Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beyond Meat fights for survival

foodinstitute.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

551–560 of 645 posts

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#551

Post by UltraSane »

jebarker wrote: post #379
UltraSane wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat" Humans have evolved to enjoy the taste/texture/smell of cooked meat

If you speak with vegetarians/vegans who have been raised that way and never eaten meat you will find many that are repulsed by it. Nurture seems to be able to override nature here and, as far as I’m aware, there’s no strong evidence that we’re born with an inherent taste for meat, we’re just born with bodies that need certain nutrients that are easily obtained from meat but can be found elsewhere.

I would be willing to bet if a lifelong vegan hadn't eaten in days and smelled a freshly cooked bacon cheeseburger they would start salivating. And I bet they would find it delicious if they ate it.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#552

Post by jfengel »

chickensong wrote: post #511
jfengel wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ask a bunch of meat eaters how they feel about animal cruelty, they'll get uncomfortable. Many will admit that they would like to avoid it but don't think it's practical. Look in particular at the kind who seek out organic, free range, and other (honestly, not very effective) ways to reduce suffering. I suspect the market research turned up a large contingent of such. Perhaps not sufficient to justify a whole…

> honestly, not very effective Care to elaborate?

Unfortunately, the legal definitions are the result of regulatory capture. Commercial organic farming has effectively nothing in common with JI Rodale's use when he coined it. (Well, popularized it.)

If you want to know how the animals are treated you need to visit the farm. Which you cannot do for commercial organic farms.

If you can, you could satisfy yourself that the animals are being treated in accordance with your conscience. Unfortunately it will cost at least twice as much. (And, aggravatingly, possibly emits more greenhouse gases.)

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#553

Post by j7ake »

exe34 wrote: post #447
biztos wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat Does that actually describe a commercially relevant segment of the population? Intuitively, having known a lot of vegetarians, I'd expect the people whose primary concern is animal cruelty to be specifically turned off by realistic fake meat.

That's me. The first time I had a seitan dish at a chinese restaurant, I was certain they had given me chicken and asked them to check. The poor guy went and dug the empty tin out of the bin to show me.

Chinese Buddhist cuisine is essentially the art of tasting exactly like meat without the meat.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#554

Post by lazylizard »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #299
lazylizard wrote: post #290

i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat. why not plant based lobster, crab, sea cucumber or sea urchin or sharks fin or something similar. that is unproductive? or impossible to farm? and perhaps even endangered? something that plant based processes are closer to competing on price.

> i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat. Because they are living, somewhat sentient, animals that are capable of suffering. And using them as a food source requires that we kill them on a large scale. And because industrial-scale meat production causes huge suffering to the animals caught-up in it, as well as…

there's not much market for that apparently..

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#555

Post by saagarjha »

spwa4 wrote: post #279
rimbo789 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a funny way to say genocide

Colonialism ENDED the genocide that was going on in most of Africa before the Ottoman empire was defeated. A genocide generally referred in older texts as "the islamic slave trade", because islamic economies were entirely dependent on the slave trade for more than a millenium, oh and because it's part of the religion/state that islam was at the time. Economically it was quite accurate to say that the islamic slave tr…

There is still genocide going on in Africa. Colonialism merely added more.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#556

Post by saagarjha »

UltraSane wrote: post #551
jebarker wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you speak with vegetarians/vegans who have been raised that way and never eaten meat you will find many that are repulsed by it. Nurture seems to be able to override nature here and, as far as I’m aware, there’s no strong evidence that we’re born with an inherent taste for meat, we’re just born with bodies that need certain nutrients that are easily obtained from meat but can be found elsewhere.

I would be willing to bet if a lifelong vegan hadn't eaten in days and smelled a freshly cooked bacon cheeseburger they would start salivating. And I bet they would find it delicious if they ate it.

I think it would be more like the reaction a "normal" meat eater would have when presented with a strange food, like snails, or grasshoppers. You'd probably eat it in desperation but I don't think it would register as food.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#557

Post by saagarjha »

jjani wrote: post #145
burnt-resistor wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in hill country Texas, even Walmart sells MorningStar corn dogs. H-E-B carries most of the Impossible line including meatballs. I made some dirty rice with the IF ground "beef" and it was awesome. There's almost no oil in it, browning onions and peppers required adding some avocado oil (never use olive oil for high temperature cooking). PS: I'm a lazy vegetarian who will eat a real burger every few months. When…

> When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan. Cheese I really doubt will get there any time soon. It's pretty doable to make milk-free cheese alternatives with eggs - at least in terms of taste - which is probably per gram a lot more sustainable than proper cheese, but there wouldn't be any market for it.

