarian? I'm not, and really enjoy a good black bean patty. But when I crave a juicy beef hamburger, I have one. Vegetarians might prefer to satisfy cravings with something closer to their childhood memories than a black bean patty.
I remember the veggie burgers they're talking about and they weren't black bean patties. The one I remember had potato with peas in it... god, it was delicious
I'm glad that people have the option of those if they like them. Personally, I find the veggie patties to be awful in both taste and especially texture. I was thrilled when there started being options other than the pervasive gardenburgers.
Zero sodium also kills you because you need electrolytes to live. Like almost literally every complex system, there is a zone of moderation/goodness/health.
It actually nearly killed my wife’s grandmother. Until some doctor realized she avoided salt like the plague, gave her some and she made a miraculous discovery.
OK, we need to pick something apart here, because I see this a lot and it's annoying.
UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
The problem is that UPFs come from manufacturers who are trying to get you to buy more of their product, by playing tricks with the brain's response to it.
There are food labs where people are having their brain scanned while they sip different soda formulations, tobacco companies buying food companies to apply their research methodologies, and people figuring out packaging noises and shapes in order to make your old/slow brain excited at the crap you're about to eat (the pringles can is hard to use on purpose, for example). This is all symptomatic of a global food industry that needs you to buy more food, so needs you to consume more food, regardless of nutritional impact.
I recommend reading Chris van Tulleken's book and watching (if you can) the documentaries he made on the subject.
Yes, the Brazilian paper that started all this said "UPF is harming the health of the nation", but the root cause was not UPF processes, it was food industry processes that often require them to produce UPF.
It isn't the UP that makes the F bad, it's that some profitable but bad F needs UP to be viable.
It is therefore perfectly possible for meat substitutes to be UPF and healthy, just as some other UPFs are healthy. In fact, arguably they need to be both to survive.
>UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
The only thing in that list that I agree with is Yogurt. Sure, if you live in Europe where they've banned some of the more harmful ingredients and processes and you are taking about very limited quantities, maybe they are not so bad for you but that just puts in the same league as wine or beer.
"Ultra Processed Food" - I suspect? I disagree, IMO. It feels like a oversimplification, it's a sometimes useful rule of thumb that works in some cases, but not in others. Definitely not the end all be all of nutrition.
i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat.
why not plant based lobster, crab, sea cucumber or sea urchin or sharks fin or something similar. that is unproductive? or impossible to farm? and perhaps even endangered? something that plant based processes are closer to competing on price.
This is too bad. Beyond and Impossible opened up the door to me gradually becoming vegan. It was similar enough to real meat that I didn’t miss meat anymore, and from there I found other substitutions which were healthier. Without them I’m sure I never would have started a plant-based diet.
Deciding to abandon meat is a lot like quitting cigarettes. Sometimes you need a long time to ease off, some artificial/processed replacement (e.g. nicotine patches), it won't feel the same or "good enough", there's a lot of psychological struggle, even your body just demands its shot. It can take a lot of dedicated effort.
And sometimes it just hits you: this is bad for me, I haven't been wanting it for a good while, and I want it gone now. I've quit meat just like that, almost exactly 15 years ago, never looked back.
I've never liked Beyond or such, it was unlike anything I'd actually want to eat. But we should still empower people who want to quit, but can't do so easily.
I haven't tried it as a blue cheese sub dressing but if I just taste it on my chop sticks I feel it's at least in the same general direction. I'm pretty confident I could blend it into a a dressing or put it on a burger as a blue-cheese substitute.
Damn shame about the corporate drama, so it's possible the formula could/might change but the products were outstanding for the problem they're trying to solve the last time I tried them
Cheese uses lots and lots of milk. There are questions of ethics (the treatment of dairy cows is often less than stellar) and carbon footprint (cheese is worse than pork, for example.)
I'd really love to see some good alternatives, too. I don't really expect to give up all cheese anytime soon, but having a substitute for at least some of it would be helpful.
Such figures are usually "per gram of protein", in which case, sure. Thing is, it's very common for people to eat 200+ grams of pork in one meal, whereas e.g. grated cheese on a pasta dish is <10g. A big slice of cheese is 25-28g, and half the time it's significantly less than 100% actual cheese, with a good amount of filler. The only cheeses that one might eat 50g+ of in one sitting are extremely mild ones like mozzarella, and those are the easiest to replace.
I've tried the thick cut filet and just like you're not going to mistake Impossible for actual burger, so too with the filet but it's a good texture and does help fill the longing for steak for me
Juicy Marbles is legitimately the best plant-based replacement if you're interesting in smoking/BBQ'ing on a grill. I use them for pot-lucks with people.
Ingredients make it look like engineered soy. Is there a secret sauce to making it better than meat for someone who doesn’t have that level of ethical granularity?
My experience with Beyond (~4 years ago), was that it wasn't as good as Impossible. Impossible seemed like meat, Beyond seemed like nuts mashed into paste.
Yeah, I never understood the hype for Beyond's products. They must have just had great marketing or something because their meat barely tasted any better than any other frozen veggie burger.
Impossible Foods was always more impressive, both from a taste and scientific perspective. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars into cutting-edge food science, including a new plant-based heme production process. That's in contrast with much of their competition (like Morningstar, or countless other brands) who just slapped together some bean paste and spices and called it a day.
I kinda think beyond meat is for ppl who care about taste. You can fake meat taste and texture much cheaper.
For ppl who care about nutrients, artificial meat seemingly gets more expensive and you also need licenses probably and what not.
Health wise it's in your own best interest to eat animals that fave been able to forage and graze in the sun. See Vitamin d and so on. Those ppl won't buy factory slurry.
Over here, beyond meat is simply more expensive than just buying meat. On top of that, it feels like you eat pure ultra processed product magic chemistry and thats not good. So who exactly is the target audience for that?
I'd totally buy it, if it competes with meat prices by being cheaper and if there wasn't so much effort into trying to look like meat and taste like meat, which goes against the entire premise.
I am all for eating more vegetables. But putting ultra processed mashed up shit to replace the real thing just sounds like an avenue for disaster health wise.
It is, and people seem to ascribe some implicit goodness to these companies because they’re seen as providing an alternative to an implicitly evil industry and degenerate dietary choice. Truth is, they’re running the same game, just with a less wholesome food product.
It’s always been awful IMO. Tastes like sawdust with a congealed vegetable oil binder and chemical flavorings that approximate meat. A straight up bean burger is better and far less processed.
Its way better than a bean burger IMHO. As a vegan, what I like most about Beyond burgers are that they are consistent, and pretty amazing at not being awful. If I'm in a random restaurant with a few token vegan options, the last thing I want to do is take a chance on some potentially terrible homemade bean or chickpea burger. If they have Beyond or Impossible, I know exactly what I'm getting.
Absolutely better than the crappy black bean or chickpea patties you'd get at most burger joints. I'd much rather have Beyond or Impossible at a cookout as well.
Our local drive in movie theater (remember those) offers various meal options including burgers, and I've taken to ordering the Impossible there because somehow several times in their beef burgers I've gotten significant bone chunks, to the extent that I was surprised I didn't break a tooth on them.
It could have to do with how they're prepped. Even the real thing can taste like sawdust and grill marks if done incorrectly. I'm personally biased towards veggie burgers and prefer them over the real thing but in the last year, I've been to multiple cookouts where both "burger dudes" and kids have chosen beyond over meat.
I agree that the level of process is questionable but, if done well, I don't think it lacks in flavor.
I bought one of these by mistake during the pandemic and immediately gagged trying to eat it. Then checked the label and realized what I had bought wasn't what I thought it was.
I’m a vegetarian and have been for about 30 years. None of the fake meat really appealed to me. I don’t factor anything that looks or tastes like meat into my diet. The same is true of other long term vegetarians that I know. I did try the products and they were “meh”.
It suspect it mostly appealed to meat eaters who felt a little guilty about it due to marketing and social pressure. But the expense and the general inferiority of their products was enough for it to wear off quickly. I don’t blame them for not bothering.
I will add I’m not a strict vegetarian - I’ll eat meat in places where it’s not socially understood what vegetarians are. Arguing with some guy in the middle of nowhere in Central Asia about the chunk of horse you just got served isn’t productive. Whatever you want to do is fine.
I've been vegetarian for about 8 years and won't buy them and try to avoid them in restaurants because they're too meat-like. Unfortunately they've made good non-fake meat vegetarian burgers (black bean, wild rice, etc) harder to find.
It's a situation of "You know that thing you don't eat, don't like, and don't have cravings for anymore? We made something that tastes exactly like it. You're going to love it!"
I'm glad they existed when I first went vegetarian as they made the transition easier, but its a tough market when people will go off them in a couple years.
I'll echo what some of the other commenters have stated:
I'm not vegan nor vegetarian, but I definitely align with many of the reasons that one would choose to be so. There are environmental and animal welfare concerns with the meat industry that simply cannot be ignored.
With that in mind, I try _choose_ a non-meat-based option when it's feasible. I do my best to vote with my dollar. Beyond Meat and Impossible have made this option available significantly more often in the past couple years.
When I shop for meat at the grocery store to cook at home, I've effectively stopped buying "real" meat for my standard meals. Unless I'm cooking some special or something specific, I simply buy Beyond Meat/Impossible for my standard meals. The same applies when eating out -- if there's a meat alternative, I will go for it (even absorbing the $2-3 upcharge).*
This is not to say that I _only_ go for the meat-alternative-based non-meat dishes. I often go for a tofu or mushroom alternative too. I don't even think Beyond Meat/Impossible taste _like_ the meat they're trying to substitute -- they're just simply good, meat-y, protein-y, umami-y flavors that I simply can't get enough of.
The more options there are for people like me the better. My diet has been able to shift closer and closer to removing meat entirely, but it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing battle. I just want to eat _less_ meat, not _no_ meat.
