Beyond Meat Is Struggling, and the Plant-Based Meat Industry Worries

My two cents: Beyond meat is struggling because it's products aren't good. We had a "meat"-loaf made with Impossible meat last night and it was pretty good. I'm consistently convinced I could hand someone an Impossible burger (maybe with cheese, on a roll, with some ketchup), and they would not identify that it was not beef if they were not looking for an excuse to complain. The industry needs time to find it's footing and to bring costs down with scale, but I expect that'll happen slowly but surely.

I just don’t think the tech is there, yet. I’ve tried their meat balls and burger with very high hopes, but they all taste like those cheap soy-based Chinese snacks, less greasy, more expensive.

Meanwhile, I have like 20 tofu recipes that are cheaper and more importantly, way tastier. I don’t try to make tofu taste like meat; it’s just delicious when the recipe makes it shine on its own right.

There are so many vegetarian recipes around the world that doesn’t try to fake meat, and achieve superior result both in cost-effectiveness and taste, in my opinion.

And then, at some point, we’ll probably have the technology to synthesize meat in a more realistic way. The current soy-based mimicry, as much as I admire the initiative, just feels like an awkward product.

Why would I buy those ridiculously expensive fake meat when I could just eat grilled or fried tofu? In Asia tofu is even cheaper than in US/EU countries, and ppl would laugh at those fake meat

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It's a non-subsidised product competing with a subsidised product (meat), that's got to be a big part of it struggling.

I tried a Beyond Meat burger. It tasted so much like the real thing that I did not finish it. It had that rusty-nail sharpness I have not missed at all.

I have been vegetarian for ~30 years. Pork and ham are the only meat I have missed. Knowing how pork is produced in the US, I would never buy any of it.

Unfortunately, fake meat is as "packaged and processed" as it is physically possible for stuff sold as food to be, making it not really food at all. That is too bad, because meat production is a huge driver of the looming global climate catastrophe, enough so that people switching to a meat substitute would cut their CO2 footprint more than giving up their car. But it is hard to recommend switching from actual food to merely food-shaped stuff. That said, a huge fraction of Americans habitually eat stuff not really food, already. If those were to switch to a meat substitute, their diet would have no more non-food than before. Unfortunately, those are the least likely to switch, no matter how closely it matches the real thing, unless it gets substantially cheaper than real meat.