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

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

#581

Post by m000 »

cowsup wrote: post #177
adam_arthur wrote: post #153

I can’t for the life of me figure out how they're losing so much money, yet their product is still far more expensive than actual beef. Can a more informed follower provide some insight? Are they just grossly mismanaging their production costs?

Creating "actual beef" used to be fairly expensive, but, over the decades, companies have found out how to produce it for as cheap as possible, while still earning billions in profits, without consumers feeling as though beef is expensive. That efficiency comes with time. Plant-based meat is still in its infancy by comparison. So, even though the costs to consumers is high, the amount of profit the plant-based compan…

> That efficiency comes with time.

And subsidies! Don't forget the subsidies!

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

#582

Post by willsmith72 »

ghostpepper wrote: post #351
Willish42 wrote: post #347

This post is crowded with responses from people explaining why they hate Beyond meat FWIW, I've always liked Beyond Meat as a "good enough" substitution for a beef burger that's easy to prepare that is close in texture to a real burger - if you use a burger sauce and cheese like most recipes for non-vegans do, it tastes pretty close. I even liked it so much I'd order it at restaurants wherever available and bought a…

What do you see as the benefit of reducing red meat to once a month? There was a widely-publicized article recently questioning some "well-established" science that had, previously for decades, linked red meat to higher rates of heart disease, etc.

Not a vege, but that study doesn't really say say as much the article made it out. The core thesis was essentially:

"Eating red meat at most causes increases in risks of cancer and similar by 15%. If people replace calories that could come from vegetables with red meat, that risk gets worse because they're eating less vegetables"

So yeah, eating red meat isn't that bad, but if it reduces your vegetable intake significantly, it probably is worse for you. And it's harder to get the right amount of vegetables if you eat a lot of red meat (unless you just want to increase your calorie intake)

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

#583

Post by notyourday »

fsloth wrote: post #444
friend_and_foe wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's not as impossible as you make it sound IMO, I would guess it's more a matter of pricing.

This sounds like people at a startup with no product/market fit telling the market that it is wrong.

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

#584

Post by Cannabat »

rlt wrote: post #464
Cannabat wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are suggesting non-animal agriculture kills or displaces more animals than animal agriculture. What do you think the animals humans like to eat, eat? A heck of a lot of grain and other plants. "Animal agriculture" includes the fluffy animals (with whom we may empathize - they ain't robots) and the massive farms that grow their feed. Animal agriculture incidentally kills and displaces far more other…

I don't think they were suggesting that. More something along the lines of "you're likely to be killing animals either way, so just accept that nature is cruel and don't feel guilty about it". There's a wide spectrum of how much you're willing to do to avoid causing suffering: - Nothing, eat meat from the worst factory farms without second thought - Only eat meat from local, ethical, sustainable, etc farmers. - Only…

Most humans can live deeply fulfilling and joyful lives without causing as much suffering as they do now. They don't need to feel guilty about what they are doing now so much as strive to cause less suffering.

Maybe you must eat factory farmed meat, fine, it's not for me to say. But that's not most people. Most people can do with reducing their meat intake, and it isn't hard. It's not like you are in the wilderness hunting or anything. You just go to the grocery store and buy veggies and beans and stuff.

Furthermore, for some people, eating meat from a factory farm is orders of magnitude more difficult than eating a strict plant based diet. Maybe that's easy for you - not for me.

Finally, while nature may indeed be cruel, we do not need to be.

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

#585

Post by scrollaway »

alkonaut wrote: post #518
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…

I'm definitely a habitual meat eater. I don't have a vegetarian bone in my body. Yet I'd prefer a vegetarian burger to have beans and carrots, to having one with an uncanny valley meat texture and meat taste. That is, while I'm happy to eat a perfect meat substitute, I'm also don't have a problem with vegetables and I'd rather have a totally-not-meat burger than a not-quite-meat burger.

> one with an uncanny valley meat texture and meat taste.

I mean, honestly, aren’t most cheap burger meat patties in that uncanny valley?

I love meat but eat it rarely. And I like burgers, even the cheap McDonald’s stuff. But burger patties are basically entirely their own texture, which is only loosely related to beef meat.

Now a burger with lightly cooked and well seasoned, real fresh ground beef? It’s a different product altogether. But it’s also less popular and I don’t think it’s what beyond meat tries to replace.

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

#586

Post by barrell »

froggychairs wrote: post #491
SoftTalker wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.

We know red meat isn’t healthy. Most (not all) fake meats try to replicate red meat. What proof do you have them being unhealthy? Impossible for example has fairly simple list of ingredients. Better macros than burger ground. Anecdotally. My father in law has had to stop eating red meat due to health concerns. He enjoys impossible products just fine with no negative concerns in blood biomarkers or examines (several y…

> We know red meat isn’t healthy

It's worth obfuscating this point. We don't know red meat isn't healthy.

