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Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
381–390 of 1001 posts
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#382One 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 w…
Completely agree with you. I'm not a vegetarian at all and honestly most of my dinners are vegetarian anyway because half the time I'm just too lazy to deal with meat. Plenty of delicious cheese centered meals, for instance. Mac and cheese can be made in a million different ways. Sometimes I'll make my chicken rice and mushroom casserole but throw in legumes instead. Lots of great things to make with eggs for protein too.
I've accidentally cut my meat consumption down drastically through sheer laziness, so I always find it puzzling that people make a fuzz about it.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#383I'm a meat eater, but am a big fan of fake meats - to the point where I prefer them in some situations. Overall I'm not a huge fan of Beyond Meat. While it does feel closer in taste to beef than impossible burgers, I heavily prefer the taste of impossible burgers to beyond. Impossible burgers have a stronger umami taste and tend to add to the experience. Beyond kinda just tastes like lower end beef to me. This means…
I don’t know that $114 over a year would be an amount I would notice/ make me buy a lesser product. I’ve no issue with removing the subsidy but I’m not sure that changes much either.
That is what bit over 2$ a week. Which I think is less than current inflation. So it would not actually change much.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#384This 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…
What do you see as the benefit of reducing red meat to once a month? There was a widely-publicized article recently questioning some "well-established" science that had, previously for decades, linked red meat to higher rates of heart disease, etc.
I don't think it's about health, it's about not having to unnecessarily farm cows.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#385I 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…
The thing is, this stuff is more expensive than normal meat, and if you go by bio availability of the nutrients, a fraction of the same nutritional value as actual meat. And if they replace meat consumption then it puts even more stress on the agricultural land that can actually grow vegetable crops, which is only about a quarter of all farm land.
So either way, it wont work that well in it's current state.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Let’s see what we know: 1. Raw materials are cheap 2. Expensive end product 3. Company is losing money The most straightforward explanation is that the processing is expensive in some way, unless I’m missing something here. I feel like the burden of proof should be on you to establish that the straightforward explanation is not accurate beyond just a claim.
> unless I’m missing something here
Yes, marketing.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Reliably present in all the major grocery chains here in the Pacific Northwest.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea that processing determines the healthfulness of a foodstuff is fallacious.
Not exclusively, of course, but the degree of processing of food greatly influences our body’s insulin response, which can over time have huge impacts on health (leading to fatty liver disease / metabolic syndrome / obesity / diabetes). This is why, for instance, fruit juice is so much worse for us than the whole fruit — most of the fiber is removed which would otherwise slow down digestion and temper insulin respons…
Some kinds of processing increase insulin impact, others don't. If your goal is controlling sugars, a diet premised solely on minimizing processing isn't a great strategy; "processing" isn't the high-order bit of that problem.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#389Earlier 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.
I don't understand why the cost of processing can't achieve significant economies of scale when the company is supplying food at the national level. Can someone explain that to me?
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
To each their own. I greatly enjoy the flavor of meat, but feel like a serial killer when I think about the animal suffering and to a lesser extend carbon emissions. While I also get a slightly odd feeling in my stomach from Impossible beef (doesn't happen with their cyber chicken), it's a tradeoff I'm excited to make 1-2 a month to get the flavor of a burger without feeling like I just tortured a puppy.
You'd be surprised how many animals die in the process of scaled agriculture and displacement that occurs to create these replacement goods. But they're not the big fluffy animals we anthropomorphise, so it's easy to accept.
I have always wondered just how many accidental casualties occur with harvesting equipment. I guess home garden is the best bet if it’s a concern?