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

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

#301

Post by SoftTalker »

sokoloff wrote: post #87
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.

As a pretty hardcore meat-lover (we had sous-vide filets tonight at home), I think Impossible is close enough on the taste and feel side for a lot of dishes that use beef (including hamburgers). They're comically far off on the price side, but if they could get price-competitive with bulk 80% ground beef, they would capture a large amount of that market, I think.

I don't understand how you can say this. The Beyond/Incredible meat is not close enough. It's not even close at all. The texture is wrong, the feel chewing it is wrong, the taste is wrong unless you slather it with enough condiments that you can't taste it anyway. It is exactly the sort of highly processed industrially-created food that health experts tell us to avoid.

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

#302

Post by HellsMaddy »

duxup wrote: post #197
bawolff wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, are you also ok with how raw hamburger looks, because to me personally that's also super gross. I guess everyone is different though.

IMO ground beef can look bad but it doesn’t have a distinct smell.

When you go vegan for a few years, you can absolutely smell raw ground beef. It's not a good smell.

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

#303

Post by RC_ITR »

shalmanese wrote: post #38
dayvid wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the reduced cost of regular meat due to subsidies? https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/

No, the impact of subsidies is always heavily exaggerated by those who want to promote an agenda, as evidenced by the relatively small differences in prices between countries that subsidize and don't subsidize various things. $38B is only $100 per person. Even if it all went towards ground meat, it could only subsidize 4 lbs at a $30 -> $5 cost reduction.

>No, the impact of subsidies is always heavily exaggerated by those who want to promote an agenda, as evidenced by the relatively small differences in prices between countries that subsidize and don't subsidize various things.

This is such a wild thing to say without any proof. SA, for example uses way more petrol than the EU, largely because of direct subsidies that keep the price low [0] Now, notice how my example was a consumer subsidy, and consumers can't easily export petrol.

What you're maybe confused by is the concept of tariff-free trade that's become popular in the past few decades.

The US subsidizes corn farmers (who are free to sell corn to whomever they like anywhere in the world) not corn consumers. Most Western subsidies are to producers, for a variety of reasons.

A single global prevailing price isn't evidence of subsidies not working, it's just evidence of free trade.

The true counterfactual for Western subsidies is the global price if there weren't subsidies, which is usually pretty extreme, for example:

As we have seen, corn is one of the most highly subsidized crops in the US, with subsidy levels as high as 47% of farm income. Other important distortions characterize US corn markets, some more important to prices perhaps than high subsidy levels. [1]

Now keep in mind, that's not 'Corn is 47% cheaper because of subsidies' that's '47% of the effort dedicated to growing corn would not happen if not for subsidies.'

>$38B is only $100 per person. Even if it all went towards ground meat, it could only subsidize 4 lbs at a $30 - $5 cost reduction.

To make the claim you did just has no basis in logic. The US does not participate in direct subsidies like you claim. It instead gives farmers $38bn when the total value of cattle marked for slaughter in the US is $135bn. [2]

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat... [1] https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/15590/ [2] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/cattle-beef/...

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

#304

Post by dathinab »

One thing I'm seeing all the time is people approaching vegetarian food by removing the meat and adding something else instead.

IMHO this is the wrong approach and hardly ever works well or relies on luxury products like beyond meat(1).

The best vegetarian food I had eaten was such which was designed as vegetarian food, not as a dish with meat and then modified to somehow work. Pretty much the only times I ended up with vegetarian food which tasted disgusting was with meat replacement products.

At the same time beyond meat isn't the only producer of meat replacement products, and you don't need massive international cooperation for them either. For example the local butcher around where I live has meat replacement products, self-made based on the recipe they licensed from another smallish non-international company. It doesn't taste like meat, but it tastes good and has properties similar but not quite like meat wrt. taste direction, consistency and texture so you can swap it in to get a quite different but still good tasting result (through it's not stake like, more pulled pork like, suited for dishes which need pulled pork or minced meat).

(1): Now part of the reason why it is more expensive then meat is probably state subventions but on a pure resource level meat is much more resource intensive to produce then most vegetarian stuff.