I feel like people who want milk-free cheese may not particularly want egg-based products either.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#558

Post by woodpanel »

zahlman wrote: post #512
woodpanel wrote: post #484

The Beyond Meat story for me is a boon since its IPO. I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally. Let's not forget how, in the late 2010s, VC money successfully pushed the idea that Beyond Meat et al didn't just taste as good as what it mimmicks, but that it acutally tastes better. Then-Celebrety Chef David Chang even said "it melted my brain" (Impossbile Foods). Chain stores around the world fell over…

> I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally. How did you decide when the rally was over?

May 2019 is when they launched in Germany and by looking at the shelves during the coming months it was obvious that BYND's then-market-cap of over 10B USD was unsustainable. Shelves were being emptied out quickly by customers at the start. By the end of the summer though, these new types of patties (whether BYND or its competitors) had more discount/sale stickers on it than the average carpet store window.

To be fair: Price actually returned to that valuation a year later during Covid but by then I wasn't exposed and didn't bother to double down. Probably bad financial behaviour, since I was betting against "the market can be incorrect longer than you can remain solvent", but the visibility of it's products vis-a-vis the hype, and the unlikelyness to me that a patty of hyperprocessed legumes could ever achieve a moat large enough to sustain such a market cap, gave me confidence that with BYND sanity would return to markets rather sooner along side the first quaterly results.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#559

Post by scythmic_waves »

cj wrote: post #385
scythmic_waves wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for breaking that down. As someone doing weightlifting, this is the primary reason I don't bother with vegetarian meats. They actually taste pretty good IMO, but they don't offer nutritional benefits commensurate with animal meat. It's a shame, really. I'd gladly incorporate them if I could get a similar protein : calorie ratio.

I dunno. I track macros religiously with daily protein/fat/carb targets for weight lifting. I don't care much about the macros of each individual meal (or any individual ingredient). When dinner comes around, I'm cooking whatever meal will let me hit my targets for the day. If I already got most my protein in, I'll happily eat something with "bad" protein/calorie ratio. Granted, 99% of people don't track food intake,…

> Critiquing beyond burgers for their macro breakdown doesn't make sense to me.

They're selling a meat replacement. Replacing the meat in my diet with their product does not work for my goals without additional planning to compensate. Therefore it's not a good replacement for me. A criticism need not apply in all cases to be valid.

> I'd still be able to hit 150g/day at least without really trying.

What are your calorie goals? If you're in a surplus, maybe. But I'm currently in a deficit with 150g protein / 1600 calorie. I do not find that I can hit this goal "without really trying", _especially_ without protein powder.

And to clarify, it's 100% possible to hit my goals eating vegetarian/vegan. But with meat in my diet it's much easier because their high protein content gives me more flexibility with the rest of the diet. If I wanted to do it vegetarian, I wouldn't use beyond meat because it'd be even harder than other options.

Re: Beyond Meat fights for survival

#560

Post by cloudbonsai »

bartread wrote: post #221
cloudbonsai wrote: post #132

So the biggest problem here is that Beyond Meat has a huge debt due in just 2 years: That’s a problem given that $1 billion in convertible bonds come due in March 2027. Beyond Meat has no way to repay that debt, and the credit markets know it: The bonds currently trade at about 17 cents on the dollar. To put the "$1B" number into the context, Beyond Meat sold $300M worth of plant-based meats last year, and made a net…

And this as well: > The company expects the figure to reach about $330 million in 2025, roughly 10% higher than it was six years earlier despite a huge increase in the number of products offered. It’s not like they have any growth potential to speak of that would enable them to service that debt. It’s a bit hard to see who their target market is or, rather, it’s a bit hard to see that the market segment they’re aimin…

> If BM’s products were more affordable

One thing worth noting here is that, contrary to the popular belief, Beyond Meat is not a high-margin business.

You can check out their latest financial result (2025 1Q) to confirm this:

  First Quarter 2025 Financial Highlights

  - Net revenues were $68.7 million, a decrease of 9.1% year-over-year.

  - Gross profit was a loss of $1.1 million, or gross margin of -1.5%, compared to gross profit of $3.7 million, or gross margin of 4.9%, in the year-ago period.
https://investors.beyondmeat.com/news-releases/news-release-...

Basically they are spending $95-101 to produce $100-worth of plant meat. Compared to traditional meat companies, Homel (SPAM) is operating at 20% gross margin and Pilgrim (chicken) is at 10%.

BM is barely profitable even before sales and administrative expenses.

Post reply on HN