* One thing that's frustrating to me as someone that's not _actually_ a vegetarian/vegan is that restaurants often make the assumption that if I'm choosing the meat-alternative, then I must be vegetarian or vegan. No, I still want the cheese or the dairy, or even the meat (e.g.: an Impossible Cheeseburger with real bacon is still delicious). I'm trying to reduce, not _eliminate_, meat from my diet.
If you care about the ethical reasons for plant-based meat, you should look at the companies business practices behind the scenes when they think no one is paying attention - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1927531529883762920
You shouldn't take it so personally that they're suing you. They're obligated to try to defend their copyright if they want to be able to continue using it.
Because after 8 years the idea of eating meat has no remaining appeal and is switching more to mild revulsion. Why would I order a substitute that is a close copy of that?
I'll still get them if there's literally no other vegetarian option on the menu, but that's rare.
There’s no way to say this without sounding like an asshole but perhaps in 8 years your memory of what meat is like has drifted. I only say that because the rest of us wish the fake stuff was remotely comparable in taste and texture.
I've been vegetarian for a long time and I still think Beyond burgers are great. I have a pack of them from Costco in the freezer. I like black bean burgers, too, but Beyond burgers taste like my (distant) memory of a "normal" burger.
In any case, I assume Beyond was relying on getting more market penetration past just vegetarians and vegans. There just aren't enough of us to get to the revenue they seem to be targeting. Personally, I'll be disappointed if they end up disappearing.
Was a vegetarian for about 8 years and now a pescatarian. We practically always have some Beyond products in our house and will order them at restaurants. Losing Beyond products would be a huge bummer.
Why do you assume people will stop consuming them after a few years? I think most people enjoy the taste of meat but are concerned about the environmental implications of consuming meat.
I would replace all animal products if they tasted like the real thing. I'm sorry but tofu is not cheese
I'm a vegan who loves & misses the taste of meat. Without Beyond (and Impossible), it would have been way harder for me to have become vegan. I think black bean burgers are disgusting. When picking a restaraunt for a team dinner with non vegans, I specifically look for menus that offer Impossible or Beyond, and I avoid restaurants that offer homemade bean/pea/etc burgers.
One of the things I've noticed about shopping carefully at the local supermarket (Albertsons, in Oregon) is that they very often use beef as a 'loss leader' to get people to shop there, so beef is often cheaper than it 'should' be, and especially so if more of the externalities involved in the production of beef were included in the price.
I like beef, but the price probably makes it harder to compete with.
Ground beef needs to move quickly, and you've got to sell some to go with the nicer cuts of meat, so it makes sense to sell at low or negative margins.
Impossible is good enough that - in the right context, if you squint real hard - you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish it from the real deal. Beyond just isn't there, it still comes off as a weird faux meat.
Note that Impossible, unlike Beyond, isn't publicly traded, so the only time anyone knows for sure what it's worth is right after it raises capital. It sounded like the 50% thing was some kind of internal projection.
I think the problem is that crappy supermarket meat is really cheap, and most people don't seem to care about the quality of the meat. For those people, it's hard to justify buying a more expensive product that's not even meat.
I wonder if reducing the price (without selling at a loss) would increase sales enough to offset the lower revenue
There's crappy meat. Have you ever had cheap salmon sashimi? It's completely flavorless, with a rubbery, watery mouthfeel. Conversely have you had expensive salmon sashimi? A delicate umami flavor with a mouthfeel of liquified butter. It's not preparation. They're not the same fish.
Different subspecies of plant and animal taste different. Farmers have learned to charge more for the ones that taste better.
You wouldn't say "there's no crappy tomatoes, only crappy preparation." Nah, some tomatoes are simply junk.
Some of the best food cultures in the world - Italy, France, Japanese - lean much more heavily on ingredient quality than on preparation. Fine dining as a whole revolves around ingredients.
Part of the reason that cheap meat is cheap is because it's a byproduct of producing nice meat. Chicken thighs are cheap because the chicken seller makes money on breasts. Round is cheap because the cow is paid for with the revenue from brisket and ribeye etc.
The meat alternatives are a product by itself, and they have to justify their whole supply chain. That's tough.
Not a customer but it’s a shame it’s not working out for them. I’m sure they have people who would enjoy it but the feedback I’ve heard was mostly negative with respect to quality of ingredients and the like.
At this stage if they scaled back would they stand a chance to survive? Or do they owe too much money?
They owe way too much. The article actually touches on this - they have such little hope of paying back their debt that they are leaning into this so that they can get better renegotiation terms with bond holders
Not surprised. Expensive, taste like shit. Nice Asian vegetarian food exist. A always seemed like stupid amount of resources a d effort to cater to burger markets.
Last I looked, there was an awful lot of saturated fat in their burgers. I tended to order something other than a veggie burger when their was the only one on the menu.
I feel like I'm the ideal customer for Beyond Meat and its competitors. I am not price sensitive, I don't mind the idea of plant based meat products, and I am willing to try new things. My biggest reasons for not buying Beyond Meat are that I:
1. Would rather not cook, and eating Beyond Meat in a way that's financially meaningful for them as a company means me cooking
2. If I'm going to put in the effort to cook, I want the result to be something that I have outsized enjoyment for. If I get a middling burger for my trouble, I'm simply not going to care enough to do it.
The chicken nuggets and popcorn chicken sound the closest to something I can casually heat up, but neither of those are things that would replace something in my existing diet. They have beef and chicken and sausage and all sorts of other stuff, but they're just the meat. They replace an ingredient.
I buy Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls. I'd happily get ones that used Beyond Meat. I buy frozen noodle and pasta meals: same deal. Sandwiches. Chicken salad. Soup. I'm struggling to think of a single product that I can swap out for a Beyond Meat alternative.
I don't need every bit of meat that I consume to even be especially good. But if it's only just fine and it's not convenient, I'm just not going to get it. If it was cheaper, I might consider. Or if it was more nutritious. Or if it was more filling than regular meat (or less filling, even). Or if I felt strongly about the plant based products that I buy being a somewhat compelling meat facsimile. But there's just nothing that inspires me to pick up any of their products.
The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
Just like the drug ads on TV, this is one of those situations where industry must be reigned in before the market discovers the truth.
> The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
A Beyond Burger has ~300 mg sodium. You could eat one every day and come in well under the recommended daily allowance of sodium as long as the rest of your diet is appropriate.
> the end of Beyond Meat stock doesn’t mean the end of the Beyond Meat business ... reorganized company can continue its work, and perhaps even go public again in the future
The stock price is simply unnaturally low because there's a decent chance it'll go through Chapter 11 soon.
What I would like to see in a fake meat is a product engineered to have lower level of histidine, since there is evidence that gut microorganism processing of histidine creates a chemical that causes atherosclerosis.
I absolutely love beef. A good ribeye steak, or some smoked brisket are two of my favorite foods. I was intrigued by the claims these meat alternative companies were making, so naturally I tried them all. It's not surprising to me that they are struggling. I could barely swallow their products. I think it was a mistake to compare these to one of the greatest foods on the planet. It set the expectation was too high.
When Impossible was new and only available in burger format at a small number of partner restaurants, I ventured out to SF to try two of them. I concluded that it can make for a genuinely convincing substitute, but the key is preparing it with a sleight of hand to misdirect from the noticeable imitation texture and flavor. Those early burgers were made with thin patties, with flavorful burger sauces and toppings.
As Impossible expanded beyond their launch partners, they lost their control over the consumer experience. I think many restaurants now serve wretched Impossible Burgers because they just substitute a beef patty and don't try to accommodate the differences.
If you are savoring it as part of a taste test, it will never fool you; the first impression isn't the takeaway. If beef is not the focal point of the dish, as in their Impossible Mapo Tofu recipe (https://impossiblefoods.com/recipes/impossible-mapo-tofu) or a chili or something, it can slot in pretty well. They are nowhere near substitutes for ribeye steak or smoked brisket.
They work well enough as a replacement in a fast food burger or in a dish where the meat itself isn't really the star player. Using their ground meat alternatives in a hamburger helper is totally fine.
We're not at the point where high quality meat can be replaced, but that doesn't mean the product is worthless.
everybody mostly discusses real vs. imitation/vegan, yet i think it has nothing to do with the current BYND situation.
"on an operating basis Beyond Meat lost 45 cents from every dollar of sales."
that is a culprit. Bad management. How else can your plant based product at comparable to meat prices be a loss instead of great profit. Even pure avocados are cheaper than meat. What is better and pricier than avocados do you put into your product? Then it should taste much better than avocados and meat. Yet there is no avocados, it is more like low quality cat/dog food:
"Key components include pea protein, rice protein, and lentil protein, alongside avocado oil, refined coconut oil, and canola oil. Other notable additions include methylcellulose, potato starch, and apple extract.
"
That stuff at their prices should be super-profitable.
Given the amount of animal suffering and environmental destruction involved in beef, this great taste shouldn't be taken so lightly. Everyone should make some effort to reduce its consumption.
That's disappointing, they've done a great job making plant meat ubiquitous and took away some of the hippy aura that has kept many people from trying plant-based meat alternatives. I really hope they can turn it around, both selfishly as a happy customer, as well as for the planet.
Vegetarians and Vegans turn out to prefer less UPF dominant protein in their diet?
Plus, they apparently lost 45c in every $1 of sold product.
Quorn, allergy issue noted, continues. Growing edible fungi in tanks using classic bioreactor methods works, is economically sustainable. TVP likewise. 1960s tech which works at scale.
Me? I liked eating it a bit. I like eating flesh and organ meat, fowl and fish a lot. A lot beats a bit. I like inari sushi too. So it's not I dislike the veg alternatives.
