Beyond Meat fights for survival
foodinstitute.com
foodinstitute.com
Don’t get me wrong, as a vegetarian, I think they taste nice. They are just too damn expensive and not particularly healthy which goes against why I am a vegetarian. In Europe we have so many alternatives that are insanely cheaper and, as an Indian, we have so many alternatives that haven’t been processed to within an inch of their life.
One thing I found to be a great homemade burger maker is simply getting some dried minced soy protein, mix with some eggs, breadcrumbs and seasoning before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty. Tastes great, holds it shape and has a burger like texture.
As someone who doesn't actually really like how Beyond Meat tastes, it's unfortunate that it's the only option sometimes. As someone who likes food variety and practically needs it, eliminating choice is the worst.
I have to concur about processing as well. Indian cuisine has so many unprocessed and nutritious meals that are vegetarian. So does Ethiopian cuisine. Mediterranean foods, Tex-mex, and lots of South American food can be made vegetarian. There are great ideas for burgers from here too. See https://www.shopdeepfoods.com/product/aloo-tikki-141-oz?pid=....
I've wanted to try some of the NYTimes vegetarian and vegan burger recipes when I get the chance. My point is, Beyond Meat seems to reduce the better-testing and less processed competition.
The reason is simple: it has higher protein content than most other place based fast foods.
I'd love to live in a world with minimally processed high protein vegetarian restaurant food (like lots of legumes), but the only reliable place to get this that I know of is CAVA.
Products like Beyond are at least a step up from carb heavy pastas and grains or oily fried vegetables and starches which are the staples of most restaurant fare for vegetarians.
The biggest problem they have is the exhorbinant prices, which relegate it to niche status.
Ecologist Howard Odum developed a system of environmental accounting based on tracing energy back to the sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy
a calorie of vegetarian food is estimated to require 200,000 calories worth of sunlight when you factor in energy to drive the wind, make rain, all of that.
Invariably there is part of a product or service that you can't account for in detail so you take the remaining dollar cost and multiply it by the emergy/$ ratio for the economy as a whole.
Although you can argue a "cheap" product has a price that is subsidized or doesn't represent externalities, this leads to the corollary that an outrageously expensive product is not green because the money is a license for somebody to do things that impact the environment be it the employees driving around in a big-ass pickup truck or the executives or investors flying in private jets.
There's that and there's also the fact that most people's main objection to meat substitutes is high cost.
If you're not going to emulate beef exactly, own that and sell a different experience. I'd love to see something more like "stuffing fritters"-- strongly seasoned meatless patties with different tastes and textures. Nobody would be fooled they're burgers, but nobody is claiming they are either.
I could even see expanding the market beyond vegetarians by presenting them as a supplement for conventional burgers and chicken-patty sandwiches as a topping to add more flavour.
That was always another problem with meatless products-- they didn't get a great anchor with the mass market (who wasn't looking for explicitly vegetarian) so they remained expensive, narrow-distribution specialty products. If the regular burger is $5.50 and the Beyond Meat is $7.50, it's an even harder sell to the mainstream consumer outside of buying one as a novelty once.
The US is primed for this. Buy the market, invest a lot, then invest less in the product. Hate to say, RFK may be on to, some things. Plain Heinz catsup in Canada makes the US versions (plural) just seem sort of gross.
If I went full vegetarian again, I'd stick with the classics - they taste so much better.
I’m not a vegetarian by any means but really enjoyed many of the vegetarian items inspired by things like burgers. I often found them a great vessel for hot sauce as a condiment v. ketchup on meat.
But the biggest gripe for me - it greatly shows how much meat and dairy farming is subsidised (at least where I live). When chicken meat is 4-5€/kg (i see ofen discounts on chicken breast/wings for 2-3€/kg) and grains (rice, buckwheat) are ~3€/kg it just doesn’t make sense to me. Similar with milk vs alternative milks.
Hence it doesn’t at all surprise me if you do some “lab grown” meat alternatives from plant proteins - you will have 5x more expensive product (if not more).
With all this technological advancements it seems bizarre that we as a humanity still spend so much earth resources on growing animals for slaughter. I know it will not disappear and I don't wish that, but the amount of problems it causes is insane. Diseases (swine flu and avian flu are never ending problems, mad cow disease is one of the scariest things), completely destroyed water sources from pollution, overuse of antibiotics (because of prevalent infections and unsanitary conditions), etc.
