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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

#831

Post by hnfong »

zmgsabst wrote: post #729
corobo wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

The concern is that lab grown food will have similar health risks to ultra processed foods — which are correlated with a number of illnesses. You’re asking people to trust a process (food science) that we’ve spent the last decade finding out has poisoned us for generations.

"Last decade" is too generous.

HFCS wasn't last decade. Trans-fats wasn't last decade. We've known they were bad more than a decade ago.

Many more decades ago they marketed these artificial food alternatives without any evidence of long term health effects, and the process of "proving" them bad took many years (funny how the onus lies on the potential victims), and only recently we've been able to mostly contain the damage of HFCS and trans fats.

It seems every once a while this process restarts again. Americans sure love to play with their food. (I'm not American)

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

#832

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

papito wrote: post #749
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal should be to eat HUMANE meat if you want to eat meat but can't for ethical reasons. To a lot of us, it will never be considered humane to kill something that is perfectly healthy for no other reason than that we want to eat something that tastes a certain way. > When I was a kid, my gram grams in Ukraine treated our animals like family members Think about this for a minute.

This is called "sustenance". They are not your pets. You treat the animals well because they literally feed you through the cold months. People don't understand that in many parts of the world not eating meat is a huge luxury.

You didn't make an argument from the perspective of needing to eat meat to survive though, did you?

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

#833

Post by jandrese »

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…

One thing both Impossible and Beyond do is add artificial smoke flavoring/aromatics to their product to more closely resemble a flame broiled burger. I find them to be somewhat offputting personally, and it also makes the product useless for anything other than a burger. You can't do a hot dish with the Beyond meat because the smoke flavor will overwhelm everything else in the dish.

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

#834

Post by quitit »

Every week I try a different meat-substitute product just to see if I like them.

I keep visiting supermarkets which claim to sell Beyond and I’m yet to find one.

The other issue with many meat subs: they usually have insanely high saturated fat content. At least if replacing beef, make it a healthier alternative.

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

#835

Post by cjf101 »

ok123456 wrote: post #81
linsomniac wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure why you're putting "feel" in quotes, voting with your pocketbook is a legitimate way of signalling to large industrial polluters to do something, right?

Not in the least. Consumerism is not a substitute for real policy. Imagine if instead of freeing the slaves, Abraham Lincoln just instead made "Freedom Credits" that were issued to businesses that didn't use slave labor, but it allowed companies that used slave labor to purchase surplus "Freedom Credits" as offsets so they could claim they're making progress towards their ESG goals. Maybe it would become part of thes…

Where I agree with you is that _policy_ is a much more direct and effective method of achieving similar ends. However I don't think eating less meat is comparable to carbon credits. The IPCC specifically lists it as a tried and true strategy for reducing greenhouse emissions.

The substitution of meat for other protein sources has real (albeit lagging) effects on the agricultural economy. Less people buying meat leads to less production of meat at scale, which in turn results in reduced deforestation (and potentially reforestation). Producing less meat leads to less greenhouse gas production at several points in the chain, most notably from reduced number of animals, but also during production and logistics. More forests contribute to carbon capture and biodiversity.

Probably the two biggest obstacles to consumer based solutions have been policy that subsidizes the cost of meat, and the cultural backlash to the idea of eating less meat (despite the many health + environmental incentives to reducing meat consumption overall).

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

#836

Post by parthdesai »

parkingrift wrote: post #826
parthdesai wrote: post #819

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because meat tastes better, and I want it Sorry, as a person who eats both, meat doesn't "just taste better". If by vegetables, you're referring to standard meat and 3 veg that western countries were used to, then yeah meat tastes way better. But if you're trying Indian/Thai, etc, vegetables can taste as good as meat, and in some cases, even better.

The number of people chiming in on this article proclaiming food preferences as "wrong" or "correct" is truly astounding. No, my preferences aren't wrong. No, yours aren't wrong either. Food preferences are personal. The only thing "wrong" here is all the people chiming in to tell others that their differing preferences are incorrect.

Well, you're one of them. Your comment has a blanket statement "Meat tastes better" like it's an objective fact.

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

#837

Post by jbuhbjlnjbn »

quelltext wrote: post #802
nextaccountic wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't have to, Alcantara is extremely robust and a great replacement for leather, just as one example. But the synthetic leather in cheap products aiming to look like real smooth leather, I think this is the one you mean, time and time again is so inferior it's almost a scam. Shoes will fall apart quickly, sofas, clothing will peel off after 2-3 years when the softener has gassed out.

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

#838

Post by rootusrootus »

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…

Yeah I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I get a weird aftertaste that lingers when I've tried the impossible burgers. Closest thing I can compare it to is the aftertaste I get after eating chicken thighs. I know that's not exactly a useful comparison, but it's what I've got to work with. Definitely not an aftertaste I've ever associated with beef.

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

#839

Post by JohnFen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #301
sokoloff wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a pretty hardcore meat-lover (we had sous-vide filets tonight at home), I think Impossible is close enough on the taste and feel side for a lot of dishes that use beef (including hamburgers). They're comically far off on the price side, but if they could get price-competitive with bulk 80% ground beef, they would capture a large amount of that market, I think.

I don't understand how you can say this. The Beyond/Incredible meat is not close enough. It's not even close at all. The texture is wrong, the feel chewing it is wrong, the taste is wrong unless you slather it with enough condiments that you can't taste it anyway. It is exactly the sort of highly processed industrially-created food that health experts tell us to avoid.

> The Beyond/Incredible meat is not close enough. It's not even close at all.

To you. Which is legit -- if it's not to your taste, that's fair. But to a lot of people, it really is close enough -- which is equally legit.

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

#840

Post by friend_and_foe »

kuschku wrote: post #541
friend_and_foe wrote: post #375

You don't see meat eaters trying to make their broccoli taste like hamburger patties. Vegetables are supposed to taste like vegetables. They're good without needing to be processed. Nobody wants to buy uncanny valley meat substitute, except as a novelty. And novelty business models work, but these guys misread their market and thought it could be a daily meat replacement, for a group of people that don't eat meat, or…

Considering Rügenwalder, one of Germany's largest meat processing companies, managed to pivot to primarily selling veggie meat replacements, and grow their business at that, your conclusion is wrong. There's definitely a niche for this, and it's large enough to build a multi billion dollar company. And if it can work in the country that's home to the Currywurst, then it can work everywhere.

There is a niche for it, I'm not saying there's not. All I'm saying is they went about marketing it wrong because they misread the market and targeted the wrong demographic. Meat eaters dont want it, vegetarians don't want it, it's a novelty item, that's your niche.
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