Once-Hot Fake Meat Sees Sales Slide on Price and Being Too ‘Woke’ | Hacker News Reader

Once-Hot Fake Meat Sees Sales Slide on Price and Being Too ‘Woke’

bloomberg.com

8 pointsshaburn12 comments

How about just not very palatable or convenient?

I bought a box of beyond meat burgers. They taste terrible compared to 4oz of beef with a little salt, and you have to keep them frozen and get the ones you want to cook out to thaw the night before.

I am probably not going to be able to finish the box.

Edit: Most veggie burgers that don’t pretend to be meat are better than these things in my opinion. They are in the uncanny valley.

Definitely agreed, I tried them a very few times and it didn't taste good and made me feel bad.

I don't care if it looks like meat, just make something nutritious and tasty.

You could just defrost them in the microwave in a few minutes.

I know much of America is incredibly excited to see these fail, but I'm a huge fan of Beyond Meat. I don't really care what the stock price is or how many other people are buying them, my freezer is always going to have a few Beyond burgers and sausages, they've become a staple for easy to cook meals for me.

Defrosting them in a microwave would make them even more unpalatable. Also it not what they recommend.

I don’t want to see them fail. That’s why I bought their product. I was willing to pay more than beef for potential health and environmental benefits.

It’s just not a good product though.

I always thought that these being more expensive than beef was just a temporary thing. After all its a plant protein compared to a large animal that lives, grazes, gets sick, has to be butchered etc. I would buy them sometimes if they cheaper just because I like novelty, like I do with veggie burgers and sausage. But there is no way I’m paying more than beef.

I remember when NPR was pushing "Beyond Meat" like it was a paid sponsor. It was bizarre. The strangest thing was the declarative tone that this was the future for certain.

We went from this https://www.npr.org/2017/02/16/515420148/live-episode-beyond...

to this

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124160661/beyond-meat-execut...

I guess some people like meat after all...

McDonald's sells the a lot of burgers, and they buy the most cow eyeballs too. What would be good is if more people ate veggie burgers like these, or burgers from MickeyD's and the like, and then us carnivorous foodies can get the prime, hand-packed, never frozen gems cooked to bloody perfection. I mean come on, is there anything better than a duck fat french fry drowning in the blood and juices of a fresh burger. Personally, I recommend R_O__'S around 6PM and snakin' one of those.

Source for the claim McDonalds buys eyeballs. Eyeballs are very tough and chewy. I suppose if used as a lower percentage filler in ground beef people wouldn't notice much, but I highly doubt a significant fraction of burger meat is eyeball.

I ate impossible burgers for a few months, just for the novelty of it. Then I got bored of it.

What I realized is it always tastes exactly the same. That’s not how meat works.

Beyond meat tastes like ass.

Im not sure i know anyone who’s eating that stuff, and I know many vegetarians.

Weird. I think the impossible burgers are ok but bland, but love Beyond meat.

I never bought any "veggie burger" products for at home, but would occasionally order one in a restaurant when it was the best option and thought they were always just sort of tolerable.

Beyond meat has been such a game-changer for me. I probably eat about 3-5 servings of a Beyond meat product per week now. Anecdotally, the only people I've seen who had a strongly negative reaction seemed to be overcooking them significantly.

I’ve never perceived them as ”woke” — just vegan. I’ve been paying fairly close attention to the marketing of Beyond Meat, at least, for the past year.

Plenty of discussion in a two-day-old less-inflammatory titled post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32961766

Reply on news.ycombinator.com