- protein to fat (which is roughly 1.4 in Beyond Meat (20g protein / 14g fat in 100g) versus 2.5-3.5 in beef (30±5g protein / 12.5±2.5g fat in 100g)) - protein to mass (20% vs ~30%) - micro-nutrients to mass (a very wide variety of minerals, vitamins, and other unknown nutrients present in beef) - carbohydrates (not present in substantial amounts in meat and around the same amounts in tofu/tempeh as in Beyond Meat; but I don't think it's as major a statistic as previous ratios)
I eat chiefly vegetarian, and refuse to see why Beyond Meat exists beyond 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.'
The industrial overhead of producing Beyond Meat and all the effort that went into creating it simply doesn't make sense to me compared to beans and plant-based protein friends like tempeh/tofu/seitan. Latter are an order of magnitude more scalable than both Beyond Meat and Regular Meat.
All the processing plants and factories built to make this ultra-processing possible, the logistics and supply chains set up to bring all the necessary additives and components together, the grandiose packaging and marketing efforts... I don't get it. It's not a product made for a real audience.
That's a noble goal in and of itself. Every step to reduce environmental impact and animal cruelty has value.
Beyond and Impossible were my "off-ramp" from eating meat every meal to exploring vegetarianism and veganism. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
As someone doing weightlifting, this is the primary reason I don't bother with vegetarian meats. They actually taste pretty good IMO, but they don't offer nutritional benefits commensurate with animal meat.
It's a shame, really. I'd gladly incorporate them if I could get a similar protein : calorie ratio.
So yeah, this is what you get. At the price sold, whether you are vegetarian, vegan, or anything else is largely irrelevant; you have to be rich first and foremost.
And if we are talking about the product "qualities", it does not make a lot of sense: as a meat eater I cannot fathom people who pretend it's anywhere near close to the real thing, it's much dryer, does not have the burger flavor and disintegrate much like vegetables do.
And the nutritional profile isn't very good as well, as you explain. If I have to eat a lot of fat and associated carbs with my protein, it might as well be cheaper beans/veggie stuff.
All that being said, I'm not a very big fan of the plant-based protein (like tofu) stuff either. It's rarely cheaper than meat, always has a chewy like texture (sometimes it feels like you are eating rubber) and can only taste what you prepare it with. I have a friend who worked at high-end restaurants who became vegetarian and prepared it many times for me, it has never been any good. It's also heavily processed and requires a lot of water/heat to make (it also requires a lot more energy/effort than meat to prepare afterwards) and lacks many other nutrients meat naturally has.
I doubt meat is cheaper only because of subsidies, to me it seems like nature is extremely efficient and we have a truly hard time competing with it.
Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.
I don't see anything in the Beyond Meat ingredients which is a scary chemical. It's just various plant proteins, starches, and oils that we've been eating for millennia already. Plus some fruit coloring, vitamins, and the like.
That's not to say it is automatically healthy or a useful product (e.g. one can certainly argue about too much "tropical oils"), but that also doesn't make it automatically dangerous either. That is called the naturalistic fallacy.
Like for example the other day I made a vegan version of my pasta and meat sauce recipe but instead of trying to use a meat alternative like beyond meat, I reached for some mushrooms and end up having my guests ask if I accidentally made the dish with ground beef because the texture and consistency was so similar.
It's not that beyond meat is bad but why reach for something that's had god knows what done to it versus: mushrooms, where the only "processing" is ripping them out of the ground and washing them.
Beyond burgers have no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. They’ve got significantly lower saturated fats. Studies have shown that swapping out regular burgers for Beyond burgers lowers your LDL cholesterol and TMAO.
I’m not going to pretend they’re as healthy as a burger made out of black beans and carrots. But if concerns about UPFs are your primary reason for avoiding them then you can relax; they’re not that bad.
Up thread, people are talking about using minced soy protein. I'm kind of surprised that itself is not ultra processed, given that bread flour is considered to be ultra processed.
>Everyone knows that greens are good for your health and red meat is not. But everyone would laugh if I were to propose that red foods are dangerous and green ones healthy. I could prove my thesis making use of a few additional rules, such as postulating that some shades of red, tomatoes and apples for instance, should not be counted as red.
