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

nytimes.com

341–350 of 1001 posts

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

#341
post #212

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."…

These companies are losing a lot of money. That the raw ingredients are cheap doesn’t matter much if the cost and complexity of processing is high.

So you seem to know what's complex on this products. Share your knowledge. I claim that this products are not complex or not more complex as meat based products

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

#342

If you know cars are problematic, the solution isn't to produce a bicycle that has a "car-like experience". The solution is to make non-car transportation more available, more useful, cheaper, etc, and slowly make car use itself more painful. I have at least 8 vegan dishes I can make that are just amazingly delicious . A mushroom risotto, veggie tajine, chana masala, ramen, moussaka, general tso's cauliflour, cuban b…

This is a really great perspective. Thank you for sharing!

Regarding this part:

> It took an unbelievable combination of luck and grit for one woman to introduce America to French cuisine, allowing home cooks to stretch past the bland, canned staples of the 1960's.

I feel like this should be obvious but I'm ashamed to know I don't know who you're describing. Can you or somebody else happening to read this please elaborate?

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

#344
post #242
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus I've found a similar trend in the supermarket frozen aisles. I used to be able to reliably find "veggie crumbles" at most largeish stores, perfect for pizza, chili, or mapo tofu. My favorite brand was Quorn (not quite vegan, includes egg whites) but there were often several decent options. Now it's rare to find anything other than Beyond or Imposs…

I also quite like Quorn but it is non existent in North America unfortunately.

Can't edit this now but looks like I was mistaken. Non existent in Canada but it is available in the US these days?

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

#345
post #7

It really is not that complex to understand: You either love meat and won't touch these things with a 10 feet pole or you are vegetarian/vegan and usually take care of what you put in your body, meaning probably a limited amount of junk/processed food, meaning no fake meat substitutes. The market really isn't that big imho, there are already plenty of alternative to meat for most applications, which are cheaper, less…

I'm vegan, but our numbers are so vanishingly small, we're a distraction in this conversation. Essentially the ~entire market for these products is meat eaters, and I don't believe meat eaters care about what they're eating even if they pay lip service to their health, the environment, or animal rights. Meat substitutes will win in the market because the food labs will (and I believe already have) succeeded in making them cheaper and tastier. You can't add extra salt, sugar, and MSG (not there is anything wrong with it) to a 100% beef patty.

I am 100% rooting for Impossible to win regulatory approval here in the EU, even though it's an uphill legal battle. The USA leads the world in junk food technology, and we need better junk food to get us through the energy transition.

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

#346

i really want to say this. there is chinese demand for... sea cucumbers...Nostoc flagelliforme..i dunno...all kinds of crab and lobster...shark's fin? that they are prepared to pay good money for.. why are the lab grown food firms trying to compete against the domestic chicken? why not lab grown shark's fin or sea cucumber?

Are those people paying for the flavor of the food, or because they think it'll cure incontinence or something?

flavor/texture/appearance

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

#347
This post is crowded with responses from people explaining why they hate Beyond meat

FWIW, I've always liked Beyond Meat as a "good enough" substitution for a beef burger that's easy to prepare that is close in texture to a real burger - if you use a burger sauce and cheese like most recipes for non-vegans do, it tastes pretty close. I even liked it so much I'd order it at restaurants wherever available and bought a few shares since I figured they'd do well.

I've tried Impossible Burgers too (both prepared by others and myself), and I don't like that it has hemoglobin in it and for some reason it's more in the uncanny valley than Beyond meat is for me - Beyond Meat is just different enough that it doesn't taste to me like moldy beef the way Impossible Burgers seem to.

What _did_ eventually get me to stop making Beyond Burgers is that the fat and sodium content is as bad or worse than just plain regular beef. Reducing red meat consumption to once a month or so achieves basically the same benefits, and occasional red meat consumption + no more frequent beyond meat burgers is healthier in the long run than what I was doing before. I think an under-appreciated advantage to the veggie and black bean burger options out there is they tend to be way better w.r.t. fat and sodium, and taste just as good once you give up on the "almost beef" taste of these new-wave alternatives, but Beyond Meat _did_ work for a few people out there and just never tweaked their product enough to seriously compete with cheaper alternatives as inflation has gotten worse.

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

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This source says differently [0], at least for meat. Do you have any evidence or reasoning? [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18444144/

For some reason there is no reply button on the other replies.

Maybe the evidence for meat doesn't generalise, but the idea that fresh vegetables would retain some sort-lived structures that start to break down once processed seems plausible. I was just pointing out that GPs claim could do with some backup.

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

#349
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.…

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…

We haven’t had issues with stomach upset, but I’ve found that cooking impossible burgers leaves an oder lingering in the house for days. It smells good while cooking but over time becomes off putting and I loose my appetite to cook the rest of the pack through the week.

Beyond doesn’t have the same issue for me.

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

#350
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.…

> IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach. When I want to eat meat, I want to eat meat.

for taste yes, for vegan and vegetarians it depends. that audience is so heavily diluted by a dozen different goals they want to represent or embody.

some don't like the inflammation (according to their sources) that a meat diet causes within humans, in which case this wouldn't satisfy them

some don't like harm to animals, in which case this would satisfy them

some don't like the environment impact, in which case, who knows? sustainability study and audits needed

others...?

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