Impossible Foods Plans to Lay Off About 20% of Workers | Hacker News Reader

Impossible Foods Plans to Lay Off About 20% of Workers

bloomberg.com

They claim their sales are up by 50% in dollar terms in 2022:

> Closely held Impossible Foods recently said its sales were up more than 50% in 2022 in dollar terms at US retail stores. In a September interview, Chief Executive Officer Peter McGuinness said Impossible Foods has a strong balance sheet and good cash position.

What's the trick here? Seems like interest in general has fallen:

> Impossible Foods has rapidly expanded to restaurants and supermarkets. Maintaining momentum will become challenging as performance of the broader plant-based meat category slips. Supermarket sales of refrigerated meat alternatives fell 15% by volume for the 52 weeks ended Jan. 1, according to market-research firm IRI, while they declined 14% in dollar terms. In restaurants and food-service outlets, orders of plant-based burgers dropped 9% in the 12 months ended in November, according to market researcher NPD Group. Impossible Foods sells products at major restaurant chains, including White Castle, Qdoba and Burger King, which offers the Impossible Whopper. Data from HundredX, a consumer-experience strategy firm, also suggests falling interest. The percentage of shoppers who have eaten Impossible products but say they’re less likely to eat as much going forward has risen, according to feedback collected from 1,723 consumers in the last year.

Maybe they're capturing a rising share of a shrinking market? A 50% increase under these conditions still does sound suspicious though.

I for one enjoy their burgers. They taste damn close to meat and they are good for the planet.

+1 Impossible is the winner to-date.

It's tasty. I consider them "medium quality burgers", compared to the low and high quality burger I've eaten. I'm perfectly fine eating these. They don't upset my stomach, ever. [Real meat can - perhaps too oily for my system?]

Also, use the meat with taco-seasoning on nachos, is okay. The texture is a bit grainy vs hamburger.

And the sausage product, when shredded and placed on-top of a vegetarian pizza, is AMAZING.

Beyond Meat is still strange for burgers, though they make good sausage - tasty with eggs.

We love their italian sausages.

Why are people so obsessed with creating fake meat? I've always found that meat > vegetarian food >>>> "vegan" "meat"

Because a lot of people think meat tastes good but for whatever reason(s) don't want to participate in the industrial farming of animals.

In my view (as someone generally on the carnivorous spectrum of dietary preferences), Impossible's beef substitute product is quite tasty for any dish where beef is "an ingredient, but not the central focal point". Hamburger, sloppy Joe, tacos, meatballs, lasagna, etc are the perfect spot for it.

Their biggest problem is the price is utterly uncompetitive with utility-grade, 80% lean ground beef. If volume production, cutting overhead costs, or other actions can get them competitive (and eventually under) that price reference, they'll have a runaway hit on their hands.

Food choice is partly cultural. The dishes of my childhood all had meat at their center, if I go for long periods of time without eating meat I begin to really miss those dishes (I went vegetarian for a year at one point, didn't stop the cravings).

Fake meat is great because you can recrate the culinary experiences without actual meat e.g. I can make a great Bolognese with impossible beef, I've yet to meet someone who could actually tell there wasn't any meat in it. For me this scratches an important "itch" I get .

It's because your preferences aren't universal.

There is interest in the space for a variety of reasons. Animal welfare, land usage, agricultural pollution, climate change, etc.

So not because it tastes good, but for asspats. Maybe they should take a page from the EV market and stop trying to ape the normal offering? Their customers want to be seen "helping" - so the product has to draw attention to itself by being a weird color or shape.

Also for taste: for example, IMO a beef burger tastes best, but a fake-beef burger tastes better than a not-trying-to-be-meat vege burger.

I’m mostly vegetarian because it’s healthier - and I’m comfortable that a fake-beef burger is healthier than a real beef burger.

heh, well at least you're honest about the asspats. If health is the primary motivation, and you haven't researched it for yourself - you might want to. Do you remember the food pyramid, and how that was the consensus position - until it got exposed for being total BS? Or how regularly eggs, wine, and cholesterol flip between being good for you one decade and bad the next? These people cannot be relied upon.

It’s not about asspats at all - I don’t care what others think. As I said, I’ve made a personal decision to be mostly vegetarian for health reasons.

As for “research”, there’s plenty of evidence supporting that a plant-based diet is healthier than one including meat and dairy.

Now, obviously there’s the question of how processed meat-substitute burgers compare to less-processed real meat burgers, but as said I believe the evidence points towards the non-meat option being better.

