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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

#801

Post by JeremyNT »

astannard wrote: post #787
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've been vegetarian for 40years and prefer my food to not be like meat. I also know plenty of people that avoid if too like real meat. Not sure what market they go for. People that dont want meat but miss it I guess. The idea of the latest lab grown meat I also find disturbing

I don't eat much meat outside of the occasional fish but I did welcome the fake meat fad.

It's not that I enjoy eating the product, it's that I need to find protein somehow when I'm at "American food" restaurants (fast food or otherwise). In most of these places there's no veggie protein options other than the "veggie burger" - and the fake meats have made these a little more ubiquitous.

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

#802

Post by quelltext »

nextaccountic wrote: post #730
oblio wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is... this is not a solved problem, by far. You forget all that leather used in a myriad of products, that leather comes from cows. Or feathers and down from various birds. Or the other million side products of animal husbandry, that I'm not even aware of. I think almost every part of a cow is used in an industrial process, not much is wasted. Plus, this needs a totally vegan solution and you're wiping out…

There's synthetic leather too. And there's vegan cheese https://www.reddit.com/r/vegancheesemaking and of course vegan yogurt etc. (you can make yogurt with coconut milk for example)

> There's synthetic leather too.

...and it sucks as a replacement for genuine leather.

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

#803

Post by HDThoreaun »

SoftTalker wrote: post #298
colordrops wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see you are being downvoted, but I know exactly what you mean. When I eat Impossible and especially Beyond burgers, my stomach feels slightly off. A bit of indigestion. I don't get this with typical veggie patties.

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.

Beyond/impossible aren't trying to be healthy. They're trying to be meat replacements and have similar healthiness to red meat, which they do. I prefer them to previous generation meat substitutes. They work great as ground beef replacement, much better than any vegetables.

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

#805

Post by HDThoreaun »

Firstmate wrote: post #358
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…

> You are not the target group for these products! It's not a choice for me. When I go to _restaurants_, they are replacing their only vegetarian options with these impossible/beyond meats, and they're charging $2 more while they're at it. These goals and target markets sound great on paper, but feels like the exact opposite in practice. The goal for reducing waste is great, but why are vegetarians paying that cost w…

Probably because the beyond/impossible offerings sell more and they're only willing to put a limited number of vegetarian items on the menu so the others are crowded out.

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

#806

Post by HideousKojima »

nextaccountic wrote: post #730
oblio wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is... this is not a solved problem, by far. You forget all that leather used in a myriad of products, that leather comes from cows. Or feathers and down from various birds. Or the other million side products of animal husbandry, that I'm not even aware of. I think almost every part of a cow is used in an industrial process, not much is wasted. Plus, this needs a totally vegan solution and you're wiping out…

There's synthetic leather too. And there's vegan cheese https://www.reddit.com/r/vegancheesemaking and of course vegan yogurt etc. (you can make yogurt with coconut milk for example)

>vegan cheese

My old boss was vegan (or rather his wife was and he was very accommodating of her diet, he would still eat meat outside the home). He would always mention that the fanciest, most expensive vegan cheese option out there set itself apart from the rest with the tagline "It melts!" on the packaging. Vegan cheese has to come a long way to be anywhere comparable to real cheese. The same applies to synthetic leather, by the way.

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

#807

Post by HDThoreaun »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #214
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, to each their own, but I have the complete opposite experience and opinion: 1. First off, the vast majority of restaurants that I've been to that offer Impossible or Beyond Burgers still offer at least one traditional veggie burger. In fact I don't know if I've ever seen a restaurant that will only offer a faux meat burger but not offer a veggie burger. 2. I love a good Impossible Burger, fundamentally because…

Complete opposite experience on both counts, anecdotally. I've been vegetarian for years, and the texture of meat (and substitutes) creeps me out. My town has like 10 restaurants that dropped their veggie burgers for beyond/impossible.

Fake meat probably isn't for vegetarians. It's for meat eaters who are interested in "meatless mondays" or the like.

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

#808

Post by drewg123 »

xeromal wrote: post #68
sho_hn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You either love meat and won't touch these things with a 10 feet pole I think this is wrong, and you're missing where the market is. From what I've read, the meat alternatives actually sell primarily to meat eaters who feel like they should occasionally substitute meat for health reasons or variety. Non-meat-eaters have already weaned themselves off meat taste-wise and are not-so-interested.

The problem is that these fake meats are worse for you than grass-raised beef.

My cholesterol levels beg to differ. When I became vegan, my LDL/HDL ratio dropped from 1.9 to 0.8, triglycerides dropped by 35%. My doctor told me she's never seen such a turnaround without statins.

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

#809

Post by HDThoreaun »

loeg wrote: post #773
dsabanin wrote: post #717

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was always to cause less death and suffering, these days for many it’s also about ecology, but it was never about saving a buck.

You’re not going to get meat eaters to eat your plant burger with that attitude alone.

It's why I eat beyond, so they got at least one.

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

#810

Post by bryan0 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #595
bryan0 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals. Beyond/Impossible is close enough.

> But I don’t want a veggie patty. I want a hamburger that doesn’t involve killing animals so basically you want a veggie patty disguised as an hamburger. but there's a catch: agriculture kills as many animals than we do to eat them. You might not see them, but billions of insects, worms, small rodents etc are killed in the process of making agriculture a viable business. Pesticides are not exactly environmental frie…

I appreciate the very good points you are making, however I do not consider these morally equivalent. Specifically the indirect affects of agriculture on local wildlife vs direct and largely unnecessary killing and suffering of animals.
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