They're also spending enormous amounts of time & money suing creators for their trademarks (sort of a bad-look if your stated mission is to "save the planet")
The problem with Beyond Meat is that it is insanely expensive. I could buy a free range, organic and grass fed beef burger for the price of their ultra processed burger.
Don’t get me wrong, as a vegetarian, I think they taste nice. They are just too damn expensive and not particularly healthy which goes against why I am a vegetarian. In Europe we have so many alternatives that are insanely cheaper and, as an Indian, we have so many alternatives that haven’t been processed to within an inch of their life.
One thing I found to be a great homemade burger maker is simply getting some dried minced soy protein, mix with some eggs, breadcrumbs and seasoning before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty. Tastes great, holds it shape and has a burger like texture.
Why do you believe it's not healthy? Because of the processes food hysteria stuff?
By “processes food hysteria stuff”, do you mean “the growing research consensus around ultra-processed foods”?
A category that includes both twinkies and whey protein powder doesn't seem that useful.
The rule of thumb is that the ultra-processed food should not account for a too large part of your diet. The protein powder is usually taken as a supplement and in small quantities, as opposed to food like twinkies people can easily overeat on. But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
> But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
What? I've had >100g of protein from whey protein shakes every day for months now. I don't know what you're trying to imply.
Do you think that the poster who used the phrase "processes food hysteria stuff" unprompted is intending to make a statement about the broadness or usefulness of the category.
The bulk of the harm from ultra-processed foods was specifically from meats, with smaller contributions coming from sugary drinks and dairy desserts. It’s the pink slime, reconstituted McRib, and hot dogs that are causing the most significant health problems.
Beyond burgers have no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. They’ve got significantly lower saturated fats. Studies have shown that swapping out regular burgers for Beyond burgers lowers your LDL cholesterol and TMAO.
I’m not going to pretend they’re as healthy as a burger made out of black beans and carrots. But if concerns about UPFs are your primary reason for avoiding them then you can relax; they’re not that bad.
No, nothing to do with hysteria. We simply have not had access to the substance long enough to be able to accurately say what the long term effects on health are and I cannot help but to assume that there has been a lot of unnatural processing in-order to turn a small, green, pea into a patty which resembles beef.
Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.
The more common term you're looking for is "ultra-processed food"
Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not?
Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate?
Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it?
If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?
The term comes from the Nova classification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
Thanks for linking that. Their rubric for ultra-processed is easy enough to grow that folks could use this at a grocery store. We're on a kick to remove "parameters" from tasks right now, so this definition is clearer than thoughts like "stick to the outside of the store."
It was more unhealthy in the past due to the sodium, saturated fat, and possibly some of the additives/preservatives. It was unhealthy enough that the company even changed to a new formula with avocado oil, which might be better, but I haven't looked into it.
Many vegetarian meat substitutes, including the Beyond Burger, contains methylcellulose. It is one of several emulsifiers both often associated with "ultra-processed foods", and known from several studies to affect the mucus lining the intestinal wall, increasing the risk for infection and suspected of increasing cancer risk.
Being a vegetarian, after having suffered colon cancer twice, I now too eat only burger patties I've made myself (similar recipe to the one above), and also use only real mayo and sour cream, so as to avoid those emulsifiers.
Edit: Downvote, why? Because I am a vegetarian?
It's not hysteria. Beyond Meat uses way too much processing in their food. They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.
What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.
> clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed
The processing is done with a purpose.
> All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption
Source?
Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
Do you have some studies proving out that control for vegetables and sugar is all that is needed? I am skeptical that just controlling for those would eliminate the risks with other processing ingredients such as cured meats.
Edit: why disagree?
Treating food with chemicals usually it's not good. Also you simply don't know what exactly are they doing.
Like ultra processed american bread is not so good comparing with european wholegrain sourdough bread.
Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general.
European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory.
Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
“Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements.
For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns.
Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.
And there are a handful of chemicals banned in the US for health concerns that the EU is fine with.
I hear they even process it with dihydrogen monoxide!
I'd rather apply hot dihydrogen monoxide to my dry lentils than use compound prepared by Beyond Meat.
> They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.
This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"
In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary.
The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".
Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
You mean peroxide? Not bleach?
I mean, so do cows and chickens.
Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction…
When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
> before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty
Why do you wrap it? Couldn't you also form the burger patty without the cling film?
It allows you to add some pressure to the patty while providing it a restricted space in which it can expand. By doing so the ingredients seem to form a much stronger bond (from my experience). I used to do the same with beef when I ate it.
Also, rolling it into a ball and then wrapping before flattening gives a much better shape to the resulting patty
Pretty common thing to do to help limit cleanup and help shape the patties (regardless of what they're made of).
If you'd rather avoid the single-use-ish plastic, then wax paper usually works as well.
Is this really a problem with Beyond Meat or a problem with our policies not correctly pricing meat due to not caring about the environment or animal welfare?
It's the same policy whether it's real meat patties or beyond meat, because beyond beef has the same main ingredient as the feed for the cattle: soybeans.
How much soy does it take to raise 1kg of beef compared with producing 1kg of beyond meat?
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Besides the reasons of sheer taste, another good reason is culture. Meaning, the preexisting meat-eating culture at a place. One of the reasons why vegan / vegetarian / etc options are often lacking is because there is no longstanding culture of eating those dishes at that certain place, and so, a vegan dish will likely come from a meat dish, minus the meat. But that dish is created around the meat, so without the meat, it will be lacking, like taking the patty out of a burger, or taking the meatballs out of the spaghetti with meatballs.
So, a quick solution is to create a substitute to the missing thing. That way, the culture problem is immediately solved, as the alternative dish will the be the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted. As a bonus, it will be very similar to the existing, accepted culture, so the participant doesn't become an outsider. Also, for many, it's easier to adopt, than changing the culture entirely.
Same way that I disagree with shooting people, but I can enjoy doing so in video games
Why do so many people ask this question about burgers? It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.
Food is not just food: it's culture.
These replacements have value because sometimes you want the thing that gives you that nostalgia kick or whatever specific feeling you associate with food. Old school plant based replacements don't always feel right for this.
I became vegetarian early in life mostly because of the industrialisation of meat production, and the treatment of animals within that system, and the perception that it's just an incredibly unhealthy production line (e.g. steroid use in livestock, etc)
I recall enjoying meat flavours, so I'd be tempted to try this fake meat for occasional, one-off enjoyment.
And I say one-off as my experience says there are enough flavours and alternatives out there such that a replacement like this isn't really needed at all. That might be the real market issue for Beyond Meat (in my life, anyway).
Have you never enjoyed a burger and a beer with your friends? Or is that you fail to see the social component of eating?
Doesn't seem relevant. There's a decent amount of veggie/vegan options these days without using fake meat.
Fake meat isn't really a product for vegetarians/vegans. It's is a product aimed at creating vegetarians/vegans, and that's going to be much harder.
I always feel like people are being intentionally obtuse when making these arguments. I'm vegan and know many vegans who enjoy beyond meat. We didn't go vegan because we didn't like the taste of things which were traditionally derived from animal flesh, and it's nice to be able to enjoy effectively the same foods without the animal exploitation.
> Fake meat isn't really a product for vegetarians/vegans
This is just flat-out wrong.
Why do you fucking think? Because it's tasty. You can disagree with the ethics of how we make animals suffer because they taste nice and still think they taste nice.
This is a non sequitur, but I don't know. I don't. I think the reason is people aren't used to eating plants and find the tastes and textures disagreeable. It's a taste that can be acquired at any time, though. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, but I'd only go back if I was literally starving. Vegetables taste so much better, but you need a cuisine that does vegetables properly, like Indian or Mexican. Trying to do a bland cuisine like American or British without meat isn't going to be a good time.
A lot of people would say it is a problem with making the entire population pay for the moral preferences of a few.
"The entire population" doesn’t want to eat only beef and drink milk, however those are way more subsidized than other food. The real winners are food mega corps and a few rich farmers.
Remove the targeted subsidies and "the entire population" will eat less meat and more peas. Subsidize the peas and not the meat and you’ll see vegans skyrocket.
True. People would have said the same in defence of colonialism, slavery, genocide etc.
Generations later it's easy to look back and say "of course that stuff was bad, I would have fought against it too".
Colonialism was great. It literally took continents out of pre history and brought them to the civilized world. So your moralization doesn't stand true even today.
That’s a funny way to say genocide
Colonialism ENDED the genocide that was going on in most of Africa before the Ottoman empire was defeated. A genocide generally referred in older texts as "the islamic slave trade", because islamic economies were entirely dependent on the slave trade for more than a millenium, oh and because it's part of the religion/state that islam was at the time.
Economically it was quite accurate to say that the islamic slave trade WAS islam. As in, everything else was a rounding error. Even now, because the slave trade is still easily 95% of the entire existence of the religion.
For "some" reason people are now trying to rename it "African slave trade". Not at all to get people to focus on the 1% of slaves that went to work in western colonies in the New World (which is what Americans historically called it).
Like the one the aztecs regularly unleashed upon their neighbors? Or any pre-colonial tribe in the Americas or Africa (in this case up until this day really). What did the Romans brought us really?
> What did the Romans brought us really?
War, pestilence, famine, and death.
An excuse like "everyone else was doing it!" only goes as far as making my ancestors "not spectacularly evil", it definitely does not make them "good".
The railways are in the plus column, but would you accept your country being taken over by several different groups of aliens who draw random-seeming lines on the maps that even split up your existing cities between them, each forcing their own language and religious customs on their bit of your land, being really brutal in their suppression of any resistance campaigns, in exchange for a network of teleporter booths?
The implication of this statement is probably supposed to be that it's the west that did that. However, colonialism never conquered Africa. They took over Ottoman/muslim colonies. Muslims, and by that I mean the now dead state that is the religion, conquered 90% of the colonies, and inherited the remaining 10% from the Romans. The only big exception to that is the US.
