Hacker News Reader

Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

I’m a meat-eater but my wife is vegan. We’ve been following Impossible Foods for some time and got to finally try one of their burgers last month.

As a meat eater who is vegan at home, I think it’s a decent alternative compared to other vegetarian meat-like products, in fact far superior. But it’s definitely not a replacement for the real thing.

I have been pretty impressed with the steady innovation in vegetarian / vegan options that give me as good alternatives compared to non. For example, Miyokos cheese is incredible, and far better than any cheese I used to typically eat, and it’s dairy free.

I used to eat Boca burgers when I’ve had to and they aren’t great. I’m excited for better options to come into the market.

View on HN

I was also underwhelmed by the Impossible Foods burger, which was a better imitation of meat than other patties, but not necessarily tastier.

The bigger surprise to me was that Impossible Foods does not apparently control how restaurants prepare their burgers—in fact, the restaurant where I ate it even had an Impossible Foods chili. I would have expected IF to put pretty close restrictions around how you cook and present their foods, to make sure that people don't have a bad experience and assume it's the fault of the "meat".

Chili, interesting. I tried breaking up a Beyond Burger patty so I could use it as ground beef filling for burritos/pasta. It was pretty much a disaster. Even when cooking the burger normally there is very little room for error, compared to real beef.

I think the end-game for these companies should be to produce a chuck substitute that is malleable rather than being restricted to patties. And of course it shouldn't ruin easily.

Impossible and Beyond really aren't comparable. I prefer Beyond, because the Impossible tastes and feels just a bit too much like meat for my tastes. The Impossible burger also crumbles way better. I haven't tried to crumble the Beyond burger, but I have a strong feeling it wouldn't end nicely.

> because the Impossible tastes and feels just a bit too much like meat for my tastes

Many, this industry has quite a dilemma. On the one hand, some folks want their products to taste as much like meat as possible. But others will avoid products that taste too much like meat.

When Beyond Meat said they'd sell their products in the meat section of the grocery store, I thought it was brilliant. Their goal is to convert meat eaters after all.

Not everyone got on board with this though. Safeway sells the patties literally next to cow meat, whereas Whole Foods puts them in the vegan section next to seitan.

It's an interesting line they have to walk.

Have you tried Quorn mince for comparison? It's probably not great in a burrito but I find it fine in a rich pasta like Bolognese. I'm also a fan of their southern style chicken patties, I prefer them to any "real" chicken patties.

Same. I thought the impossible burger was fine but wished if just ordered a traditional veggie burger.

I understand the desire to appeal to meat eaters, but it's never going to be a match. And close but no cigar leads to an uncanny valley of the palate.

Meanwhile, there are much tastier vegetarian burgers that abandon any desire to taste like meat.

So I see "meatish" as nothing but a curiosity for the time being.

Lab grown meats married with meatless agencies, meanwhile, could bridge the gap better while we wait for it to become a more affordable process.

can you express in what way they fall short of the real thing?

In my experience, the patty lacked the density of meat and tasted a bit like peas/alfalfa sprouts. I don't mind either of these things, but I wouldn't want a hamburger to taste like them.

I would certainly eat one again if the price came down, but I'm on the sidelines for now. For background, I order veggie burgers more often than beef burgers when given the choice, but I have never been a vegetarian.

I had read a lot about their synthetic process in reproducing heme, which gives meat the iron-y taste. They also had some marketing videos about how they introduce fat, because real chuck has different degrees of leanness. So I was expecting something close to meat, with maybe some weirdness in texture.

In reality, it was much closer to a Boca burger but tastier. Basically if you take a burger and remove 50% of the juice and , 25% density, the crumble, and cook it well done. If it were in the grocery store, I'd still buy it over Boca, but my expectations of it being like-meat but healthier were not met. I wouldn't serve it to real burger loving carnivores.

I'd say its kinda false advertising, but I get why they did it...it definitely got us intrigued.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com