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Comment by technotony | Hacker News Reader

The naysayers in the comment thread are missing the understanding that the fundamental technologies driving this are all moving exponentially. Beyond Meat's innovation came from a Stanford professor who is an expert in RNA molecules (he helped them figure out their protein structure/selection), impossible foods is a synthetic biology company. Exponential techs always underwhelm in the beginning but soon deliver more powerful products than people imagined. That's going to happen with this industry and faster than people expect.

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Maybe with Impossible Foods, but I don't see anything about RNA here:

> The vegan meat substitutes are made from mixtures of pea protein isolates, rice protein, mung bean protein, canola oil, coconut oil, and other ingredients like potato starch, apple extract, sunflower lecithin, and pomegranate powder with a range of vitamins and minerals. Beef products that "bleed" are achieved by using beet juice

Just sounds like a veggie burger that tastes better, and has a VC-funded marketing budget.

I've had a beyond meat burger, I'm curious to hear the opinion of others that have had one too because I thought it tasted terrible. The texture was nothing like real ground beef and neither was the flavour. It wasn't good different either - I'd much rather have a regular bean burger.

I feel like it's all marketing and they're just riding the hype wave caused by other better products or peoples desire for one. (I assume the Impossible Burger is better - they seem to have gone into more effort to replicate beef, but I haven't tried one)

I purchased a package of Beyond Meat Burgers after the IPO stock skyrocketed, to see what all the fuss was about.

The texture is like a persian koobideh kabab, the taste is meh, but I couldn't stand the ammonia like smell. The aftertaste lingered for most of the day and I had to ventilate my kitchen to get rid of the odor. I'd rather eat a Dr Praegers veggie burger.

Their Beyond Meat Sausages (Brat) are much better but I'm not sold on the idea of these processed foods.

I didn't buy any Beyond Meat stock.

I got the ammonia smell/taste too - that was the worst thing about it.

I'll bite—I love the beyond burger. There's a burger joint near work that has them and they're now exclusively what I get when I go there

I've had both. I had the Beyond Burger at a burger/beer joint and it was legit good. But I was surprised and very satisfied with it, as was the buddy I was with who is also not a vegetarian.

I had the Impossible Burger at Burger King, and it's now my go-to for when I want a fast food burger. It won't fool you, but it's about equally satisfying and it makes me feel less bad about the environmental and ethical impacts of a beef burger.

I will say that I've mostly eliminated red meat from my diet due to ethical/environmental/health concerns, so convincing me to try and continue eating one of these is much easier than convincing a die-hard carnivore, or even a middle of the road meat eater.

Having eaten possibly all the best beef around the world, and most of the "meatless" meat even before they were even hyped. I have yet to taste a Meatless burger that is anywhere near as good as real beef.

I wouldn't say Beyond Meat were terrible, may be because I have low expectation of these type of patties anyway. But Impossible Burger is slightly better than Beyond Meat, but still far from Real Burger. I definitely wont be trying it again until they have another major version upgrade.

Yes, they talk about meat like Software Development.....

I found it tasted like a frozen burger - like the kind sold in 40 packs and sold at charity barbecues. The texture seems too smooth. And the aroma was unpleasant (as someone else commented). I too would prefer either a real meat burger, a black bean burger, or just some tofu (if you freeze it to drive out more moisture, you get a chewier texture - non traditional, but can give good texture.)

I've had the impossible burger on multiple occasions. Every time I've had it, it felt like whoever cooked it either didn't care or was trying to present the burger as basically as possible to try to demo it as a discrete product. The trouble is, that's not how anyone over the age of 10 actually eats any kind of burger, so it's not really a fair presentation. If you actually season it (it absolutely needs salt and pepper) and put on equivalent toppings and condiments, it's really not bad at all in my opinion. I tend to view it like soylent. It's definitely not as good as a good beef burger, but it's good enough to consider eating regularly for convenience and health reasons.

I'm a burger purist - lightly toasted then steamed bun, patty with the right fat content (and no additions, just salt and pepper) - not too lean - either smashed thin or a bit thicker and medium/medium rare, processed cheese (it really is the best on burgers, although swiss is nice too I guess), some kind of "special sauce" (even if it's just ketchup and mayo), diced raw white onion, dill pickle slices and lettuce.

