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Comment by Ambolia | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how can those companies afford to put those fake meat sections on all supermarkets across the globe. At least in my european country all supermarkets seem to have this section and from what I've been told most of the products just end up being thrown away because nobody is buying them.

I assume they expect to lose a lot of money now but then to make it big at some point in the future. But those companies seem to be global multinationals and rely on global supply chains to create their products. And if the future requires decarbonization and reducing energy consumption, wouldn't that mean that complex global supply chains will be drastically reduced, and food production will move back to a more local level?

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> from what I've been told most of the products just end up being thrown away because nobody is buying them

Who told you, and why do you consider them a reliable indicator, for what you imply are all supermarkets across the globe?

thats certainly a false claim. no supermarket would be in business if they were throwing everything away.

Not necessarily, supermarkets have a built in expectation of some loss to spoilage already. A lot of those fake meat products have a pretty long shelf life since they are highly processed/frozen products and tend to be marketed in a very small footprint within the store. They are also priced to counter any spoilage expectation. So low stock requirements, small footprint, and consumer expectation that it’s an expensive product doesn’t really make that a false claim. They also could be considered a loss leader to attract vegan and vegetarians to buy the other vegetarian friendly foods they sell.

> expectation of some loss to spoilage already.

some is the key word here. You can bet that anyone who's managing a supermarket is optimizing to reduce this kind of loss.

Sure…and also incorporating what they can’t optimize into the price for the item.

This is a tangent, but so much of the supermarket nowadays is junk.

Go to the protein section, and there is literally no product that is just protein, everything has added artificial sweetener or some lab concoction with god knows what.

Go to the frozen food section. 80% junk. Ice cream, frozen potato chips, frozen pizzas. Oh look, some frozen fruit in the corner.

Go to the cereals section. 80% junk. If you look really hard, you can find some wholegrain cereal without added sugar.

Is this the equivalent of when social media companies optimize heavily around taking advantage of dopamine spikes in their customers, instead of doing things in their customer's actual best interests?

Speaking to an older relative, things were not like this in the mid 20th century.

How much cheaper would food be if the healthy staples could be bought in bulk, and our supply chains and packaging were optimized around that?

You can buy almost pure protein in some supermarkets - look for powdered egg whites which are like 99% protein.

I never seen frozen fruit, but frozen vegetables are super common.

Frozen berries tend to be pretty common from my experience in supermarkets across the US.

Frozen fruit is usually in its own section and isn't often mixed in with the vegetables. I'm more used to seeing it near desserts. It is, believe it or not, super common.

I promise it is common, though: I could find it in pretty much every grocery store I visited in the US (Including aldi) and can find it in most stores here in Norway as well. Some folks seek out frozen peaches and frozen mixed fruit for fruit salad as well - at least they did where I grew up in the Midwest.

https://www.google.com/search?q=frozen+fruit&tbm=isch

In Sweden you get frozen raspberries, strawberries, cherries, passion fruit, mango, lingon, black berries plus other unusual berries. Frozen avocado too!

> I never seen frozen fruit

Never seen a bag of frozen berries?

Genuinely not. Maybe the really big shops have it somewhere and I did not noticed. It is not shocking it exists, but it is genuinely far from dominating stores. It is vegetables and ice scream dominating here.

You should try tofu

You can be 100% sure aldi, or lidl wouldn't put it out there if it wasn't massively profitable. The margins on these products are probably big so even if it doesn't sell well in one region, other regions make up for it.

Also, there are items that may not themselves generate lots of profit but do attract customers who spend a lot as well. Like if you have the plant based meats, I can probably pick up the plant based milks, and the produce, and maybe some snacks, etc.

tbf the selection of artificial meats tends to be very limited in Aldi or Lidl. But that's largely for a different reason: in the more upmarket supermarkets which devote large displays to "meatless meat", it tends to be priced at equal or higher prices than the "premium" processed meat it competes with, even when it's just sausages made of vegetables, not lab-grown stuff with tricky textures. They're not pitching it at those prices because it doesn't sell...

> And if the future requires decarbonization and reducing energy consumption, wouldn't that mean that complex global supply chains will be drastically reduced, and food production will move back to a more local level?

Food production won't move back to a more local level, you lose the economies of scale. You get more expensive products and more pollution, not exactly what we want.

> most of the products just end up being thrown away because nobody is buying them

There's also a problem with discovery: If the meat alternative section is directly adjacent to the real meat, vegetarians and vegans are a lot less likely to discover it.

This just isn't true. It is actually really common to have this section near the meats.

Vegetarian meats are usually (but not always) either kept chilled or frozen, so it simply gets put somewhere around dairy and meat. For refrigerated sections, it is usually but not always in its own section. For the freezers, it is just kept in a section with space.

Of course, there are exceptions and sometimes it is just mixed in with regular product. Vegan cheese with the cheeses and ground "meat" with the other ground meat.

Most vegetarians and vegans I know seek the stuff out and learn where to look for it - including myself (not quite vegetarian, but a pescetarian that leans very heavily towards veggie)

It's possible that the supermarkets did some market research that misled them about how popular these products would be, but there is another option. Supermarkets can arrange all sorts of deals with suppliers. In some cases, the supplier will pay the supermarket to stock a new product, hoping that high margin sales or even just market penetration make it worth it.

Looking at Beyond Meat you are probably right - their shares are in tatters, they are bleeding money without any prospects to break even. Maybe only second generation of meatless companies will make it.

A vegetable being transported all around the world, still has a drastically smaller footprint than meat from a farm next door.

I can't help but wonder if it's some evil organisation like the UN or the WEF subsidising these sections... or even blackmailing supermarkets to have them.

Lmao no, go to an Albert heijn or Jumbo.

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