In America, before the US there were Aztecs and Incas, both of whom were empires that ruled by fear, by regularly massacring large amounts of people.
By this logic all wars are justifiable. What a take!
I'm not sure how that justifies war. It just means that the outcome of a war can be better than if there never was a war. Obviously both sides in any given war believe that. Ask a few Ukrainians how that works, they can explain.
Two wrongs don't make a right.
When there's only 2 things, only 2 wrongs, one wrong is the best available moral choice, and therefore the moral choice.
The market decides the price. We don’t need politicians and biased scientists moralizing about what we can and can’t do and what we should care about.
That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those subsidies.
If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
> That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those subsidies.
By global average, under 15% of farm revenue is derived from government subsidies. USA is below that, at about 10%. Not sure if I'd call that massive, but that's semantics so it's a little hard to argue against. Does potato agriculture get massive subsidies?
> If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
The assumptions being that 1. potato farming get relatively much less subsidies as beef (and other meat) farming; 2. cost is such a factor in consumption that price change would cause "a lot" of difference. I don't think either are very safe, and as a general statement it doesn't follow that just reducing agricultural subsidies increases ratio of beef to potato (or meat to vegetable): EU subsidies are much higher than US, but USA eats far more beef per capita.
Farm subsidies primarily happen because farmers vote. And you haven’t shown any evidence that farm subsidies privilege beef over potatoes.
The market decides the price, but politics decide the constraints of the market. Agriculture in particular is heavily involved with the government, because agriculture is very risky, and needs large investments. The government already decides what we care about, and is already pretty corrupt because of the "market" powers - the different lobbies - influence it.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
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All in all, despite the fact that it is not real meat, nothing proves that Beyond Meat production is better for the planet. If you factor production materials, energy,... Not sure what it gives.
From what I understood why BM production was limited and expensive is that nothing beats nature. Cow meat manufacturing process was refined by nature for ten of thousands of years to be the most optimized possible.
> I could buy a free range, organic and grass fed beef burger for the price of their ultra processed burger.
In many countries, it's a heavily subsidized industry. Even if you have VC funds, it's not the same as being backed by country subsidies.
To be clear, I'm not making a judgment, just saying that meat would probably be a lot more expensive.
I think that for this exact reason Beyond Meat (or other alternatives) need a similar boost, in order to be financially competitive as well.
Aren't they massively subsidized already? It's soybeans, after all.
That's a political decision that needs to be applied to the alternative protein industry. However, given the current political climate and the acceptance of disinformation, that's going to be challenging.
Indeed, and indeed.
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So the biggest problem here is that Beyond Meat has a huge debt due in just 2 years:
To put the "$1B" number into the context, Beyond Meat sold $300M worth of plant-based meats last year, and made a net operating loss of $156M. Their total assets are $600M, and the market capitalization is only $260M as of today.If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
And this as well:
> The company expects the figure to reach about $330 million in 2025, roughly 10% higher than it was six years earlier despite a huge increase in the number of products offered.
It’s not like they have any growth potential to speak of that would enable them to service that debt.
It’s a bit hard to see who their target market is or, rather, it’s a bit hard to see that the market segment they’re aiming for is big enough for them to grow at an appreciable rate. To me it reads like they just didn’t do their homework up-front - e.g., an in depth segmentation - in determining their addressable market.
Vegetarians and vegans I know want protein sources in their diets but they don’t necessarily want meat substitutes, so perhaps BM’s products aren’t that appealing to them.
Meat eaters possibly have low awareness of BM and, unless they’re particularly principled - and wealthy enough to absorb the additional cost - are unlikely to pay the same price, or more (at least here in the UK), for meat substitutes than they’d pay for actual meat.
Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.
If BM’s products were more affordable and better advertised they’d have a better chance at widespread adoption but it’s very hard to plot a route from where they are now to there. Also, this doesn’t solve for the portion of the market who aren’t looking for explicitly meaty meat substitutes.
As you say, it does appear hopeless.
(FWIW, I’ve eaten BM burgers on several occasions. They’re excellent but I’m not normally willing to pay the premium for them versus actual beef patties, or making our own.)
I would guess the primary target market is ex meat eaters that are trying to go vegetarian but have been raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat. I am in this group. I agree it’s not a very large market for the reasons you stated above. However, maybe BM hoped they could grow that market, I.e. convince more meat eaters to give it up for ethical reasons.
I am in a similar group; the mostly-vegetarian. Chicken when I don't have a real choice, red meat at a wedding like once a year or something.
I like beyond meat products, the price is obviously a problem but they go on sale locally frequently enough to be a good substitute for us.
Something about them I HATE though is that they have two burger products that are extremely similar with one main difference: product A is kept frozen and requires thawing to cool properly and product B is kept frozen and cooks from frozen.
They are so similar that we accidentally get the wrong one all the time.
Once cooked, both products are indistinguishable from an eating perspective. Get product A the fuck outta here, please.
Same. Chicken, eggs, and yogurt are the only animal products I consume regularly.
"raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat"
Humans have evolved to enjoy the taste/texture/smell of cooked meat
> If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
Why is that hopeless? Maybe I'm too green or optimistic but that just requires long-term planning.
Also inflation will make it a bit easier.
One thing I find tough for them personally is that I like the Impossible burger a lot more. I find Beyond meat not tasting like meat, not enough. Since that's the case, I'd rather just have any mushroom/whatever veggie burger. I wonder how other consumers perceive this.
> Why is that hopeless?
because you can’t take 20 years to pay off debt that is due in 2 years.
Refinancing, but whoever lends them the money will take a long hard look at the rest of their finances and decide to pass.
The article mentions this as an agreement between the bondholders and shareholders, I believe, who are both mutually incentivized to come to agreement. If I understood correctly the bondholders agree to a future convertible note of some sort.
> Why is that hopeless? Maybe I'm too green or optimistic but that just requires long-term planning.
They don't have 20 years to pay it off. Debt is due in 2 years
That's got to be an incredible expenditure then. Considering their pricing compared to the better store brand alternatives, while not lacking any scale disadvantages, I expect high margins on the products themselves.
They need to announce that they are working on lab grown meat and expect to be shipping 10 million patties a month by the end of the year. Then at the end of year say you have a new formula that will halve costs and will be shipping 15 million a month by mid 2026. Rinse and repeat. Just like Tesla.
Debt can always be restructured.
> If they could magically ... it would take 20+ years ...
It's worse than that - 10% profit on $300M sales is only $30M/year.
Vs. "risk-free" US Treasury bonds currently yield 4% to 5% - so parking $1B there would earn you $40M to $50M per year.
Nobody's insane enough to loan money to Beyond Meat at US Treasury rates. And even if someone was - Beyond would still fall deeper into debt every year, because they couldn't even keep up with the interest.
The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that. I rather see more and more friends and people avoid eating meat or reduce their consumption drastically. Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.
I have been eating plant based meat alternatives for four years now, and I am never going to go back to eating meat. Yes, these products may be ultra processed food, but I cannot justify the ecological consequences and the suffering brought upon the animals just so I can eat a piece of their muscle tissue.
Our lifestyle is not sustainable, we have to look for alternatives. And young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption.
> The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed.
I don't see this message in there. If you ask me the real message is that companies trying to sell overly processed, way too expensive, imitations of "something" will struggle. They're trying to sell a very expensive mechanical horse. Just give people a car.
Maybe it's a US thing where people are more emotionally attached to the concept of the burger. But I think these companies would be better off selling plant based stuff that doesn't need to be processed to the moon and back with the associated costs, just to imitate the real thing, and still fall short.
Plant based food has been around for millennia, focus on that. More people would eat plant based food if it was more accessible in terms of price and effort to prepare. Imitating a meat burger wastes resources and results in something most meat eaters won't actually find as a good alternative, beyond the novelty factor.
Often I think it's largely based on the types of food people grew up with. Meat and potato diets seem to struggle with reducing the meat part of their diet. People often try to eat the same stuff but substitute meat with bad imitations of meat. In other places, as an example, Indian food has plenty of choices without meat and is delicious.
As a meat eater trying to casually reduce my meat consumption, I find myself buying more tofu, lentils and beans, rather than processed meat-like substitutes. I think that is the issue. People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.
> People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.
This is an extremely strong generalization that is obviously not true in many cases.
It doesn't have to be true of everyone to be an entirely plausible hypothesis for why highly-processed mock-meat alternatives are struggling.
The biggest issue to me is that beyond and impossible aren’t just making replacements that are worse than meat, they are making things that are worse than the alternatives we already had.
A beyond burger might be more like meat than a patty made from beans or lentils, but it tastes worse and has a worse nutritional profile. Beyond chicken isn’t even all that similar to chicken and it’s a worse substitute than seitan for something like wings.
Beyond meat burgers taste like flavored plastic grounds, so until these plant based alternatives can close the taste gap its not going to go anywhere. And they have had years to make it taste better, so I suspect theres something fundamental that makes it very difficult.
It is just too much to ask the public to buy worse tasting food at a higher price, all to feel morally better about yourself.
The texture and mouth feel isn't right either.
can't help but feel like including "plastic" here is just hysteria, I eat them regularly and it's certainly not accurate
That says a lot about the public
Food is one of the joys in life that people can enjoy no matter where they are on the socioeconomic spectrum.
In the modern age, if you're poor, or just time poor, you can enjoy a tasty meal thanks to cheap food coming out of the modern food industry.
Why would you pay more for a less enjoyable experience when tasty food might be one of the only joys in an otherwise mundane or hard-up existence?
This is exactly why McDonalds is popular. It tastes relatively good, it's comforting, and it's cheap.
Agree. As a side note McDonalds veggie nuggets are from behind meat and they rank equally to the chickens one one the taste and processing scales.
> Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that.
