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Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

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Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#571

Post by dataflow »

627467 wrote: post #527
dataflow wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lets be real: unless fake-meat products become at least the same price as equivalent meat options what's the point? If you were to make fake plant-based products that were (a) noticeably healthier than meat, and (b) indistinguishable from meat taste-wise (or better-tasting), I'm quite confident a lot of people would pay a premium for that. The problem is the current products just don't deliver that. All they delive…

To me your basically describing a climate fee in your paragraph. You can already eat healthy, better and more sustainably but doing what humans have done for millions of years. You dont need an industrialized, packaged, convenient and standardized flavour. Honestly, i have come to see beyond and impossible as a variation of soylent. Its for a very specific and narrow market of people that I'd rather not describe

> You can already eat healthy, better and more sustainably but doing what humans have done for millions of years.

We can? What are you suggesting I order at a restaurant that's both healthier than meat and also indistinguishable from it taste-wise?

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#572

Post by DangitBobby »

antonymoose wrote: post #38
asdff wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My vegetarian friends can now go to a restaurant (or better example yet, any event space like sports event or theme park, since having a veggie burger is pretty easy to check a box and satisfy dietary restrictions) and get any of the burger offerings on the menu with a beyond patty. Before that, the vegetarian option of only resort was often much more depressing and unsubstantial.

Reading this somewhat reminds me how the Gluten Free trend led to a lot more options for my friend with celiac. Still, one wonders does “buying a fake burger at the ball park with my friends” translate to actual fandom and further consumption or is it just a a captive consume picking the least-worst option. The impression I’ve gotten is for the latter.

It's definitely the "least-worst option", most of the time, but I'd rather be able to eat _something_ with my friends when we go out to do something. At burger joints the burgers are usually otherwise dressed to impress, dripping with cheese and some awesome sauce; those are quite good with an Impossible patty subbed in. But American restaurants in my experience offer a selection of very, very sad foods, because they simply don't know how to make food taste good without meat. Vegan and vegetarian restaurants and many ethnic restaurants make excellent food. It's a cultural problem.

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#573

Post by DangitBobby »

asdff wrote: post #70
antonymoose wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading this somewhat reminds me how the Gluten Free trend led to a lot more options for my friend with celiac. Still, one wonders does “buying a fake burger at the ball park with my friends” translate to actual fandom and further consumption or is it just a a captive consume picking the least-worst option. The impression I’ve gotten is for the latter.

It is the latter. For a few of them they swear off impossible and tolerate beyond or vice versa. And of course some restaurants with their own bean burger formulations are sometimes whiffs but also other times completely blow any fake meat option out of the water.

I've had maybe one bean burger in a restaurant that was any good.

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#574

Post by petterroea »

The problem with the value prop for beyond meat is that good vegan food exists. There's no reason why you need to pretend to eat meat, and every meat product they made was clearly inferior to real meat.

Or, in other words, why would you eat mediocre fake meat when good vegan food that doesn't pretend to be meat exists, if your goal is to eat vegan.

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#575

Post by carlmr »

ben_w wrote: post #445
carlmr wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got a kit for making my own burgers from dehydrated soy mince and/or mashed kidney beans. Do you have a link or name for this? I also prefer black bean or lentil burgers, but I've been making them by hand really.

One of these, found in the discount bin in a nearby supermarket for about €10-20: https://www.discounto.de/Angebot/BESTRON-Hamburger-Maker-AMH... There's probably also a cheaper source for the form and squasher if that's all you need, but it came with them so I didn't look for that separately.

Thanks, so the squasher is all I need I guess

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#576

Post by watermelon0 »

thesis wrote: post #162
lambda wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weird comment. Why do you think that "ethical vegans" like the "taste of plants" any more than anyone else? The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals, not because you don't like the taste. Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers. Sure, they're not perfect from a health food point of view, but they're lower in sodium and saturated fat tha…

FYI most beyond burgers have more in sodium not less and beyond uses coconut oil which is still fairly high in saturated fat. If those 2 things are your barometer for healthy… it’s not a clear win.