Equally, we also don't know that red meat is healthy.

Without making a case for either side, readers should know that the field of nutrition is incredibly unclear, often times very individualized, and most of what people 'know' are just 'educated guesses'. For every study proving one side of the argument, you can find 10 studies proving the opposite side.

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

#587

Post by bravura »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #101
gwbas1c wrote: post #32

I 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.…

I’m vegan, converted about four years ago so I ate meat for decades. I ate impossible burgers for a while after Burger King got them, because there is some nostalgia/novelty in going to a fast food joint. But I’ve realized that this weird food product leaves some kind of odd taste in my stomach, and not just from Burger King. I’m pretty over these fake beef burgers now, and would way rather have a black bean burger o…

From David Zilber (formerly of Noma):

"Here’s a pesky little chemical called hexanal. If you’ve ever eaten a beyond burger, or any of these plant based products 2.0 (though to be honest, it’s more like they’re on V.46.6.2) and burped 10 or 15 minutes afterwards, and thought to yourself, “Hmmm, wow, ok I definitely just had a meat alternative” you were probably regurgitating this aerosol. Some people think it’s fruity, like green apple, others like mulched grass. At the lab, we had to walk outside to get wafts of it in its pure form, but the minute I opened the cap I knew exactly what this flavour was…. “OLD FRYER OIL, 100%”. It’s metabolized in all manners of organisms through the oxidation of fatty acids, and is… kind of unpleasant?! The point is that while this molecule exists in fava beans, peas, and soy, (the three kings of texturized vegetable protein) when you have a WHOLE FOOD, its there in harmony among all sorts of other volatile compounds, while also being locked away deep inside the beans fibres. It’s the act of processing that concentrated and heightens the presence of off-flavours like these, making the processed foods made from them taste, well, processed. Good with the bad. You can’t concentrate for protein without concentrating other aspects of a plant. There’s always a cost. Now, I will always be a huge proponent for whole foods, made with care, prepared simply. But the realities of grocery store shelves dictate a different truth. People opt for convenience, and sometimes, you’ve got to meet them where they are. My current work at CH has me doggedly hunting down an effect of fermentation I’ve long known intuitively through practice. Certain lactic acid bacteria fermenting their way through legumes don’t just mask, but dismantle this and other problematic molecules. I’m still after the mode of action, but it’s also enough for me to know that age old techniques of fermentation (like soaking ones legumes or grains days in advance of their cooking) can still put to shame the greatest technological “advances” of food science of the past 40 years. Nature is, after all, cleverer than you are. "

https://www.facebook.com/david.zilber/posts/pfbid02CkCY53qDd...

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

#588

Post by raspberry1337 »

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.

It's very rational how many individuals are rejecting these trashy products.

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

#589

Post by literalAardvark »

tptacek wrote: post #308
SoftTalker wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond/Incredible meat is awful. There's no other description for it. This highly processed fake meat is not healthy. Just eat meat, or don't if you don't want to. There's no need for this fake garbage.

The idea that processing determines the healthfulness of a foodstuff is fallacious.

You are technically correct. However...

The complexity of digestion rivals that of cryptography. And the same caveats apply.

Ultraprocessed foods, let's say a [plant] burger, are the food equivalent of "roll your own crypto".

Less processing = fewer things we break without knowing we broke them. I'm in no way actually arguing against cooking.

This would take a fair bit of time and space to explain in general, but if you have specific questions I'll do my best to address them.

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

#590

Post by JansjoFromIkea »

girvo wrote: post #258
notjulianjaynes wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that there is no reason these plant based alternatives should be priced higher than meat. The raw ingredients are dirt cheap. You can get pound of TVP or soy protein is like $3-4; and certainly less at wholesale prices. It comes dehydrated, so back of the napkin I'd guess the cost for a company producing fake meat products is like $1/lb or less. I paid $8.50 at a gas station for 2.47 oz of "Noble Jerky."…

TVP is so damned excellent. That reminds me, I really need to write up the recipes I've come up with using them and post them somewhere. Magic cheap protein with an awesome flavour if you rehydrate it with vegan beef/chicken stock and season it well and cook it correctly. It's even excellent just chucked into some instant ramen (after frying it) with some spring onions!

Would def want to see some of those! I've been doing TVP and beef stock as my backup meal for years and it's amazingly good for the price. 500g for like €3 that'll last absolutely ages coupled with one of those stock cup things (think they're like 4 for 90 cent now).

Originally only tried it due to a serious lack of fridge/freezer space.

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