I stopped buying beyond meat burgers simply because they disappeared from the shelves (of Tesco). For no other reason. The burgers were excellent. To me Beyond Meat just “got it”. I wanted a burger that delivered tasty high energy content and they delivered. The other meat alternative companies went down the health food route which I think is a mistake.
Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
181–190 of 1001 posts
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#182I 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.
Isn’t that what BM wants to do though?
I think that’s what they’re going for, not so much satisfy vegans as much as sell their product to non vegans, or everyone.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#183No post body was provided.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#184McPlant burgers are available in the UK - have they stopped in the USA?
Yeah, apparently it didn't sell. I thought they tasted great though, and that's coming from a meat eater.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#185Paywall so I can only speculate. I have thought about if the idea of wanting to eat meat-like food is a construct created by meat eaters speculating about what vegetarians want. But in reality I think that there is a large portion of vegetarians that view the texture of meat as "gross" and so realistic meat substitutes have no appeal to them. I don't know if this is true or not, and I have no way of proving this othe…
As an unrepetenting meat lover and eater I can guarantee you that we simply do not care, AT ALL, about what vegetarians and/or vegans decide to eat. We're just tired of people trying to impose their own conscientious objections on to us. We just want that the people that do not want to eat meat to stop trying to dictate what WE, the ones that love meat, want to eat. There is zero chance that those fake burgers were the brainchild of meat lovers, we simply don't care.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#186I’ve tried the product and I always thought it silly to produce a plant-based version of an unhealthy meat product so that all the healthy dieters that switched away from said foods now have an unhealthy option restored to them that is more conscionable than what they chose to avoid in the first place.
I always thought their target market wasn't vegetarians, but omnivores.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#187I 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.…
Your first point is spot on. I’ve had many many delicious black bean burgers.
You see this all the time with “keto” junk foods. Keto brownies were definitely the worst.
Point being, we waste a lot of resources trying to ape “unhealthy” food and do a disservice all around.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#188I 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.…
"Vegetables " are not cheaper than meat. Grains are cheaper than meat. Most vegetables are very expensive per calorie compared to meat. Chickens in particular are very efficient at turning feed corn into usable protein. 3000 calories of fully cooked chicken costs $5 at costco.
Just add olive oil to any food you want more energy in. As long as the base food meets the nutritional needs, adding oil is a pretty good strategy.
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a meat eater and I would love to find a faux ground beef or faux ground pork that I can use in the kitchen exactly the way I use beef/pork in my recipes. I would prefer such a food if it was similarly priced to animal, but more sustainable, because I would rather be vegetarian but not to the degree that I need to give up my favorite recipes. I need it to provide essential umami, salt, fat, flavor. Often vegetaria…
I am omnivorous, but I have a sibling who is vegan. When we were both in the Bay Area, Golden Era ( https://www.goldeneravegan.com ) was a place that we found that... wasn't bad. This was quite a while back but the first time we went in and looked at the menu the question of "is all of this vegan except for these two items with an asterisk?" (It was the 'classic' Chinese style menu with about 200 things on it with nu…
This is interesting. There's a few successful "vegetarian/vegan" places in my area, but they're all basically some variant of Chinese food and are from moderately to pretty good. There's also a few Indian places, but they don't really seem to register with the local vegetarian population as such, but at least can be quite good if you know where to look and have the usual amounts of flavor that Indian food tends to have.
However, there's a couple "Western" vegetarian/vegan joints in my immediate area that I've tried a couple of times. To be fair you get lots of food for the money, but both places produce a product that really is quite flavorless -- even with pretty different menus. Things like extra spicy vegan chili go down with the flavor profile of water, other dishes taste like salad baked in an oven, it's really dreadful shit. Yelp reviews for both places? 4+ stars. shrug
Re: Beyond Meat is struggling, and the plant-based meat industry worries
#190It 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…
There's, at least, a third group that stopped eating meat on ethical or climate related grounds rather than taste or health grounds. My daughter was one, as were a decent number of her peers. Whether or not that's a sufficiently large segment that can sustain an industry, though, I'm not competent to judge.
Climate impact is what made my daughter become vegetarian. I am not yet completely convinced (I eat meat, but in smaller amounts than I used to), but do find the argument persuasive.
Things like BM aren't appealing to me, though, because of the price point. I can just eat non-meat things instead.