Neither do I, but it's a highly competitive market that competes with both the established industrial meat market, as well as people actually educating themselves on cooking without "meat". I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy, let's just swap one thing out for another, instead of find / cook something different entirely. I see it as a kind of middle-class virtue signaling, which wasn't helped by the fact the meat replacements are (or used to be, I haven't checked) more expensive than meat. Even though on paper they should be cheaper because growing vegetables should be a lot less resource intensive and more sustainable than the meat equivalent.
Soy and oat milk is also incredibly expensive compared to cow for what it is. Same for most supermarket tofu in the West. The cheapest own-brand tofu in Tesco is the same as the beef mince (£6.50/kg).
And even though I like tofu, it's 90% water and that's a terrible deal. A 500g pack of tofu doesn't go nearly as far as 500g of beef mince.
Meanwhile you can buy it in a UK Chinese supermarket for under £3.50 per kg.
Perhaps there isn’t much demand in your Tesco. Store brand (organic) soy milk is 0.9€ here in Paris which is cheaper than the organic cow alternative - which is subsidized btw.
6.5£ for seems super cheap for beef and I’m sure tofu can be even cheaper when optimized. I find it here at the same price but it’s organic and grown in France. I wish it become more popular where you live so the prices become more competitive.
In the Netherlands it's dirt cheap in all supermarkets. 550g package, so 500g of tofu is €3.72/kg, soy milk is €0.80/l.
> I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy
Pretty harsh to expect people to throw away their entire food culture just to cut down on meat consumption.
Beyond Meat is industrial plant-based protein. The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants. That means their market is is poor and lower middle-class folks—hence the distribution through fast food and mid-grade grocery channels.
They’re not buying plant-based proteins. (The conscientious are already eating plants.)
Beyond Meat is broken as a mass-market brand. It should be restructured as a niche play.
> young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption
Statistically insignificant [1].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691922...
> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.
I don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand.
The whole dismissal doesn’t make sense to me. It’s marketed at well-off former meat eaters.
The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans just like they have for the last hundred plus years.
> don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand
It’s not. The premium options for plant-based foods are vast, fresh and more expensive than BM.
Beyond Meat isn’t serving premium. It’s premium to the lowest-grade ground beef. But that’s like saying a basic economy seat is premium to Greyhound. Technically true. But misleading relativism.
> The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans
Globally? Sure. In developed countries, of course not.
Delicious vegetarian food is already a thing, and doesn't require new technology, and it's not necessary to completely eliminate meat-eating to significantly reduce your ethical-harm footprint. It's a matter of changing food culture. Once you adapt to an omnivore diet that contains tasty meals from both meat and non-meat cuisine, it's actually quite easy to reduce your meat intake further.
I was raised as a meat eater and ate it for 30 years. I’ve been vegetarian for about a decade for ethical reasons that I do believe are incompatible with eating any meat. I consider myself a good cook and make vegetarian/vegan meals for my family every night. However: I will never stop thinking that the taste of chicken, pork, beef and lamb are desirable. The conditioning is too strong. Sticking with vegetarianism is still an act of willpower for me. This is why I like meat alternatives.
Well, that is probably just some kind of perception bias.
Of course vegans or vegetarians have more vegan or vegetarian friends.
If it helps you, I know hardly anyone who eats plant base meat.
It is sustainable.
It is. Just not at the rate we consume it.
Everything comes down to world population, which has quadrupled in a century, making the previously-sustainable now unsustainable.
But even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'. And 'growth' is most easily obtained by creating more consumers and more workers.
> Everything comes down to world population
This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.
> even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'
Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.
Degrowth is inevitable.
Whether it will happen "naturally" because of climate catastrophes and war, or whether we will somehow understand this and do something before it's too late, I can 100% assure you that the world economy in 2100 will be smaller than today.
Your word, plausible
Reddit-tier take. You probably live somewhere extremely urban. I don't, and everyone I know is tired of the forced veganism meme. Tired of them putting their not-meat next to actual meat, and not-milk next to actual milk, trying to trick people into buying it. I have never seen a person put it in their shopping basket. Stores are now finding that this crap isn't selling like they want it to, and they're forced to scale it back.
Your experience is not universal and just because you haven't seen anybody do it doesn't mean that people haven't. If anything it is your take that is reddit tier. Nobody forces you to buy that stuff, people who want to eat that stuff do. Have you tried being any less entitled?
Considering that this manufacturer of ersatz meat is unprofitable and bordering on insolvent, it seems that people do not, empirically, want to eat it.
I live somewhere not especially urban/progressive, and I’ve never even heard of this “forced veganism meme” that you reference.
Seems to be a lot more forcing happening around your parts than mine.
It's insane to me that they're struggling despite the burgers being more expensive than actual meat in my supermarket.
They taste nice, sure. But my supermarket now also has Mushroom burgers, lentil burgers, normal soya burgers... All for 1/3 of the price.
The premium product of vegatarian meat is meat, not more expensive veggie meat, it seems.
Personally I think this will become that premium spot: mosameat.com
But who knows, it's too early to tell.
Whether they taste nice is debatable. They had an odd aftertaste for me. I would much rather have a good mushroom or black bean burger. They taste better to me, are cheaper, and probably more healthy.
It’s interesting that alternative meat consumption in the U.S. is struggling but taking off in Europe.
One thing I noticed after moving to the UK: alternative milk is normalized here. Like, it’s so common to avoid milk that if you order coffee without specifying, you will be asked what kind of milk you want.
Here in hill country Texas, even Walmart sells MorningStar corn dogs. H-E-B carries most of the Impossible line including meatballs. I made some dirty rice with the IF ground "beef" and it was awesome. There's almost no oil in it, browning onions and peppers required adding some avocado oil (never use olive oil for high temperature cooking).
PS: I'm a lazy vegetarian who will eat a real burger every few months. When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
> never use olive oil for high temperature cooking
This is a myth and needs to die. Olive oil is fine at high temperatures, even EVOO.
https://www.seriouseats.com/cooking-with-olive-oil-faq-safet...
> vegan parm
Have you tried nutritional yeast? I use it everywhere I’d put parm. The taste is a bit different but as much delicious.
> When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
Cheese I really doubt will get there any time soon. It's pretty doable to make milk-free cheese alternatives with eggs - at least in terms of taste - which is probably per gram a lot more sustainable than proper cheese, but there wouldn't be any market for it.
Can you say more? I've got milk allergies and I might want to try making this just for me.
> There's almost no oil in the ground beef, so adding some avocado oil while browning onions and peppers was required.
Their sausage works well for that, no added oil needed.
Part of their financial woes might come from them paying for shelf space at retailers and/or making sale guarantees. A grocery chain will gladly carry a poorly performing product if the manufacturer is paying them to do so.
It's not all of the UK, you get asked in London, not in the countryside. Same in the Netherlands, you get asked in Amsterdam but not much outside.
I guess San Francisco also has much more oatmilk latte's than rural villages
It’s very normalized in any of the medium to large cities in the Netherlands.
(take “medium to large” with a grain of salt given that means population of 100k)
I don't know I've been in Bristol and Cornwall last week and was always asked. I guess you can extend that to anywhere they might reasonably expect a Londoner to turn up.
I feel like most coffee shops here in California always ask what type of milk you want, too.
What part of the UK does this happen in? I've never been asked this. I can only assume you're in London?
Woops, sorry, yes, this is in London.
According to Good Food Institute (which is a plant-based food lobbying group), 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023 and 33% of UK households bought plant-based meat alternatives at least once during 2023.
https://gfieurope.org/blog/plant-based-meat-and-milk-are-now...
For a less biased source, a 2022 ipsos poll found that 48% of the UK uses alternative milk and 58% " use at least one plant-based meat alternative in their diet".
I think things dropped a bit since then due to cost of living crisis.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/almost-half-uk-adults-set-cut-in...
Some high street chains already make some of their products with plant-based milk by default. I was shocked to hear the cow milk being an "option".
Having lived in both the US and Europe, I have to imagine at least some of that comes down to cost. In Europe, the plant based alternatives (at least where I lived) were actually cheaper, and meaningfully so.
Also, they taste better? I have been a vegetarian since 1999. Even in the small village I lived with my parents, the local supermarket had a meat replacement section. Later I moved to a larger city and the product selection at supermarkets is very large and nice. A few years ago, supermarkets also started carrying Beyond Meat products. We tried them a few times, but they taste absolutely horrible compared to local offerings that have been developed for decades now.
In my neck of the woods you can easily find plant-based alternatives, but I've found that the best ones are those that don't try too hard to mimic meat.
From a "macro" nutrition perspective they're also much, much better (more protein, less carbs) and don't usually contain a bunch of weird oils and other crap.
However, they're usually a bit more expensive than actual meat.
Interesting, in Britain it's completely the opposite. Alternative milk is way more expensive.
This is only true if you buy the chilled branded stuff, most of the big supermarkets sell generic soy, oat, almond, coconut for £1/litre
Same in Germany (~1€/l for milk, 2€/l for pretty much all milk replacements.
You can obviously buy more expensive milk to, which would give it price parity... But there are also more expensive replacement products. On average, the replacement products cost about 50-100% more.
The only way to save money via vegetarian meals is by making everything yourself and not the finished products from the supermarkets (at that point the relationship reverses - making meat meals about twice as expensive)
And I feel the urge to point out the obvious: the reason why the vegetarian replacement products get ever more space in supermarkets is precisely because they've got a gigantic profit margin, whereas the "traditional" milk/meat products have razor thin margins
Lidl has oat/soy milk for 99 cents, and the NoMilk clones for 1,50. In fact, Lidl had a respectable replacement line up now. If you only buy Alpro Milk then yeah, it's gonna be more expensive, but prices have come down tremendously, especially once the discounters hopped on that train.
