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How to lower the price of plant-based meat

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Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#151

Post by dsomers »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #75
ebiester wrote: post #29

I disagree with some of the premises. First, I think that the right choice is to pick the right protein for the job, and not choose wheat and soy because of price. Mung beans, for example, are expensive because people aren't growing them. If quantity demanded grows, so will supply and supply chains, which will lower the price. It is possible that mung beans (as an example) are marginally more expensive to grow for so…

The protein yield per acre for soybeans vs mung beans is 6x. No amount of try hard is going to make mung bean protein close in price to soy. What gets me is that I can’t even source tofu that is cheaper than chicken. Chickens are very good reactors for turning carbohydrates into protein.

Is that because soy has been engineered that way and mung beans have not? I pose the question because I remember my grand uncle who has been a soy farmer his whole life telling me that when they switched to Monsanto seeds they got some huge multiple of crop yield, 3x? 4x? I can’t remember the exact multiple I just remember it seeming like a lot.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#152

Post by ggm »

delibes wrote: post #22

tldr - economies of scale and cheaper inputs

Yep. But lurking underneath is health, and mouth-feel and taste. Cultured cell lines will possibly get past health because instead of plant based vitamins and nutrients it will be animal protein and fat soluble versions which are sometimes more bioavailable.

Mouth feel is heavily dominated by fat, but also texture. I don't know if the cell culture meat lays down muscle fibre the same way actually being a leg of a grazing animal does. Tvp tried to emulate this with spun fibre complexes, I never found it very compelling.

It's not really surprising meat substitution targets ground beef, ground chicken and the like.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#154

Post by shartshooter »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #65

It's interesting to note the names of the companies in the article: >> In China, Beyond Meat signed five major new partnerships, with Starbucks, retailers Alibaba and Metro, distributor Sinodis, and Yum China (owner of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell). >> In the rest of Asia, Thailand’s largest meat company, CP Foods (...) >> In Latin America, Brazilian agribusiness giant Marfrig (...) >> In Europe, the UK’s largest re…

If you're trying to bring a new product to market don't you want to rely on the infrastructure that already exists? What's the alternative if you want to make an impact quickly?

Sure, KFC, PizzaHut, etc. have contributed significantly to increases in meat consumption, but isn't that exactly the place to start?

Just like BP, Shell, etc. are diversifying away from fossil fuels, the companies you mentioned likely see the writing on the wall. Considering the fact that they already have supply chains in place to support a significant portion of the population, using them as a proxy to get alternative meats to people at a reasonable cost seems like the path of least resistance.

Agreed, these companies in many ways have despoiled the land as you said but their real motivation is generating profit, they don't necessarily care about the food being low quality, they care that it's good enough for people to buy it and cheap enough to sell it.

If alternative meats drive the same demand, or more, as regular meats and can be sold at similar margins, and as a byproduct the companies can say they're on the alternative meats train, I think you'll see them come onboard.

My parents, who are as far from alternative meat fans as you can find, are in complete alignment that eating meat isn't going to be nearly as commonplace in 30 years as it is today and are interested in investing in alternative meat producers just due to the fact that society is trending in that direction.

Of course you've got the rise of countries coming out of poverty whose populace is going to expect to eat a bunch of meat which is why it's critical that we get economies of scale, distribution, etc. nailed down now before they acquire a real taste of beef grown on an industrial farm, instead we need options for them to buy alternative, or potentially lab grown, meats.

Doing so would have the benefit of generating massive amounts of innovation in how food is produced while, hopefully, reducing relative and absolute greenhouse gas emissions.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#155

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

goatinaboat wrote: post #101
gus_massa wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last election was in 2019 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_European_Parliament_elect...

To the figurehead, talking shop parliament. Effectively all the power in the EU belongs to the commission, which is appointed not elected.

EU Comissioners are proposed by the Council of the European Union, a body composed of EU member state ministers, themselves directly elected by the citizens of their respective states in national elections. Appointment of Comissioners follows the suggestions of national governments.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#156

Post by ggm »

If you want a truly awesome plant based meat experience for taste and mouth feel try "tartex" which is a nutritional yeast derived pate, and I eat it as itself, no fakery needed but revel in its foie like texture. Sold in tubes, invented more than 70 years ago. Perhaps a little too greasy afterward (I suspect it's palm oil) but heaps of umami.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#158

Post by k__ »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #143

A tangential topic - I really think that in general calling plant-based things "meat", a terrible idea. It does not promote plant-base diet or meat consumption reduction. It is trying to be what is not. I think it pushes away those who are on the cusp of moving towards plant-base foods. Why? Because the consumer is told it is "meat", so they will compare it to meat. They will compare these patties to a real, prime An…

Why shouldn't they compare it to meat?

If I am asked to replace meat with plants, these plants have to compete with meat.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#159

Post by danShumway »

nemo44x wrote: post #135
danShumway wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if we ignore externalities and pollution costs, just stop outright subsidizing animal meat production so much. The reason meat is so cheap is because our government puts a lot of effort and money into making it cheap. I don't know why more people aren't trying to sell this to the "free market" crowd as government overreach. The reality right now is that plant-based protein is gaining popularity despite the marke…

Have you considered why we do this? How would our society be different if only well-to-do people could eat meat regularly? Would a regular guy be content with wealthy people eating steaks while jet-setting around the globe because of climate change? I think a populist uprising would occur almost immediately and we’d see heads on pikes with their decapitated mouths stuffed with cabbage for all to see. It would be supe…

> That's not necessarily bad, but if we're going to be messing with the market anyway we could choose to subsidize other things.

I'm saying we shouldn't pretend that meat is as cheap as it is on its own. We should acknowledge what the reality is: meat is cheap because as a society, we choose to use tax dollars to make it cheap.

We could do the exact same thing with plant-based meat. We could shift some of those subsidies so that meat and plant protein were equally subsidized. We could balance them out. We can talk about the logistics.

But I think sometimes the conversation gets stuck entirely on "how could we make artificial meat cheaper" when the reality is that animal meat is expensive, and the big difference between animal meat and plant meat is that we pretend that animal meat costs less than a free market would otherwise dictate. Of course I want to artificial meat to be cheaper, but I'm also not going to pretend that it's a fair fight.

The reason why this matters is because I do see arguments from people that say that it's just too expensive to have a social shift towards vegetarianism, and it can't possibly scale, and it's government interference to try and prop up plant-based foods. And yeah, we can have a values conversation about whether society wants us to make meat cheap. But most of the rest of those objections are crap. There are a lot of people that do think that meat is actually priced realistically based on what it costs to produce. They don't realize that it's just that our government chooses to make very specific farming outputs cheaper.

Re: How to lower the price of plant-based meat

#160

Post by dragonwriter »

nemo44x wrote: post #138
dragonwriter wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You get rid of subsidies and then poor people can’t eat meat So stop subsidizing meat and spend the same money augmenting the income of the poor , then poor people will be at least as able to eat meat and be at least as well off when doing so as they were with the meat sibaidies, while those who choose not to will be even better off than they were with meat subsidies.

Why would people that pay taxes prefer that model? So, I pay the same taxes and then I also get to spend a lot more on food for my family? Good luck getting support for that.

> Why would people that pay taxes prefer that model?

Because they actually want to control (or, at least not encourage through subsidization) the externalities of meat consumption?

What economic group so you think that concern comes from?

> Good luck getting support for that.

If it wasn't possible to get something that didn't serve the immediate narrow financial interests of the wealthiest, the developed, democratic world would never have abandoned laissez-faire capitalism for the modern mixed economy.

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