Comment by _vuqm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _vuqm | Hacker News Reader

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What about ordering Mary’s free range chicken? Lots of restaurants advertise that on the menu. Sounds better than a normal chicken sandwich. Or Coca Cola braised short ribs from your favorite food truck? Sounds better than cola braised short ribs.

Some people wouldn’t even consider a veggie burger on the menu, but an impossible burger? Sure. It’s about _branding_.

The first time I tried impossible meat I was eating dinner with my old boss and he’d asked if I had heard about impossible meat. I’d heard about it but never tried it, so I ordered it and it was honestly better than I expected.

I never would have tried it if it wasn’t for word of mouth marketing because it was on the menu. Restaurants are in the business of selling food. It’s their job to make items on their menu sound appealing. Just like those Michelin star restaurants including ingredients I’ve never heard of, let alone can’t pronounce. I could never find that ingredient at my local store. Maybe I should try it.

Based on your tone it sounds like you’ve never tried “imitation meat” as you describe it but i can see why people are hyping it. I eat plenty of meat but have started buying beyond meat patties at the store every now and then. It’s magnitudes better than your run-of-the-mill black bean veggie burger.

It's not just about branding, it's also about knowing what you eat. And also about restaurants not being able to make every possible piece of food from scratch.

If they made their own veggie burger, I love that. If they bought the best veggie burger on the market, that's also great.

There are plenty of brands involved in restaurants, in meat, in fake meat, in the preparation of the food (Big Green Egg for example). It's rarer to come across brands in vegetables or non-meat/meat-like products, but it happens. Sometimes their bread comes from the best bakery in town and they want you to know that.

Making everything from scratch is a lot of work for a small restaurant. There's nothing wrong with outsourcing it to a specialist.

And they also sell branded drinks, don't they? They don't brew their own cola or beer (well, some do[0]), and they will tell you what brand they've got.

[0] I recently had lunch at https://deproefzaak.nl/en/ which brews their own beer and serves branded veggie burgers.

Honestly, that branding for actual meat also makes me feel like I am getting a commodity product: I start to associate the food item together with all of the other food items I get which are "this same thing with different condiments" as opposed to "this unique meal that is notable for being from this restaurant". I actually really like the Impossible Burger, but it now feels like I am ordering the exact same product from every single restaurant... and this is not at all helped by how, to maintain the strength of their brand, they insist on certain kinds of preparations of their patties.

> I eat plenty of meat but have started buying beyond meat patties at the store every now and then.

Pretty off-topic, but a question: after seeing so many mentions on HN, I was pretty interested to give it a try after seeing Beyond Burgers appear in my Dutch grocery store recently. One thing that struck me, though, was that they were twice as expensive as the A brand plant-based burgers we already had, and over three times as expensive as the cheap ones. How expensive are they in the US? (i.e. are they just this expensive because they're from outside the EU?)

Probably not as expensive. They were pricier than other options, but not as extreme as you're describing. Generally, I notice these brands are more expensive than their meat counterparts and other fresh vegetarian options in the restaurants I visit. They're not cheap. I think a lot of that has to do with the marketing and hype around these products rather than inherent cost of producing or shipping them - and I hope the prices will become more reasonable in the future.

Thanks, I'm hoping the latter as well. Might also have to do with trouble scaling up, related to the hype. I hear they're working on a new factory here, so hopefully that helps.

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