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Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

nytimes.com

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Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#281

Post by charles_f »

gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I married a vegan, and I eat a lot of vegetarian food. (I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day.) One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. A familiar refrain I've heard in restaurants in the last few years is "we used to have a nice veggie patty, but they replaced it with the beyond/incredible/whatever patty.…

> One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus

I'm not vegan, but I've grown to always take the veggie burgers, unless they're beyond meat or black beans-based. They tend to be better than that dry-tasting overcooked patty (in my opinion). Makes me sad when they replace their veggie options with beyond meat

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#282

Post by ChadNYC »

prepend wrote: post #151
freitasm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is BM (and others) aren't trying to create vega/vegetarian meat. They are trying to make meat in a sustainable way, so it has to taste more like beef/pork than chickpeas or tofu if they want to get the main market. They are still not there.

> They are trying to make meat in a sustainable way I mean, isn’t meat sustainable? As it’s renewable. Factory farming isn’t sustainable, but there’s plenty of pasture raised organic beef ranchers who grow meat in a sustainable way. If the goal is sustainability, then there are other ways that are likely healthier. I thought the benefit was for ethical vegetarians who like the taste of beef but don’t want to harm ani…

This is a bit old, but it thoroughly examines why the livestock industry is not sustainable.

https://www.fao.org/3/a0701e/a0701e00.htm

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#283

Post by ChadNYC »

aidenn0 wrote: post #206
prepend wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are trying to make meat in a sustainable way I mean, isn’t meat sustainable? As it’s renewable. Factory farming isn’t sustainable, but there’s plenty of pasture raised organic beef ranchers who grow meat in a sustainable way. If the goal is sustainability, then there are other ways that are likely healthier. I thought the benefit was for ethical vegetarians who like the taste of beef but don’t want to harm ani…

It's probably sustainable for everyone to eat a large fraction of a pound of meat per week. The average American eats over 4lbs. of meat per week. This is not sustainable.

And developing countries with rapidly growing middle classes are catching up with the west very quickly.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#284

Post by kens »

sdenton4 wrote: post #253
sbierwagen wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Economies of scale will push the cost down over time. This is, of course, true, but as a business proposition it's a bit daunting. When you're competing with industrial agriculture, you're competing with a technology stack that's tens of thousands of years old, spans the globe, and employs literal billions of people. It's not quite the same as accepting a couple years of unprofitability when scaling up a social netw…

And yet... "The United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today." https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/#:... .

Those numbers don't make sense. If you follow the chain of references, they seem to be made up.

(Why do I say the numbers don't make sense? a) That subsidy works out to about 35 cents per person per day. How could that possibly reduce the price of a pound of hamburger by a factor of 6? b) In other countries, a Big Mac costs at most $6.71. The $13 figure seems to be nonsense.)

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#285

Post by RC_ITR »

georgefrick wrote: post #13

"Its stock has slumped nearly 83 percent in the past year. Sales, which the company had expected to rise as much as 33 percent this year, are now likely to show only minor growth." So they still showed growth, the stock just crashed; and the others in the segment who don't have to report numbers are doing better. Just sounds like a discounted stock to me.

Be careful with this logic.

Even at this 'discount' their market cap is 2x their revenue, which doesn't sound so bad until you compare it to someone like Tyson foods who has a market cap that is 0.5x their revenue.

Given BYND isn't growing much and its got a bad cost structure, it's still 'expensive,' just less so than before.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#286

Post by ChadNYC »

girvo wrote: post #258
notjulianjaynes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that there is no reason these plant based alternatives should be priced higher than meat. The raw ingredients are dirt cheap. You can get pound of TVP or soy protein is like $3-4; and certainly less at wholesale prices. It comes dehydrated, so back of the napkin I'd guess the cost for a company producing fake meat products is like $1/lb or less. I paid $8.50 at a gas station for 2.47 oz of "Noble Jerky."…

TVP is so damned excellent. That reminds me, I really need to write up the recipes I've come up with using them and post them somewhere. Magic cheap protein with an awesome flavour if you rehydrate it with vegan beef/chicken stock and season it well and cook it correctly. It's even excellent just chucked into some instant ramen (after frying it) with some spring onions!

Please share when you do write them up!

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#288

Post by slavboj »

Restaurant menu and supermarket shelf space is expensive. Yet I almost never see it purchased at anything like what would justify the frequency - it's like it's offered out of pure politeness, like a decorative menorah at a "holiday celebration". Ofc it's not, the company has to be subsidizing it at effectively negative cost. Even in their 10K they keep their "promotional activities" confidential, but their "selling, general and administrative expenses" are 50% of the value of their actual cost of goods sold.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#289

Post by gnicholas »

bpye wrote: post #240
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m vegan, converted about four years ago so I ate meat for decades. I ate impossible burgers for a while after Burger King got them, because there is some nostalgia/novelty in going to a fast food joint. But I’ve realized that this weird food product leaves some kind of odd taste in my stomach, and not just from Burger King. I’m pretty over these fake beef burgers now, and would way rather have a black bean burger o…

I find that Beyond Meat is 'okay' in a burger when it's got all the other flavours going on, but I was recently playing around with using it in other dishes like meatballs and wasn't nearly as happy with it. It has a weird aftertaste that I can't quite identify, and whilst not awful, isn't terribly pleasant.

The Beyond meat we've had from the grocery store has too much smoke flavor added in. It's fine if you're making burgers, and maybe chili, but anything else is a non-starter. I think they make sausage and meatballs that don't have this flavor, but whatever generic 'ground meat' we got was suitable only for making food on a grill.

Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries

#290

Post by jxramos »

slavboj wrote: post #288

Restaurant menu and supermarket shelf space is expensive. Yet I almost never see it purchased at anything like what would justify the frequency - it's like it's offered out of pure politeness, like a decorative menorah at a "holiday celebration". Ofc it's not, the company has to be subsidizing it at effectively negative cost. Even in their 10K they keep their "promotional activities" confidential, but their "selling,…

It's sort of an irritation finding it lumped in the meat freezer section at Costco, it's like noise in my search space looking for the real stuff. It doesn't help that they try to simulate the visuals to appear the same as well. Many times I have looked at some packaging and thought "that looks like a good chicken nugget", but then quickly ascertain it's not a chicken nugget. I wouldn't mind if there was some distinct boundary labeling of the shelf to identify the cluster of products under a certain identity, it's just when the border isn't identified and the customer has to determine it each round that causes the friction. It has seemed to stabilize in our region to in this third left quadrant of the freezer but it shifts one or two columns left and right it feels like depending on the inventory coming in.
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