Yesterday I bought some oat-based milk-like at Aldi for 90c/l (regular price). It's labeled "oat drink", so might not substitute milk. The (literal) "almost milk" product is listed online for 1,09€/l. They also had options based on other stuff for a similar price.
First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.
> [profit margin]
Sure, but if nobody buys them, a 1000% profit margin won't get them very far. So I think that it's a good enough indicator that more people are buying these products.
Here in Korea where soy milk has been a staple forever, its price has more than doubled over the last 5 years, now ~$1.4/L. Still cheaper than milk currently at ~$1.7/L, but it used to be twice as cheap as milk.
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BM is getting rarer on the shelves in Austria. When it first showed up, it was something special, but now there are heaps of great other alternative meats, often cheaper and made here. I guess BM is struggling because of increased competition. During my 20 years of plant based dieat it has never been easier to find fancy plant based things.
I posted before: I care more about the nutritional content being close to meat than the look and taste; specifically, similar macro-nutrient ratios and whatever micro-nutrients are rare outside of meat.
I also care about it being cheap in theory, even if it's more expensive in practice because the company hasn't scaled up. But really, as long as it's not ridiculously expensive, and isn't missing some nutrient or balance that would mess up my diet, I'd buy it for the environment.
I remember when veggie burgers first came out and they actually featured veggies and tried to taste like veggies instead of psuedo-meat patties. They were so good! Then everything tried to just clone meat, poorly, in taste and texture and they were so much worse. But those first ones that really tasted like veggies were delish.
Are you a vegetarian? I'm not, and really enjoy a good black bean patty. But when I crave a juicy beef hamburger, I have one. Vegetarians might prefer to satisfy cravings with something closer to their childhood memories than a black bean patty.
I remember the veggie burgers they're talking about and they weren't black bean patties. The one I remember had potato with peas in it... god, it was delicious
It sounds like your describing aloo tikki. It's really delicious and sometimes used as a vegetarian burger patty.
I'm glad that people have the option of those if they like them. Personally, I find the veggie patties to be awful in both taste and especially texture. I was thrilled when there started being options other than the pervasive gardenburgers.
Both exist. Portabello burgers are great too. There's nothing wrong with choice.
Portabello pizzas are also great. It's not the same as a wheat crust pizza but great in its own way.
hmm.. you would buy it but aren't?
4 oz raw/patty:
Impossible → 19 P / 14 F / 9 C, 240 kcal, 370 mg Na, 0 mg chol
Beyond → 20 P / 13 F / 7 C, 220 kcal, 260 mg Na, 0 mg chol
80/20 beef → 19 P / 23 F / 0 C, 287 kcal, 75 mg Na, ? chol (high)
Plants hit beef-level protein, ditch cholesterol, trade more sodium & a few carbs; beef still packs the fat.
I thought sodium was really bad for you though
The beef patty numbers are solely raw beef, they do not include the seasoning required to make it taste like a hamburger.
The McDonald’s quarter pounder patty (just the cooked patty, no bun and no toppings), which I believe is comparable, comes with 210mg of salt.
Since the DRV is 2000mg, the differences aren’t as significant as they appear.
Zero sodium also kills you because you need electrolytes to live. Like almost literally every complex system, there is a zone of moderation/goodness/health.
It actually nearly killed my wife’s grandmother. Until some doctor realized she avoided salt like the plague, gave her some and she made a miraculous discovery.
*recovery.
Salt is only bad for you if you don't drink water.
These meat substitutes are UPF and that’s what you should care about more than nutritional content.
OK, we need to pick something apart here, because I see this a lot and it's annoying.
UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
The problem is that UPFs come from manufacturers who are trying to get you to buy more of their product, by playing tricks with the brain's response to it.
There are food labs where people are having their brain scanned while they sip different soda formulations, tobacco companies buying food companies to apply their research methodologies, and people figuring out packaging noises and shapes in order to make your old/slow brain excited at the crap you're about to eat (the pringles can is hard to use on purpose, for example). This is all symptomatic of a global food industry that needs you to buy more food, so needs you to consume more food, regardless of nutritional impact.
I recommend reading Chris van Tulleken's book and watching (if you can) the documentaries he made on the subject.
Yes, the Brazilian paper that started all this said "UPF is harming the health of the nation", but the root cause was not UPF processes, it was food industry processes that often require them to produce UPF.
It isn't the UP that makes the F bad, it's that some profitable but bad F needs UP to be viable.
It is therefore perfectly possible for meat substitutes to be UPF and healthy, just as some other UPFs are healthy. In fact, arguably they need to be both to survive.
Regular pasta, bread, and yoghurt are processed, not ultraproccessed.
(the shelf-stable varieties are often ultraprocessed though, and are less healthy than the non ultra-processed ones)
>UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
The only thing in that list that I agree with is Yogurt. Sure, if you live in Europe where they've banned some of the more harmful ingredients and processes and you are taking about very limited quantities, maybe they are not so bad for you but that just puts in the same league as wine or beer.
These meat substitutes use the bad kind on the NOVA scale. Gums and binders.
I am current reading the book you mentioned which is why I made this comment.
> Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you
But the less processed the better. And eating something else is probably better still.
Does it worry you at all that meat is ultimately made of whatever food the animal eats and processed into a litany of chemicals?
I feel the UPF "debate" is just an appeal to nature, and calorie/nutrient density should be what we fixate on.
> Does it worry you at all that meat is ultimately made of whatever food the animal eats and processed into a litany of chemicals?
As much as the same can be said about plants.
This guy actually defending ultra processed food?!! LOL. Go right ahead and poison yourself dude!
Many (most?) plant based meat substitutes contain methyl cellulose. There are studies like [1] that seem to connect it to intestinal inflammation.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5410598/
"UPF"?
"Ultra Processed Food" - I suspect? I disagree, IMO. It feels like a oversimplification, it's a sometimes useful rule of thumb that works in some cases, but not in others. Definitely not the end all be all of nutrition.
i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat.
why not plant based lobster, crab, sea cucumber or sea urchin or sharks fin or something similar. that is unproductive? or impossible to farm? and perhaps even endangered? something that plant based processes are closer to competing on price.
This is too bad. Beyond and Impossible opened up the door to me gradually becoming vegan. It was similar enough to real meat that I didn’t miss meat anymore, and from there I found other substitutions which were healthier. Without them I’m sure I never would have started a plant-based diet.
Deciding to abandon meat is a lot like quitting cigarettes. Sometimes you need a long time to ease off, some artificial/processed replacement (e.g. nicotine patches), it won't feel the same or "good enough", there's a lot of psychological struggle, even your body just demands its shot. It can take a lot of dedicated effort.
And sometimes it just hits you: this is bad for me, I haven't been wanting it for a good while, and I want it gone now. I've quit meat just like that, almost exactly 15 years ago, never looked back.
I've never liked Beyond or such, it was unlike anything I'd actually want to eat. But we should still empower people who want to quit, but can't do so easily.
What have you substituted cheese with? It's one of my favorite foods but no substitute has come close to it
Sad truth is there isn’t a real substitute. You just eat it less and desire it less over time.
Unrelated to cheese but MyBacon is fantastic if you can get it near you.
What kind of cheese? If you want something strong like blue cheese you can try fermented tofu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_bean_curd#/media/Fil...
I haven't tried it as a blue cheese sub dressing but if I just taste it on my chop sticks I feel it's at least in the same general direction. I'm pretty confident I could blend it into a a dressing or put it on a burger as a blue-cheese substitute.
Including Miyoko's? https://www.miyokos.com/products/fresh-plant-milk-mozzarella...
Damn shame about the corporate drama, so it's possible the formula could/might change but the products were outstanding for the problem they're trying to solve the last time I tried them
I love Miyoko's products, their oat butter is amazing, I use it daily.
Violife is probably the best for shredded (mozzarella/cheddar) but its still not great.
I really like Field Roast Chao slices for things like burgers or sandwiches.
I replaced it with insatiable yearning. It's not as good, but it's all I've got.
> It's one of my favorite foods but no substitute has come close to it
Why do you want to? Lactovegetarianism is far more precedented than veganism.
Cheese uses lots and lots of milk. There are questions of ethics (the treatment of dairy cows is often less than stellar) and carbon footprint (cheese is worse than pork, for example.)
I'd really love to see some good alternatives, too. I don't really expect to give up all cheese anytime soon, but having a substitute for at least some of it would be helpful.
> cheese is worse than pork, for example
Such figures are usually "per gram of protein", in which case, sure. Thing is, it's very common for people to eat 200+ grams of pork in one meal, whereas e.g. grated cheese on a pasta dish is <10g. A big slice of cheese is 25-28g, and half the time it's significantly less than 100% actual cheese, with a good amount of filler. The only cheeses that one might eat 50g+ of in one sitting are extremely mild ones like mozzarella, and those are the easiest to replace.
https://kite-hill.com/products/chives-cream-cheese is a great option for bagels. I prefer it to normal cream cheese.
Nutritional yeast has cheese like flavor.
There are 1000s of varieties of cheese and most don't taste like nutritional yeast.
Vegan cheese is made from cashews. If you’re in the Bay Area try Arizmendi’s vegan pizza. Surprisingly good.
I looked them up and I couldn't find any indication that they regularly offer vegan pizzas.
good get rid of this garbo, give me a cow plz moo
I know this is about Beyond but I figure the audience that would care about this article would be interested in looking at Juicy Marbles: https://juicymarbles.com/collections/all-products
I've tried the thick cut filet and just like you're not going to mistake Impossible for actual burger, so too with the filet but it's a good texture and does help fill the longing for steak for me
Juicy Marbles is legitimately the best plant-based replacement if you're interesting in smoking/BBQ'ing on a grill. I use them for pot-lucks with people.
Ingredients make it look like engineered soy. Is there a secret sauce to making it better than meat for someone who doesn’t have that level of ethical granularity?
