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

Strong tangent here, but y'all vegetarians in the Bay Area ought try Dad's Luncheonette in Half Moon Bay for their mushroom sandwich, a vegetarian's alternative to the hamburger sandwich.

I got no affiliation with Dad's aside from thinking that they make a couple of fine sandwiches, and the mushroom sandwich is a great example of a vegetarian hamburger "alternative" that doesn't try to be a hamburger but tastes real good.

I'm omnivorous but like that mushroom sandwich sometimes (and the hamburger sandwich they sell is probably the best sandwich in the state, so that's saying something).

They are not targeted for vegans, the huge majority of customer are curious people that wants to transition into vegetarian/vegan diet and need the help of plant based meats.

I don't think demand for Beyond will ever hit zero but I do think recent demand seems to have been temporary & can see it falling into a niche.

In the past, vegetarianism/veganism was mostly the reserve of activist types, dogmatic in their approach, with little interest in fake meats (though they existed, demand & competition was low enough for them to be pretty poor substitutes).

Then, more recently, there was a big trend of vegetarianism becoming more mainstream, with many people trialling it: during that trial, there's naturally a lot of reliance on products like Beyond. Similarly, with the mainstreaming of it all, many old-timer vegetarians become more comfortable/open with liking/trying meaty things & also as the product quality/variety improves, many old-timer vegetarians will be naturally curious excited to test new options. So this all results in big spikes in demand for Beyond.

Now I think we're entering a phase of (a) long-term dedicated vegetarians have tried it out & the novelty has disappeared and (b) "trial" vegetarians are settling into a "flexitarian" / low-meat diet, where they just eat real meat when they want to, but do their best to reduce consumption. So the demand drops.

There's still going to be the odd "trial" vegetarian who likes meat but stayed strict & there's probably some old-timers who developed a taste for it, but it's a much lower % of people than at the peak of novel interest.

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There's also a few notable exceptions where new substitutes have succeeded in gaining a culturally iconic status - e.g. the Greggs sausages in the UK. These will probably retain some popularity I guess, but they're very much the exception.

Because it is a gimmick to make you feel like you're doing something, for the sole purpose of getting money from your pocket into theirs. You're not doing anything. The dr. feelgood insect and vegetarian "meat" products are heavily processed, requiring extra energy, fuel, and manpower.

That's the gag with Impossible. Unless you or your parents are owners of a climate non-profit flush with cash, their products are impossible to afford.