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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

#661

Post by pbalau »

nottorp wrote: post #609
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. I'm not a vegan nor a vegetarian. I just sometimes think I eat too much meat and check out vegetarian restaurants. They all have 100 kinds of fake burgers and little else. There are thousands of good food recipes without meat. Why are you trying to sell me burgers?

Because in the American society, food == burgers. If you don't want to eat meat, you need to replace the meat bit from a burger.

In many other cuisines, there are naturally non meat dishes, just look at the Indian cuisine. Heck, even my own country cuisine, Romania, has plenty of meat free dishes that taste very good.

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

#662

Post by sweetheart »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #636
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.…

Meat is a lot more nutrient dense. You would have to eat 4x the veggies to get the same nutrition. Better to let the farm animals concentrate that energy for us. They also eat a lot of grass, which is great for carbon capture. So just eat a balanced meal and be done with it.

Animal agriculture is one of the largest contributors to the climate crisis, so I don’t think your point about carbon capture is valid.

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

#663

Post by pclmulqdq »

joe_the_user wrote: post #389
xyzzyz wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sometimes, economies of scale don't just come automatically with scale. You actually have to make economies of scale happen when you invent new processes - this often means creating new machines or new methods that can be done by untrained people.

The process for creating these fake meats is complicated and long, so there are certainly a few novel steps in there. I'm guessing that a few key steps do not scale well today and have significant technological barriers to scaling. I have no idea what they could possibly be.

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

#664

Post by sweetheart »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #595
bryan0 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals. Beyond/Impossible is close enough.

> But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals so basically you want a veggie patty disguised as an hamburger. but there's a catch: agriculture kills as many animals than we do to eat them. You might not see them, but billions of insects, worms, small rodents etc are killed in the process of making agriculture a viable business. Pesticides are not exactly environmental frie…

https://yourveganfallacyis.com/en/vegans-kill-animals-too/re...

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

#665

Post by cactusplant7374 »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #101
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.…

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…

It's could be the high amount of fat / saturated fat. This happens to me with a lot of high fat products. When I was consuming a lot of coconut milk / cream with curry dishes it happened too.

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

#666

Post by fsloth »

boppo1 wrote: post #654
fsloth wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not 100% sure it's a product issue and not a market positioning issue. Current gen "new fake meat" veggie brands try to position themselves at premium, which looks like the wrong place to be in. At premium fake meats loose to meat, hands down. It's like you are trying to position fish sticks on the same slot as fresh salmon. Huge marketing campaign, target low price segment - that would be the market experiment I…

Maybe. Maybe not. Poor people are pissed off these days and boy that sends the message “we’re taking meat away too now! For a hundred years you knew at least you had meat on the table, but we’re going back to the good ‘ol days of serfdom. Enjoy the slop!” I have already seen this sentiment among poor people.

Well, it's about marketing and positioning isn't it. Veggie based diets are plausibly healthier due to higher content of fiber - and health is generally considered an admirable trait. So the marketing should not be about selling a cheap offering, but something like Coca-Cola (everyone likes it!) and celebrities enjoying the product and so on. A campaign that draws everyone to the product basically (like cigarettes in olden times). I'm not sure if you can achieve something like that today though. But at least US food industry used to be really great at selling a cheap product to the masses if they put their marketing muscle behind it :)

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

#667

Post by osigurdson »

barrell wrote: post #586
froggychairs wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know red meat isn’t healthy. Most (not all) fake meats try to replicate red meat. What proof do you have them being unhealthy? Impossible for example has fairly simple list of ingredients. Better macros than burger ground. Anecdotally. My father in law has had to stop eating red meat due to health concerns. He enjoys impossible products just fine with no negative concerns in blood biomarkers or examines (several y…

> We know red meat isn’t healthy It's worth obfuscating this point. We don't know red meat isn't healthy. Equally, we also don't know that red meat is healthy. Without making a case for either side, readers should know that the field of nutrition is incredibly unclear, often times very individualized, and most of what people 'know' are just 'educated guesses'. For every study proving one side of the argument, you can…

Agree. If you have a claim to make about nutrition, please back it up with a million person controlled study run over 60 years.

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

#668

Post by crimsoneer »

boppo1 wrote: post #651
henrikschroder wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. Habitual meat eater here. I will never ever trust these products to be right for my body the way meat is. Humans haven’t nailed it in the past with heavily processed foods, why would it suddenly work now? I understand…

This seems like a bonkers thing to claim. You're suggesting that if someone gave you two burgers that tasted identical, one that was real meat and costs £5, and the other that was fake and costs £2, if they were other than that TOTALLY IDENTICAL (other than the fake one being better for the planet), you'd still feel the need to eat the real one? For some sense of perceived...offence?

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

#669

Post by newyankee »

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.…

I am a vegetarian who loves Black bean burgers. Apparently I can't find good ones in India. It used to be a staple one for me back in US.

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

#670

Post by lkbm »

jjcm wrote: post #136

I'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…

> 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.

Interesting. I've always felt the opposite: Impossible closer to beef, Beyond much tastier.

But I haven't eaten a real burger in a couple decades.

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