My experience with Beyond (~4 years ago), was that it wasn't as good as Impossible. Impossible seemed like meat, Beyond seemed like nuts mashed into paste.
Yeah, I never understood the hype for Beyond's products. They must have just had great marketing or something because their meat barely tasted any better than any other frozen veggie burger.
Impossible Foods was always more impressive, both from a taste and scientific perspective. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars into cutting-edge food science, including a new plant-based heme production process. That's in contrast with much of their competition (like Morningstar, or countless other brands) who just slapped together some bean paste and spices and called it a day.
I kinda think beyond meat is for ppl who care about taste. You can fake meat taste and texture much cheaper.
For ppl who care about nutrients, artificial meat seemingly gets more expensive and you also need licenses probably and what not.
Health wise it's in your own best interest to eat animals that fave been able to forage and graze in the sun. See Vitamin d and so on. Those ppl won't buy factory slurry.
Over here, beyond meat is simply more expensive than just buying meat. On top of that, it feels like you eat pure ultra processed product magic chemistry and thats not good. So who exactly is the target audience for that? I'd totally buy it, if it competes with meat prices by being cheaper and if there wasn't so much effort into trying to look like meat and taste like meat, which goes against the entire premise.
My vegetarian wife won't touch the stuff, or any meat substitute. It's too much like meat.
I always believed these things are like nicotine patches/chewables/etc.
I am all for eating more vegetables. But putting ultra processed mashed up shit to replace the real thing just sounds like an avenue for disaster health wise.
It is, and people seem to ascribe some implicit goodness to these companies because they’re seen as providing an alternative to an implicitly evil industry and degenerate dietary choice. Truth is, they’re running the same game, just with a less wholesome food product.
It’s always been awful IMO. Tastes like sawdust with a congealed vegetable oil binder and chemical flavorings that approximate meat. A straight up bean burger is better and far less processed.
Its way better than a bean burger IMHO. As a vegan, what I like most about Beyond burgers are that they are consistent, and pretty amazing at not being awful. If I'm in a random restaurant with a few token vegan options, the last thing I want to do is take a chance on some potentially terrible homemade bean or chickpea burger. If they have Beyond or Impossible, I know exactly what I'm getting.
Absolutely better than the crappy black bean or chickpea patties you'd get at most burger joints. I'd much rather have Beyond or Impossible at a cookout as well.
Our local drive in movie theater (remember those) offers various meal options including burgers, and I've taken to ordering the Impossible there because somehow several times in their beef burgers I've gotten significant bone chunks, to the extent that I was surprised I didn't break a tooth on them.
It could have to do with how they're prepped. Even the real thing can taste like sawdust and grill marks if done incorrectly. I'm personally biased towards veggie burgers and prefer them over the real thing but in the last year, I've been to multiple cookouts where both "burger dudes" and kids have chosen beyond over meat.
I agree that the level of process is questionable but, if done well, I don't think it lacks in flavor.
Right! Beyond awful
I bought one of these by mistake during the pandemic and immediately gagged trying to eat it. Then checked the label and realized what I had bought wasn't what I thought it was.
Im not surprised. It doesn’t really fit anywhere.
I’m a vegetarian and have been for about 30 years. None of the fake meat really appealed to me. I don’t factor anything that looks or tastes like meat into my diet. The same is true of other long term vegetarians that I know. I did try the products and they were “meh”.
It suspect it mostly appealed to meat eaters who felt a little guilty about it due to marketing and social pressure. But the expense and the general inferiority of their products was enough for it to wear off quickly. I don’t blame them for not bothering.
I will add I’m not a strict vegetarian - I’ll eat meat in places where it’s not socially understood what vegetarians are. Arguing with some guy in the middle of nowhere in Central Asia about the chunk of horse you just got served isn’t productive. Whatever you want to do is fine.
Boy, the C-suite that sold in the 2019-2021 peak at $150 a share knew what they were doing.
I've been vegetarian for about 8 years and won't buy them and try to avoid them in restaurants because they're too meat-like. Unfortunately they've made good non-fake meat vegetarian burgers (black bean, wild rice, etc) harder to find.
It's a situation of "You know that thing you don't eat, don't like, and don't have cravings for anymore? We made something that tastes exactly like it. You're going to love it!"
I'm glad they existed when I first went vegetarian as they made the transition easier, but its a tough market when people will go off them in a couple years.
I'll echo what some of the other commenters have stated:
I'm not vegan nor vegetarian, but I definitely align with many of the reasons that one would choose to be so. There are environmental and animal welfare concerns with the meat industry that simply cannot be ignored.
With that in mind, I try _choose_ a non-meat-based option when it's feasible. I do my best to vote with my dollar. Beyond Meat and Impossible have made this option available significantly more often in the past couple years.
When I shop for meat at the grocery store to cook at home, I've effectively stopped buying "real" meat for my standard meals. Unless I'm cooking some special or something specific, I simply buy Beyond Meat/Impossible for my standard meals. The same applies when eating out -- if there's a meat alternative, I will go for it (even absorbing the $2-3 upcharge).*
This is not to say that I _only_ go for the meat-alternative-based non-meat dishes. I often go for a tofu or mushroom alternative too. I don't even think Beyond Meat/Impossible taste _like_ the meat they're trying to substitute -- they're just simply good, meat-y, protein-y, umami-y flavors that I simply can't get enough of.
The more options there are for people like me the better. My diet has been able to shift closer and closer to removing meat entirely, but it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing battle. I just want to eat _less_ meat, not _no_ meat.
* One thing that's frustrating to me as someone that's not _actually_ a vegetarian/vegan is that restaurants often make the assumption that if I'm choosing the meat-alternative, then I must be vegetarian or vegan. No, I still want the cheese or the dairy, or even the meat (e.g.: an Impossible Cheeseburger with real bacon is still delicious). I'm trying to reduce, not _eliminate_, meat from my diet.
If you care about the ethical reasons for plant-based meat, you should look at the companies business practices behind the scenes when they think no one is paying attention - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1927531529883762920
Kind of wild how they're treating creators.
You shouldn't take it so personally that they're suing you. They're obligated to try to defend their copyright if they want to be able to continue using it.
I'm not a vegetarian and I buy them exactly because they're meat-like.
You're literally not supporting a company which, as you admit, made your life more pleasant. And might potentially do so for others.
I'm confused.
Because after 8 years the idea of eating meat has no remaining appeal and is switching more to mild revulsion. Why would I order a substitute that is a close copy of that?
I'll still get them if there's literally no other vegetarian option on the menu, but that's rare.
There’s no way to say this without sounding like an asshole but perhaps in 8 years your memory of what meat is like has drifted. I only say that because the rest of us wish the fake stuff was remotely comparable in taste and texture.
Both can be true. I think they try desperately to be meat, and they fail miserably.
I both remember the taste of meat and wish meat alternatives would taste like it, and I think Impossible and Beyond are both very successful at that.
For me, it's an uncanny valley thing. It's close, but missing something small and intangible which leaves me ruminating on the "fakeness."
If you didn't like that, the CEO of impossible foods is now proposing a 50/50 burger (50% fake meat, 50% meat) - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1936183159491584134
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/impossible-foods-growth-...
Sounds mad but it could work.
People seem inclined to buy hybrids over full EVs which is a comparable situation.
> You know that thing you don't eat, don't like, and don't have cravings for anymore?
That is not everyone's experience with being vegetarian.
I've been vegetarian for a long time and I still think Beyond burgers are great. I have a pack of them from Costco in the freezer. I like black bean burgers, too, but Beyond burgers taste like my (distant) memory of a "normal" burger.
In any case, I assume Beyond was relying on getting more market penetration past just vegetarians and vegans. There just aren't enough of us to get to the revenue they seem to be targeting. Personally, I'll be disappointed if they end up disappearing.
Was a vegetarian for about 8 years and now a pescatarian. We practically always have some Beyond products in our house and will order them at restaurants. Losing Beyond products would be a huge bummer.
Why do you assume people will stop consuming them after a few years? I think most people enjoy the taste of meat but are concerned about the environmental implications of consuming meat.
I would replace all animal products if they tasted like the real thing. I'm sorry but tofu is not cheese
> I think most people enjoy the taste of meat but are concerned about the environmental implications of consuming meat.
I don't think most people think about the environmental implications of consuming meat even remotely
Indeed. I've been vegan for nearly 5 years, and I still miss meat. Beyond and Impossible make being vegan tolerable for me.
Do you care about the ethical implications of the business practices of the brands you're supporting?
https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1927531529883762920
I'm just the opposite.
I'm a vegan who loves & misses the taste of meat. Without Beyond (and Impossible), it would have been way harder for me to have become vegan. I think black bean burgers are disgusting. When picking a restaraunt for a team dinner with non vegans, I specifically look for menus that offer Impossible or Beyond, and I avoid restaurants that offer homemade bean/pea/etc burgers.
One of the things I've noticed about shopping carefully at the local supermarket (Albertsons, in Oregon) is that they very often use beef as a 'loss leader' to get people to shop there, so beef is often cheaper than it 'should' be, and especially so if more of the externalities involved in the production of beef were included in the price.
I like beef, but the price probably makes it harder to compete with.
Ground beef needs to move quickly, and you've got to sell some to go with the nicer cuts of meat, so it makes sense to sell at low or negative margins.
Other faux-meat companies like Impossible seem to be doing better. Maybe Beyond's product is inferior? Personally, I don't choose it over Impossible.
Impossible is good enough that - in the right context, if you squint real hard - you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish it from the real deal. Beyond just isn't there, it still comes off as a weird faux meat.
The article says that impossible food has gone down 50% (the stock price)
Note that Impossible, unlike Beyond, isn't publicly traded, so the only time anyone knows for sure what it's worth is right after it raises capital. It sounded like the 50% thing was some kind of internal projection.
