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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

#651

Post by boppo1 »

henrikschroder wrote: post #267
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.…

> 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…

> 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.

Habitual meat eater here. I will never ever trust these products to be right for my body the way meat is. Humans haven’t nailed it in the past with heavily processed foods, why would it suddenly work now? I understand the noble dream, I really do. But the fact is, unless I find myself in near poverty or poverty and (no added sugar) peanut butter is unavailable, imitation meat will never be a go-to for me.

Hell, not to mention the disgust I’d feel eating it while knowing my betters are certainly dining on the real thing.

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

#652

Post by corobo »

boppo1 wrote: post #651
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…

> 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. Habitual meat eater here. I will never ever trust these products to be right for my body the way meat is. Humans haven’t nailed it in the past with heavily processed foods, why would it suddenly work now? I understand…

It's not like meat is free from controversy, to play devil's advocate a little. We had beef that turned out to be horse for a moment in the UK.

Not to mention mad cow disease and similar issues.

What risks are you thinking of with plant based or lab grown? If anything it seems the lab environment would catch anything significant before it got out of the building.

I'm not arguing with you, honestly curious. I've not thought about this much.

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

#653

Post by mvdwoord »

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 eat and like to eat meat, lots of it, as well as other foods. I am completely stumped by this push for hyper-processed "substitutes". I regularly ordered vegetarian dishes, and often enjoyed a decent bean or beet based burger. Those things can be delicious. I can only hope this fad of beyond meat bull-crap goes bankrupt and dies, sooner rather than later.

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

#654

Post by boppo1 »

fsloth wrote: post #575
throwaway4aday wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, we're running that experiment right now with soaring meat prices and it looks like you're wrong. Turns out if you make one type of meat more expensive then people just switch to a different kind of meat. If you make all meat more expensive, people buy cheaper cuts and get creative with how they prepare it. My bet is that if you make it prohibitively expensive then people will get creative about sourcing their m…

I'm not 100% sure it's a product issue and not a market positioning issue. Current gen "new fake meat" veggie brands try to position themselves at premium, which looks like the wrong place to be in. At premium fake meats loose to meat, hands down. It's like you are trying to position fish sticks on the same slot as fresh salmon. Huge marketing campaign, target low price segment - that would be the market experiment I…

Maybe. Maybe not. Poor people are pissed off these days and boy that sends the message “we’re taking meat away too now! For a hundred years you knew at least you had meat on the table, but we’re going back to the good ‘ol days of serfdom. Enjoy the slop!”

I have already seen this sentiment among poor people.

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

#655

Post by dlkf »

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.…

> One extremely frustrating aspect of plant meat is that they tried to aggressively push out traditional veggie burgers on restaurant menus. . . The thing is, vegetarian food is incredible without needing to taste like meat.

”Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.”

> I also still eat plenty of meat, just not every day

The reason you don’t see the value prop of beyond burgers is that you’re eating the real thing regularly. As a pescitarian who loves meat, I would bet the farm that if you went vegetarian, you would think Beyond is a godsend.

> IMO, I think the "meat in a vat" system where animal tissue is grown in some kind of factory setting is a much better approach.

Similar to how nuclear fusion is better than fission, and self-driving cars are preferable to human-controlled, etc etc.

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

#656

Post by pclmulqdq »

oblio wrote: post #599
deaddodo wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Normally vegetarian food costs less than meat. It's because the animals need to eat (surprise surprise) vegetables! When you eat the vegetables directly instead of having the animal eat the vegetable for your, it's cheaper. This is literally the whole point of the Food Chain and why species counts generally decrease as you go up the chain. Plants make up the vast majority of biomass on the planet. Animals that eat…

A classic: https://youtu.be/wOmjnioNulo?t=26 "Ten pounds of grass make a pound of steak. And ten pounds of steak make a pound of tiger. But these have the same number of calories - so you might as well just eat the cow and save yourself a lot of work."

Might as well eat the tiger and save yourself even more work.

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

#657

Post by SyzygistSix »

kodah wrote: post #312
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My partner is a vegetarian and she doesn't eat the fake-meat patties, however, she does get these: https://www.morningstarfarms.com/en_US/products/chikn/mornin... They're really good with no awful side effects or tastes. I like some vegetarian options, but honestly, most of it either tastes nasty or has poor texture.

I realize they are processed food but I really like Morning Star ~~Farms~~ Laboratories products. No one is going to mistake their products for meat but they are still delicious.

And I doubt their business is struggling, or that Beyond Meats's fate has them worried.

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

#659

Post by boppo1 »

clomond wrote: post #419
randomdata wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheaper doesn't seem feasible, at least not without essentially duplicating the meat production process (maybe lab grown meat will get us there someday). Human grade food is more expensive, often considerably so. Animals essentially get the leftovers that we can't eat so they are afforded a huge price advantage and it is not clear how that is to be overcome sustainably. Circumstances – widespread disease, for example…

You are missing the core technology point that drives the underlying thesis here - ‘every manufactured good, gets cheaper per unit as you make more and more of it’. Whether this is from the lab, a recipe of plant inputs, or some other currently unknown thing - if you are able to develop and commercialize a product around a ‘specific technology’, you can drive the cost of that down through experience and scale. Animal…

> Animals are a VERY thermodynamically inefficient way of converting plants to ‘high quality proteins’. We have automated the crap out of the food processing system. There are no material efficiencies left to be had. Compare that to options which are on paper thermodynamically superior (I.e. not supporting the life of an animal to only use their muscle tissue).

This really is such a cool take on it that it bums me out to say…

>why wouldn’t I choose that?

…because I just[0] don’t wanna eat fake meat.

[0] On a very deep, perhaps primal level. I can feel it rooted so far in my brain it’s hard to convey. Rather eat peanut butter at every meal.

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

#660

Post by jdcaron »

dustedcodes wrote: post #482

I married a Vegetarian and I converted to a mostly Vegetarian diet myself and I have made a very real realisation over the last 10 years: The one group that really hates Vegans more than meat eaters are Vegetarians. Veganism is making being Vegetarian increasingly harder. It's so hard to find a Vegetarian pizza nowadays with real cheese. It's either meaty or fully Vegan. Same for burgers. Vegetarians don't want to ea…

Vegans are and were as happy as vegetarians to eat non-processed vegetables patties. I could push this point further by stating that a high percentage of vegans are turned off by the meatiness of those fake meat products. Those who pushed or asked for the product are companies and clients with an environmentalist motivation. It also appears that the product is easier to manage for restaurants which is also a reason why most restaurants are picking this product. The meat-like is really just an industrial product designed to please the largest crowd as possible which also includes vegans. So please, don’t say it’s the vegans that pushed all “real” options off the menu because the situation is much more complex than that.

“Veganism is making being Vegetarian increasingly harder.” This is a bold claim. Those people you met needs to chill because the problem you described is light years of being a “real” problem. Adding or removing ingredients is possible in most restaurants and quite easy: “Please can you substitute the absence of cheese or the vegan cheese for real cheese.”

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