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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

#441

Post by zingar »

Gare wrote: post #105
sokoloff wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a pretty hardcore meat-lover (we had sous-vide filets tonight at home), I think Impossible is close enough on the taste and feel side for a lot of dishes that use beef (including hamburgers). They're comically far off on the price side, but if they could get price-competitive with bulk 80% ground beef, they would capture a large amount of that market, I think.

Same experience as you. Quite tasty for a burger, but not affordable at 3x the price of a beef burger patty.

I’m surprised by this… they’re possibly 20% more expensive in the grocery store here in the UK, but not 3x. More like on the order of what you’d pay for a meat product that was particularly high quality.

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

#442

Post by oceanghost »

pmarreck wrote: post #333
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not positive but I have a feeling it’s the methylcellulose. In my own home experimentation, none of the ingredients seem to cause issues except for that. It seems fairly benign, but it can’t be digested and it isn’t clear to me if we have gut flora which can break it down efficiently. I enjoy throwing together little experiments in a similar vein to beyond meat or impossible burger products, but it feels too much…

> They are still pretty trashy This is a qualitative/irrational assessment and not a quantitative/rational one, especially considering that fat consumption got a wrongfully-deserved bad rap for decades thanks to unethical lobbying by the sugar industry.

What about food is not "qualitative"? :-) Where on the spectrum are you?

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

#443

Post by Zpalmtree »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #39
lm28469 wrote: post #7

It 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…

> You either love meat and won't touch these things with a 10 feet pole Assuming you can afford to eat meat, which many meat eaters might find themselves less able to do if prices continue to climb and/or beef subsidies end. Ground beef could easily cost $15+ per pound without subsidizes: https://www.aier.org/article/the-true-cost-of-a-hamburger/

Beef subsidies are not going to end.

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

#444

Post by fsloth »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #379
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…

So the target market for these products is people that want to eat real meat and actively seek it out? And they're catering to them by... replacing existing vegetarian options? They must not have read your comment. Sounds like a bad market fit. The number of people who eat meat and don't care if their meat is made of meat has got to be in the 7 figure range worldwide. The number of people that don't eat meat and want…

It's not as impossible as you make it sound IMO, I would guess it's more a matter of pricing. If plantburgers and plantdogs where considerable cheaper than meatburgers and hotdogs I would guess people would follow the money and shift to consuming the plant based alternative if they were otherwise close enough.

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

#445

Post by yalogin »

All the plant based companies try to cater to the meat eating folk. I don’t know if it’s a winning strategy. There are tons of possibilities with vegetarian patties, they are super tasty and flavorful. I would eat them if catered as vegetarian but with the same protein content as meat.

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

#446

Post by zemvpferreira »

ajmurmann wrote: post #397
agentgumshoe wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think I'd be surprised. I don't know how to solve that though short of starving myself to death.

Not to say this is your moral prerogative but it's pretty simple: Eat only hand-picked fruit. It's by far the least death-causing food out there and it's offered to you by the tree to eat.

I'm not a vegetarian or fruitarian, I don't generally care about animal death or suffering. But if I did that would be my tactic to minimize pain in the system.

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

#447

Post by Zpalmtree »

layman51 wrote: post #208

It is interesting how they mention in the article that some Deloitte analysts think there is a segment of consumers who think this plant-based meat is "woke" or is otherwise related to politically-left leaning ideas. I think this kind of resistance to the fake meat is irrational, but there is definitely memes and other ideas on some corners of the internet that associate certain foods/dietary choices with the "Other"…

The people who promote fake meat are also often promoting banning real meat or making it more expensive by adding carbon credits. You can see some of them in this thread.

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

#448

Post by didibus »

I like them for how easy they are to cook. I tend to eat them once a week. I alternate my protein sources: fish, seafood, chicken, beyond/impossible, egg/dairy, turkey.

I avoid pork and beef most of the time, except on occasions.

In that sense they're a nice addition to my selection, I find they have a unique flavor to them, but most often they're the protein that I cook when I'm lazy, because of how they don't need any prep.

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

#449

Post by tsimionescu »

TylerE wrote: post #275
orangepurple wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is hard at work trying to figure out how to make ground up bugs affordable and palatable

That really needs rebranding. We already eat plenty but of insects… we just call em things like crustaceans, shrimp, and crayfish.

I also had this thought once, but then looked it up, and found that it is completely wrong. It's basically like saying "we already eat plenty of fish... We just call em things like beef, pork, and bird meat".

Except that fish are much more closely related to mammals than crustaceans are to insects (same phylum, different class). Here is an example of an animal that is as closely related to a cow as a grasshopper is to a lobster: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salp

Edit: Even more, dietary preferences tend to focus on a single species. Plenty of people eat chicken but not turkey, or eat pork but not boar. There are even people who eat lamb but not adult sheep. And no one eats wolf or eagle meat. To then come and say "hey, you already eat one arthropod, why not another" is pretty absurd.

I'm not at all against eating insects, I'm just pointing out that the fact we eat shrimp has 0 to do with it.

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

#450

Post by spookie »

ivanhoe wrote: post #417
arrrg wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned a ton of things that change (which, sure, they do, after all it would be weird if, after processing when things taste differently, nothing would have changed), you did not make the causal link to things changing in a way that is detrimental to health. Just because it changes doesn’t mean it‘s bad. Even your only point where one could argue that there is a potential obvious negative health effect (the vi…

> is only an issue if there are actual vitamin deficiencies that matter. It's an issue because it's wasteful, you're loosing the good stuff in the process. Throwing half of your meal into garbage every time is only an issue if you're still hungry afterwards, but it's not economically and ecologically sane thing to do. This is a similar thing, one should try to maximize the use of food that they pay for.

Cooking meat allows your digestive system to ingest more proteins, for example. This is why fire was such an unprecedented step in our evolution. For example: Raw egg: 3g of protein at most. Cooked egg: 6g of protein.
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