>The Nova classification system, which sorts foods into four categories depending on the degree of processing they undergo, uses similar logic. There is no scientific justification for the assumption that the number of processing steps is of any relevance for the health properties of foods. Making “ultra-processed” popcorn or chips is exceedingly simple. Making “minimally processed” natural yogurt requires some 20 processes.
>Heating is the process that affects foods the most, but heating is afforded no attention in Nova. It does not neatly fit into the processed or unprocessed scheme. In some cases it is essential for public health, in others it may induce carcinogens. And in a blatant example of the arbitrariness of the Nova classification, putting a loaf of bread into a bag moves it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category.
>The flawed, but intuitively easy to grasp, label of ultra-processed food is a handy justification for blaming food-related health problems on profit-hungry food companies. And it enables politicians to divert funding from serious research to meaningless eye-catching interventions.
>Petr Dejmek
>Emeritus professor of food engineering
>Lund University
>Lund, Sweden
Being a vegetarian, after having suffered colon cancer twice, I now too eat only burger patties I've made myself (similar recipe to the one above), and also use only real mayo and sour cream, so as to avoid those emulsifiers.
Edit: Downvote, why? Because I am a vegetarian?
Burgers aren't processed, fried chicken isn't processed. And, you don't need to process food to make it "addictive". People who think you need chemicals and additives to make addictive food are just stupid, frankly.
Take whatever food, douse it in salt, deep fry it in fat, and boom: you have a 2,000 calorie meal that sets off every dopamine receptor in your brain. All natural. No processing needed.
The real harm isn't processed foods, it's hyper-palatable foods. Foods that are extremely delicious, addictive, and easy to overeat. Some are processed, some are not.
Take, for example, high-fiber tortillas. Those are ultra-processed, those aren't from God. But, 98% of Americans do not eat enough fiber. Fiber can lower your risk of obesity and heart disease. The high-fiber tortillas can be a great addition to your diet. They're not hyper-palatable - you're not gonna sit there and crave them like a drug and then eat 2,000 calories worth of high-fiber tortillas.
That alone is a good enough reason to avoid highly processed foods in many cases. It’s not always true, but it’s more often true than not.
This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"
In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary.
The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".
Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction…
When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
In many countries, it's a heavily subsidized industry. Even if you have VC funds, it's not the same as being backed by country subsidies.
To be clear, I'm not making a judgment, just saying that meat would probably be a lot more expensive.
Looking at my local grocer, Impossible Beef is currently cheaper per pound than several of the organic ground beef options. There is also consensus among American dietitians that vegan diets are suitable for all stages of life. Further, "ultra processed" does not have a common definition - could you share how Impossible Beef is so much different than TVP?
Even TFA talks about this onslaught of misinformation - "CEO Ethan Brown has alleged significant “misinformation and misdirection” about the health profile of plant-based meat, and Beyond Meat has gone on the offensive to refute claims that its products are too processed.".
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Organizational_Rese...
Sounds like processing to me
If you're being genuine and trying to point out that it's difficult to draw a clear line between "good" and "bad" processing - absolutely! Processes that have been used for a long time (decades, hundreds, or thousands of years) are generally well understood and safer. Newer processes and changes have risks. So, "can I do this in my kitchen" is a great heuristic for trying to walk a very fuzzy line.
If you're deliberately misunderstanding the intent to further an argument, get outta here with that BS :P
Best example of this is when people say they want to pay "only their fair share of taxes". That's just, not how taxes work...
Remove the targeted subsidies and "the entire population" will eat less meat and more peas. Subsidize the peas and not the meat and you’ll see vegans skyrocket.
Generations later it's easy to look back and say "of course that stuff was bad, I would have fought against it too".
If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
From what I understood why BM production was limited and expensive is that nothing beats nature. Cow meat manufacturing process was refined by nature for ten of thousands of years to be the most optimized possible.
Every food is less destructive than beef by a ridiculous margin.
And eating any food directly is less destructive than losing most of the calories to grow animal biomass. Beyond Meat is just mixing together plant products directly which is trivially better than growing animals.
Why do you wrap it? Couldn't you also form the burger patty without the cling film?
Also, rolling it into a ball and then wrapping before flattening gives a much better shape to the resulting patty
That’s a problem given that $1 billion in convertible bonds come due in March 2027. Beyond Meat has no way to repay that debt, and the credit markets know it: The bonds currently trade at about 17 cents on the dollar.