Food is assumed to taste good, what point are you making?

lol, no it isn't - there are a lot of existing foods that certainly don't taste good but they are supposedly "good for you". It seems odd to even have to point out that such a tradeoff exists. The point is that up to now that calculation was a personal one, and food processors had to calibrate between those two things (and price, to a smaller degree). Now there is this collective dimension being promoted, which could dramatically alter the calculus - to the point where celebrities are now being recruited to get people to eat bugs... Most are less likely to choose the objectively inferior "I'm doing my part!" option when the effort goes unrecognized, that is why early EV offerings looked so ridiculous. Manufactures found that normal looking electric cars didn't sell as well as designs that informed onlookers that you were "doing the right thing".

it is odd, having to describe the obvious, to those who pretend to understand nothing, while condescending the entire time.

keep fighting the Illuminati

I suspect most people buying these products don't care much about how they're seen when buying these products. I personally can't stomach the idea of eating an animal that my conscience considers "someone" rather than "something", but I like the general flavour of meat-like foods. If they come from plants, I can enjoy it without feeling like I'm eating someone.

It never crosses my mind what people think of me buying Beyond this or Impossible that.

> I suspect most people buying these products don't care much about how they're seen when buying these products.

You suspect wrong, and you demonstrated why. How do you know that someone is a vegetarian? They'll tell you almost immediately, either explicitly or by bring up vegetarian adjacent issues. These products facilitate that.

> I personally can't stomach the idea of eating an animal...

So you know better than basically everyone who lived and died since forever? Before you launch into the talking point wherein humans evolve beyond needing to eat other animals, can you think of another fundamental part of the human experience that we evolved out of in the last several thousand years? Probably not, which makes this kind of wishful thinking unlikely to work out well. This reminds me of that Australian kid who was so deranged by environmentalist fearmongering, specifically that we were going to run out of drinking water, that he died from dehydration.

My choice isn’t about health or evolution or talking points. It just doesn’t feel good to me. I’m comfortable with being empirically wrong, and I actually held off from making the transition because I thought it made no sense to stop eating meat. I liked hunting and spear fishing. I stopped caring if it made sense or not at some point though because it simply didn’t feel good anymore.

I don’t know better than anyone. I do know that I buy plant based meats occasionally because I don’t want to eat real meat — not because I want anyone to see me buying it. Come to think of it, I sincerely doubt anyone gives any shits what’s in my shopping cart. If anything they’d think I’m an idiot for buying pink plant slime for ridiculous prices.

Ironically I think people who don’t eat animals actually don’t like telling people (certainly not in person, though on the internet on a site like HN it can lead to interesting conversations), because people such as yourself make it into something it isn’t. I avoid mentioning it and when it does come up, people seem to think they’re entitled to an explanation of a) why I’d do that and b) how I avoid being super unhealthy.

Sometimes it’s a fairly benign, uninteresting facet of one’s life and there’s no reason to conflate it with a superiority complex or knowing better than “basically everyone who lived and died since forever”.

I drive a large SUV. If I was trying to virtue signal I should probably start there.

I like the taste of meat. I choose not to eat it. So if I want a burger, I'll use a meat alternative.

Because people like burgers and hot dogs? Because changing peoples diets is easier if they have a similar foods they can cook? Because people want to make a positive change, without limiting their options? Because people want to introduce others using safe familiar foods?

There are a myriad of reasons why, and many of them have to do with transitioning people from a meat focused diet to a meat free diet. Usually by changing 1 ingredient in a dish rather than upending their whole process.

Also, there are plenty of vegan meat substitutes that are excellent. Eg. if you are looking for a vegan substitute for meat in stew or pulled pork look for Fable (its just shredded shitake with food binders) https://fablefood.co/ (Not affiliated, but its delicious).

Because Western food culture is based on meat.

Japan has always been a densely populated mountainous island incapable of large scale livestock production untill very recently. Meat was a luxury. So they turned to fish and rice.

Same..

As a vegetarian, I think I would actually buy from them if they had some very minimally processed (think tofu), preferably unprocessed (think lentils) food and if they just added their heme ingredient and did no other processing.

I just like the umami flavor, and I want to get that from minimally processed/weird products. Soy heme is significantly similar to the real thing that I don’t really mind how it was created.

I just want to add that umami to something healthy.

There are lots of reasons to avoid eating meat that go beyond the usual animal welfare arguments. Good meat substitutes can help people cut down on their meat intake without giving up the kinds of dishes they have grown accustomed to over a lifetime of eating meat.

It’s a better way to ingest protein and calories.

Vegetarian food has less protein by volume than meat and some of the protein substitutes taste bad and / or have a disgusting texture.

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