I think the problem is that crappy supermarket meat is really cheap, and most people don't seem to care about the quality of the meat. For those people, it's hard to justify buying a more expensive product that's not even meat.
I wonder if reducing the price (without selling at a loss) would increase sales enough to offset the lower revenue
The crappy supermarket meat is actually incredibly nutritious it just has dubious ethics for an apparently vanishingly small market segment.
But it tastes disgusting, it's one of those things where you actually get what you pay
What makes supermarket meat crappy?
Bad cuts, like pork loins that are not fatty.
Loin is usually pretty lean. If you want fatty then shoulder or belly are a better bet.
There is no crappy meat, just meat that isn't prepared well.
There's crappy meat. Have you ever had cheap salmon sashimi? It's completely flavorless, with a rubbery, watery mouthfeel. Conversely have you had expensive salmon sashimi? A delicate umami flavor with a mouthfeel of liquified butter. It's not preparation. They're not the same fish.
Different subspecies of plant and animal taste different. Farmers have learned to charge more for the ones that taste better.
You wouldn't say "there's no crappy tomatoes, only crappy preparation." Nah, some tomatoes are simply junk.
Some of the best food cultures in the world - Italy, France, Japanese - lean much more heavily on ingredient quality than on preparation. Fine dining as a whole revolves around ingredients.
Part of the reason that cheap meat is cheap is because it's a byproduct of producing nice meat. Chicken thighs are cheap because the chicken seller makes money on breasts. Round is cheap because the cow is paid for with the revenue from brisket and ribeye etc.
The meat alternatives are a product by itself, and they have to justify their whole supply chain. That's tough.
Wish their products had less fat in them. They're tasty, but nutritionally they're a whole lot of canola oil.
Their newest release uses avocado oil, fwiw: https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/beyond-beef/ground...
Is anyone really pretending these are healthier than a grass-fed beef patty? Or cooked vegetables?
The health pitch on these products has always struck me as incredibly weird.
Yes. Meat consumption is not exactly healthy. It's absolutely plausible that replacing it with something like this is a net plus.
That "grass-fed beef" is like a healthy standout is an unsubstantiated myth.
> It's absolutely plausible that replacing it with something like this is a net plus
Plausible. But both unproven and unlikely.
To the extent we’ve found anything out in nutrition, it’s that processing away from the kitchen is generally bad.
> That "grass-fed beef" is like a healthy standout is an unsubstantiated myth
Nope [1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8728510/
Not a customer but it’s a shame it’s not working out for them. I’m sure they have people who would enjoy it but the feedback I’ve heard was mostly negative with respect to quality of ingredients and the like.
At this stage if they scaled back would they stand a chance to survive? Or do they owe too much money?
They owe way too much. The article actually touches on this - they have such little hope of paying back their debt that they are leaning into this so that they can get better renegotiation terms with bond holders
Glad to see that people are still able to think for themselves. Nobody wants to eat this toxic sludge!
Not surprised. Expensive, taste like shit. Nice Asian vegetarian food exist. A always seemed like stupid amount of resources a d effort to cater to burger markets.
How is their competitor Impossible Foods doing? It's a private company, so we can't as easily look at stock prices.
Not great - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1931091407294312956
You seem to be single-purpose posting to promote your legal case.
Is the information wrong?
Last I looked, there was an awful lot of saturated fat in their burgers. I tended to order something other than a veggie burger when their was the only one on the menu.
USDA 80/20 ground beef has 7.7g per 113g [0], 90/10 has 5g [1], Beyond Meat has 2g [2], and Impossible has 6g [3].
Impossible also has a "Lite" version (which doesn't seem to exist near me) with 1g [4], although apparently it doesn't taste very good.
[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514744/nutrients
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514743/nutrients
[2] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-CA/products/the-beyond-burger/...
[3] https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189392...
[4] https://impossiblefoods.com/beef/plant-based-impossible-beef...
So if I buy their very cheap convertible bond, they either repay it (they won't) or they give me lots of equity?
Or you take a hair cut if the majority of bond holders agree.
Any employees here, sorry what morale must be like at work (I’d guess) & hope you get great offers elsewhere!
Plant-based protein will not succeed as long as government subsidize meat production.
I feel like I'm the ideal customer for Beyond Meat and its competitors. I am not price sensitive, I don't mind the idea of plant based meat products, and I am willing to try new things. My biggest reasons for not buying Beyond Meat are that I:
1. Would rather not cook, and eating Beyond Meat in a way that's financially meaningful for them as a company means me cooking
2. If I'm going to put in the effort to cook, I want the result to be something that I have outsized enjoyment for. If I get a middling burger for my trouble, I'm simply not going to care enough to do it.
The chicken nuggets and popcorn chicken sound the closest to something I can casually heat up, but neither of those are things that would replace something in my existing diet. They have beef and chicken and sausage and all sorts of other stuff, but they're just the meat. They replace an ingredient.
I buy Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls. I'd happily get ones that used Beyond Meat. I buy frozen noodle and pasta meals: same deal. Sandwiches. Chicken salad. Soup. I'm struggling to think of a single product that I can swap out for a Beyond Meat alternative.
I don't need every bit of meat that I consume to even be especially good. But if it's only just fine and it's not convenient, I'm just not going to get it. If it was cheaper, I might consider. Or if it was more nutritious. Or if it was more filling than regular meat (or less filling, even). Or if I felt strongly about the plant based products that I buy being a somewhat compelling meat facsimile. But there's just nothing that inspires me to pick up any of their products.
Impossible has Impossible Bowls, which sounds like something that would be what you're looking for. They are available at Walmart https://impossiblefoods.com/media/news-releases/impossible-f...
For your own health, I implore you to explore even the most basic of cooking.
[dead]
This is a poster child of ZIRP one step away from Juicero.
The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
Just like the drug ads on TV, this is one of those situations where industry must be reigned in before the market discovers the truth.
> The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
A Beyond Burger has ~300 mg sodium. You could eat one every day and come in well under the recommended daily allowance of sodium as long as the rest of your diet is appropriate.
Headline here is not true; in fact:
> the end of Beyond Meat stock doesn’t mean the end of the Beyond Meat business ... reorganized company can continue its work, and perhaps even go public again in the future
The stock price is simply unnaturally low because there's a decent chance it'll go through Chapter 11 soon.
What I would like to see in a fake meat is a product engineered to have lower level of histidine, since there is evidence that gut microorganism processing of histidine creates a chemical that causes atherosclerosis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44595008
I absolutely love beef. A good ribeye steak, or some smoked brisket are two of my favorite foods. I was intrigued by the claims these meat alternative companies were making, so naturally I tried them all. It's not surprising to me that they are struggling. I could barely swallow their products. I think it was a mistake to compare these to one of the greatest foods on the planet. It set the expectation was too high.
When Impossible was new and only available in burger format at a small number of partner restaurants, I ventured out to SF to try two of them. I concluded that it can make for a genuinely convincing substitute, but the key is preparing it with a sleight of hand to misdirect from the noticeable imitation texture and flavor. Those early burgers were made with thin patties, with flavorful burger sauces and toppings.
As Impossible expanded beyond their launch partners, they lost their control over the consumer experience. I think many restaurants now serve wretched Impossible Burgers because they just substitute a beef patty and don't try to accommodate the differences.
If you are savoring it as part of a taste test, it will never fool you; the first impression isn't the takeaway. If beef is not the focal point of the dish, as in their Impossible Mapo Tofu recipe (https://impossiblefoods.com/recipes/impossible-mapo-tofu) or a chili or something, it can slot in pretty well. They are nowhere near substitutes for ribeye steak or smoked brisket.
They work well enough as a replacement in a fast food burger or in a dish where the meat itself isn't really the star player. Using their ground meat alternatives in a hamburger helper is totally fine.
We're not at the point where high quality meat can be replaced, but that doesn't mean the product is worthless.
everybody mostly discusses real vs. imitation/vegan, yet i think it has nothing to do with the current BYND situation.
"on an operating basis Beyond Meat lost 45 cents from every dollar of sales."
that is a culprit. Bad management. How else can your plant based product at comparable to meat prices be a loss instead of great profit. Even pure avocados are cheaper than meat. What is better and pricier than avocados do you put into your product? Then it should taste much better than avocados and meat. Yet there is no avocados, it is more like low quality cat/dog food:
"Key components include pea protein, rice protein, and lentil protein, alongside avocado oil, refined coconut oil, and canola oil. Other notable additions include methylcellulose, potato starch, and apple extract. "
That stuff at their prices should be super-profitable.
> one of the greatest foods on the planet
Given the amount of animal suffering and environmental destruction involved in beef, this great taste shouldn't be taken so lightly. Everyone should make some effort to reduce its consumption.
That's disappointing, they've done a great job making plant meat ubiquitous and took away some of the hippy aura that has kept many people from trying plant-based meat alternatives. I really hope they can turn it around, both selfishly as a happy customer, as well as for the planet.
I don’t eat meat but enjoy their products at least once a week, sometimes more. Very tasty, available nearly everywhere.
I don’t care about the nutrition/health of it at all.
Hope they can turn things around!
Just another processed food product, good riddance.
Vegetarians and Vegans turn out to prefer less UPF dominant protein in their diet?
Plus, they apparently lost 45c in every $1 of sold product.
Quorn, allergy issue noted, continues. Growing edible fungi in tanks using classic bioreactor methods works, is economically sustainable. TVP likewise. 1960s tech which works at scale.
Me? I liked eating it a bit. I like eating flesh and organ meat, fowl and fish a lot. A lot beats a bit. I like inari sushi too. So it's not I dislike the veg alternatives.
Impossible Foods is not doing much better - the numbers are just less public but you can find a lot if you dig - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1931091407294312956
They're also spending enormous amounts of time & money suing creators for their trademarks (sort of a bad-look if your stated mission is to "save the planet")