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Comment by matt3210 | Hacker News Reader

Bacon comes from a pig. Anything not from a pig can be bacon-like and delicious if it wants to be but it will never be bacon. Tons of plant based alts are delicious, it just factually incorrect to call them meat.

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Also, it's terrible branding. I like seaweed, it's a great snack (I especially like dulse). I also like thousands of other things that aren't bacon. When I want bacon, I'll have bacon, when I want some other food, I'll look for that. A "vegan" or fake version of something I already like is the last thing I'll seek out. Make something tasty and give it a proper name, and I'll buy it because it's tasty. Piggyback on some already popular food, I'll just be set up for disappointment

I thought this was going to be the seaweed chicharron snacks. There's surprisingly not bad, in fact I might prefer them to almost any packaged chicharrones. If they'd been called seaweed puffs they might appeal to a different audience, the way I see veggie crisps placed near the produce in some grocery stores.

https://www.seacharrones.com/

There’s been a lot of discussion about the challenges companies in this space are having.

I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that there are two distinct markets, with almost zero overlap, and they are at odds with each other.

You can’t serve both markets at the same time, you can’t succeed without the credibility of one, but the only way to profitability and sustainability lies with the other.

This just isn’t a VC-compatible industry. Full stop.

“When I want bacon, I'll have bacon, when I want some other food, I'll look for that”

I hear this all the time from people who eat meat, but consider this: maybe you aren’t actually the target audience for this product. Maybe it’s for people that don’t eat any pork but still like the taste and texture of bacon.

But if they are not trying to entice meat-eaters there is no reason to ride the coattails of the original, real and authentic thing. You'd sell it as "seacrunch" or "seamunch" or whatever.

The reason is to draw people in with a comparison to something they already know. "bacon made of seaweed" sounds more interesting and will draw more people in than "seacrunch", which has its own identity and brand it would need to build up

You may be right, but I have a feeling most vegetarians and vegans don't need an imitation of meat in mock bacon. They have a great variety of tasty things already few if any rely on meat analogues (especially if the diet is inspired by traditional vege/vegan diets). So the target with this naming convention would be "converts" or people transitioning to vege/vegan --which is a smaller market.

The end result is more like replicating a grape with artificial grape flavor: not nearly there in taste and with a ton of processing.

I hate how tepid these companies are. Its like if all food has to be a copy of some other food to go to market, then we are stuck with the mass market cuisine of the mid 19th century as our end all be all.

Haven't tried the specific product myself so I can't really say. imo Artificial flavors aren't great at replacing a thing, but they can transfer the essence of a thing's flavor to something else and that leads to interesting results. For example, snow-cone syrup is a surprisingly good flavoring for kratom!

Yeah that's fair. Doing something super novel is risky though, and a big part of starting a business is about mitigating risk

Well, if we all ate meat alternatives most of the time and treated ourselves to real meat much less often, we could reduce the density of animals raised for food so that they could be raised humanely. I love meat and especially bacon, but I'll have sea-crunch (or whatever) most of the time if it means we don't have to torture animals all their lives.

Related: this Future Perfect podcast https://pca.st/ngofo0ll

The post we're children to suggests that meat eaters may not be the intended market, so my reply is a response to that.

I trust that these huge companies have done the market research and have came up with the names based on that. The people want items with names of familiar foods.

Sorry to interrupt your pointless rant, but that’s why it’s called “vegan bacon”. It’s generally accepted that words can modify other words, like in your example of “bacon like”.

Restaurants are even doing this. “Fried chicken restaurant” it says on the sign selling “chicken sandwiches” that are actually deep fried gardein but its hardly clear because the restaurant is trying too hard to be cute. I went to a place like this with vegan friends and even they were confused whether or not this was actually a plant based item on the menu, had to get reassurances from wait staff. There needs to be laws like with cheese or wine over what you can call things when you sell them to consumers.

Language is flexible, and "seaweed bacon" clearly communicates what it is. Just like "soy/oat/coconut milk", the dairy lobby's objections notwithstanding.

As a flexitarian, I find "vegan X" or "vegetarian X" labeling very useful. It tells me that when I want to adapt an omnivore recipe, I can have a certain set of expectations on how the vegan substitute can be prepared and would taste and feel like.

Language is constantly evolving.

Have you had turkey bacon?

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