Seems like they switched to avocado oil recently:

> Water, Yellow Pea Protein*, Avocado Oil, Natural Flavors, Brown Rice Protein, Red Lentil Protein, 2% or less of Methylcellulose, Potato Starch, Pea Starch, Potassium Lactate (to preserve freshness), Faba Bean Protein, Apple Extract, Pomegranate Concentrate, Potassium Salt, Spice, Vinegar, Vegetable Juice Color (with Beet).

From: https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/the-beyond-burger

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#577

Post by adrian_b »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #284
adrian_b wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are different classes of food processing, with very different properties. The kinds of food processing methods that remove from raw food the parts that are unhealthy or undesirable cannot have in principle any kind of harmful effect, when the processed food is used correctly. They may have only an indirect harmful effect because the availability of pure food ingredients may enable some people to use such proces…

> The reason is that an industrial producer has very different incentives than those who cook for their family, for friends or relatives, or at least for some loyal customers who appreciate good food. An industrial producer cares only for the appearance and taste of the food, and for its production cost. Now I'm not denying industrial players have a different set of incentives than people cooking for themselves, but…

While you are right that industrial producers could deliver high quality healthy food, when I go to any supermarket and I look at the huge variety of food offerings, after I exclude the raw food ingredients, like fresh or frozen vegetables or fruits or meat, various kinds of seeds or flour or oil, etc., from what remains 99.99% contain various kinds of garbage that I do not want in my body.

Even when such food products are intended to resemble food that I used to eat at home, based on traditional recipes, the modern industrial recipes are very different, with all expensive ingredients substituted completely or partially with worse but cheaper alternatives, and with many extra additives that do not provide any nutritional benefit, but they just improve the texture and taste to resemble that of products made with more expensive ingredients or with ingredients that cause a shorter shelf life.

So in practice, the food producers could, but they don't.

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#578

Post by oblio »

oblio wrote: post #244
TeMPOraL wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they're hoping there exists a non-crazy subset of "health conscious" population, i.e. people who are not panicly afraid of "ultra processed" food and generally don't consider food processing to be a sin, who don't see food manufacturing plants as temples of Satan, and are otherwise health conscious and not just playing the fitness fad social games.

Ultra processed foods are tied with a myriad of health conditions. https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga... Please tell the British Heart Foundation that they're "the crazy kind of health conscious" :-)

LOL @ the downvotes. I'm sure that's why Americans are so healthy, with huge supermarkets stocked to the brim with food so ultraprocessed that there are things that pretend to be called "cheese" but can't be sold as cheese.

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#579

Post by leethargo »

afavour wrote: post #151
lambda wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weird comment. Why do you think that "ethical vegans" like the "taste of plants" any more than anyone else? The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals, not because you don't like the taste. Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers. Sure, they're not perfect from a health food point of view, but they're lower in sodium and saturated fat tha…

> And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it I just did a quick search on Uber Eats in NYC. Every Beyond Burger I found was between $3-5 more than a regular burger. That’s the reason I stopped eating them, I actually quite like the texture and flavor. I just don’t like the price.

Interesting. At Burger King in Germany, there's no such difference, last time I checked.

Re: Beyond has dropped “meat” from its name and expanded its high-protein drink line

#580

Post by oblio »

chabska wrote: post #561
oblio wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dose makes the poison. People weren't doing that at a mass scale before people figured out they could make money by increasing addictiveness, once technology was good enough.

I would like to point you towards the industrial processing of soybean into tofu, soymilk, tempeh, and soy sauce in Asia that has been going on for a long time.

Are people being intentionally dense here? We're talking orders of magnitude difference here. Widespread, worldwide transition to ultra processed foods, synthetic emulsifiers, synthetic flavors, etc (the ENNNs), supermarket chock full of things that can't be named food sold as food ("cheeses" that can't be sold as cheeses, etc).

There are tons of products where the base ingredients are at least 2 steps away from actual traditional ingredients. Sometimes (frequently) the base ingredients aren't even food, they're purely petro-chemical based. My dad used to joke that the same plant that makes ingredients for paint and tires makes articial flavors for food :-)

Bah, I withdraw from this discussion. It's full of people that can't see the forest (ultra processed food everywhere destroying people's health through its addictiveness) for the trees (technicalities about some ultra processed foods being available in the pre-industrial era, on a much smaller scale and in much smaller niches).

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