Most places can't perfect the basics, but have some kind of truffle oil, bacon, foie gras (I'm exaggerating for effect a bit here) monstrosity on the menu to compensate.

> The trouble is, that's not how anyone over the age of 10 actually eats a beef burger either

Most of the people over 5 I've seen eat a beef burger that way are also over 50, not under 10.

> I tend to view it like soylent. It's definitely not as good as a good beef burger, but it's good enough to consider eating regularly for convenience and health reasons.

Does Impossible actually have convenience advantages?

When I make a burger for myself, that's often (30% of the time?) how I eat it. But yeah, being a solid base to build a heavily flavored "burger" around is a significant use case, to be sure.

I tried the Imopssible Burger, and it also tasted terrible.

I prefer veggie burgers that don't try and pretend they are something they are not.

The future is vat-grown meat, not ersatz meat.

Yes. Also look at the ingredients - the composition is very far from real meat in terms of nutrient value.

But if you think beyond meat is bad, try some vegan cheeses some time. I tried 3 and they all tasted like 6 parts soap, 1 part nail polish, and "hints" of cheese.

I've had quite a few and I find them almost on par with burgers made with ground beef. It might depends on how you cooked them.

"Veggie burger that tastes better" is kind of a big deal, because (to at least a first approximation) the only reason people don't exclusively eat veggie burgers is that they don't taste better.

I believe the parent meant these taste better than a regular veggie burger and not a beef burger.

People also eat meat because it's a lot more energy efficient. One real burger lasts me for 7+ hrs where a veggie burger maybe 2.

Could just be the veggie burger has less fat. Fat/oil keeps you satiated. But it's always easier to add more oil to a veggie burger, than it is to make a meat burger lean.

I thought protein was better for satiation than fat?

Fat is more satiating per gram, but protein is more satiating per calorie.

The science is in picking the isolates. They don't market that science, but it's the reason their burger is so much better than other veggie burgers. The Stanford RNA scientist (and some colleagues) helped them figure out which proteins to focus on and how to modify those proteins based on ph and other conditions to create the taste/texture they wanted. What they are doing is much harder than it looks from the ingredients list. This is one of the scientists who helped: https://profiles.stanford.edu/joseph-puglisi

I think the real problem goes deeper than appealing to the palate: we have a long history of creating heavily processed foods that are disastrous for human health. A massive proportion of the first-order treatment and maintenance advice from what I'd call the ongoing "gastrointestinal research revolution" boils down to: "eat real, whole foods".

To a large extent, I bin this work in with things like Soylent, until proven otherwise: a narrow attempt to create an edible substance with poor alignment to actual human biological needs.

Exponential improvement is a very powerful lesson, for sure. Exponential increases in capability or applicability or exponential decreases in cost describe the fundamental benefit of technology.

But what exactly is an exponentially superior food?

> But what exactly is an exponentially superior food?

In this case, perhaps the ability in time to produce 10x the meat ('meat') at 10% the environmental damage of our current output.

We're adding ~85-90m people per year. Most of them are going to want to eat things like beef, fish, chicken, bacon and so on. A billion new people per decade is an enormous increase in demand for meat, to say nothing of the already existing several billion people in the bottom 1/2 with rising consumer demands for meat.

It looks like we're going to be able to solve this problem and relatively soon (it will still take decades to fully scale up globally and perfect complex products, however that will occur). It's an exciting time, getting to watch the innovation and real store-worthy products just starting to take off at a consumer level.

In this case it's mainly our understanding of protein structure/texture/taste which is a new capability.

The thriving success of the Organic & Non-GMO food industry suggests that the naysayers will be correct for at least a section of the customer base, and therefore there will still be a beef industry.

About the only technology that has ever improved "exponentially" for any amount of time is CPUs.

I kind of get your point, but couldn't you have said "the technology is going to improve" instead?

If we went from veggie burgers this year to lab-grown beef patties in 2021, that would be more of a one-time leap.

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