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

#305

Post by nicolas_t »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #214
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, to each their own, but I have the complete opposite experience and opinion: 1. First off, the vast majority of restaurants that I've been to that offer Impossible or Beyond Burgers still offer at least one traditional veggie burger. In fact I don't know if I've ever seen a restaurant that will only offer a faux meat burger but not offer a veggie burger. 2. I love a good Impossible Burger, fundamentally because…

Complete opposite experience on both counts, anecdotally. I've been vegetarian for years, and the texture of meat (and substitutes) creeps me out. My town has like 10 restaurants that dropped their veggie burgers for beyond/impossible.

I'm not a vegetarian but I used to sometimes enjoy eating the old style veggie burgers that didn't try to taste like meat. I can't find them anymore and I absolutely loath beyond meat and impossible.

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

#306

Post by Vinnl »

jxramos wrote: post #290
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 distinc…

I mean, you can pretty much make the same argument about brands you don't like: they look similar to those by brands you do, and occupy the same shelf space.

(And for chicken nuggets specifically, I'd be surprised if you could tell the difference, haha.)

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

#307

Post by randomdata »

henrikschroder wrote: post #267
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.…

> The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat. You are not the target group for these products! The whole point of these products is to replace meat for habitual meat eaters. If the companies can get their products to taste about the same as meat, and have about the same nutritional value, while being cheaper , we can eliminate enormous amounts of habitual meat consumption. That's t…

Cheaper doesn't seem feasible, at least not without essentially duplicating the meat production process (maybe lab grown meat will get us there someday). Human grade food is more expensive, often considerably so. Animals essentially get the leftovers that we can't eat so they are afforded a huge price advantage and it is not clear how that is to be overcome sustainably.

Circumstances – widespread disease, for example – could see the price of meat exceed these products for periods of time. At which point these products could become contenders on factors of price, but as soon as the market starts to shift the price of meat will fall on the decrease in demand, and you're back to square one. Especially as meat has lag time to market so the price will fall further than you might expect before meat producers are able to pull back on production. There is nothing to keep people eating these products if there is nothing to differentiate them in the market.

The real value proposition is that it is different. A new food option to choose from. If it can be made great, where it is craved as much as meat, then they might have something. Until then, I can see why they are struggling.

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

#308

Post by tptacek »

SoftTalker wrote: post #298
colordrops wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you are being downvoted, but I know exactly what you mean. When I eat Impossible and especially Beyond burgers, my stomach feels slightly off. A bit of indigestion. I don't get this with typical veggie patties.

Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.

The idea that processing determines the healthfulness of a foodstuff is fallacious.

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

#309

Post by dathinab »

TylerE wrote: post #275
orangepurple wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is hard at work trying to figure out how to make ground up bugs affordable and palatable

That really needs rebranding. We already eat plenty but of insects… we just call em things like crustaceans, shrimp, and crayfish.

We also eat plenty of other bugs and insects which just get into the way of processing plants ;=)

(crustaceans are a good example as traces of them tend to get included into algal based food, but less pleasant sounding examples are e.g. from time to time small worms being in fruited pressed for juice, sound terrible but isn't really that terrible and impossible to avoid without using pesticides which are worse then that by far)

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

#310

Post by adam_arthur »

cowsup wrote: post #177
adam_arthur wrote: post #153

I can’t for the life of me figure out how they're losing so much money, yet their product is still far more expensive than actual beef. Can a more informed follower provide some insight? Are they just grossly mismanaging their production costs?

Creating "actual beef" used to be fairly expensive, but, over the decades, companies have found out how to produce it for as cheap as possible, while still earning billions in profits, without consumers feeling as though beef is expensive. That efficiency comes with time. Plant-based meat is still in its infancy by comparison. So, even though the costs to consumers is high, the amount of profit the plant-based compan…

Growth will come when the price comes down. They should be producing this stuff far below the cost of beef.

There’s economies of scale, sure, but the ingredients they use are far cheaper than the inputs required to make beef.

There is effectively no market for this product at costs that exceed beef

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