If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
> The company expects the figure to reach about $330 million in 2025, roughly 10% higher than it was six years earlier despite a huge increase in the number of products offered.
It’s not like they have any growth potential to speak of that would enable them to service that debt.
It’s a bit hard to see who their target market is or, rather, it’s a bit hard to see that the market segment they’re aiming for is big enough for them to grow at an appreciable rate. To me it reads like they just didn’t do their homework up-front - e.g., an in depth segmentation - in determining their addressable market.
Vegetarians and vegans I know want protein sources in their diets but they don’t necessarily want meat substitutes, so perhaps BM’s products aren’t that appealing to them.
Meat eaters possibly have low awareness of BM and, unless they’re particularly principled - and wealthy enough to absorb the additional cost - are unlikely to pay the same price, or more (at least here in the UK), for meat substitutes than they’d pay for actual meat.
Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.
If BM’s products were more affordable and better advertised they’d have a better chance at widespread adoption but it’s very hard to plot a route from where they are now to there. Also, this doesn’t solve for the portion of the market who aren’t looking for explicitly meaty meat substitutes.
As you say, it does appear hopeless.
(FWIW, I’ve eaten BM burgers on several occasions. They’re excellent but I’m not normally willing to pay the premium for them versus actual beef patties, or making our own.)
When Beyond Meat announced their IPO, I can recall thinking quite distinctly: "wait, this isn't the Impossible Burger. They aren't even making any kind of breakthrough in the 'convincing meat substitute' department in the first place. And this stuff is expensive. Who tf is this for?"
> Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.
It's true. I eat probably considerably less meat than I did many years ago. Which is to say, still in generous portions, but not every day (I still freely eat dairy). When I supplement with vegetable sources of protein, I'm just preparing legumes (and grains) normally, without even the slightest desire to make them "meat-like".
I've had "ordinary" vegetarian burgers before. I don't even evaluate them as a substitute, but as their own thing.
One thing worth noting here is that, contrary to the popular belief, Beyond Meat is not a high-margin business.
You can check out their latest financial result (2025 1Q) to confirm this:
First Quarter 2025 Financial Highlights
- Net revenues were $68.7 million, a decrease of 9.1% year-over-year.
- Gross profit was a loss of $1.1 million, or gross margin of -1.5%, compared to gross profit of $3.7 million, or gross margin of 4.9%, in the year-ago period.
Basically they are spending $95-101 to produce $100-worth of plant meat. Compared to traditional meat companies, Homel (SPAM) is operating at 20% gross margin and Pilgrim (chicken) is at 10%.
BM is barely profitable even before sales and administrative expenses.
Why is that hopeless? Maybe I'm too green or optimistic but that just requires long-term planning.
Also inflation will make it a bit easier.
One thing I find tough for them personally is that I like the Impossible burger a lot more. I find Beyond meat not tasting like meat, not enough. Since that's the case, I'd rather just have any mushroom/whatever veggie burger. I wonder how other consumers perceive this.
because you can’t take 20 years to pay off debt that is due in 2 years.
They don't have 20 years to pay it off. Debt is due in 2 years
That they lose 45 cents from every dollar of sales is the killer.
Was it always that bad? If so, how did the business get past the spreadsheet model phase? There’s no way the typical corp “re-org” fixes that.
It's worse than that - 10% profit on $300M sales is only $30M/year.
Vs. "risk-free" US Treasury bonds currently yield 4% to 5% - so parking $1B there would earn you $40M to $50M per year.
Nobody's insane enough to loan money to Beyond Meat at US Treasury rates. And even if someone was - Beyond would still fall deeper into debt every year, because they couldn't even keep up with the interest.
I have been eating plant based meat alternatives for four years now, and I am never going to go back to eating meat. Yes, these products may be ultra processed food, but I cannot justify the ecological consequences and the suffering brought upon the animals just so I can eat a piece of their muscle tissue.
Our lifestyle is not sustainable, we have to look for alternatives. And young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption.
I don't see this message in there. If you ask me the real message is that companies trying to sell overly processed, way too expensive, imitations of "something" will struggle. They're trying to sell a very expensive mechanical horse. Just give people a car.
Maybe it's a US thing where people are more emotionally attached to the concept of the burger. But I think these companies would be better off selling plant based stuff that doesn't need to be processed to the moon and back with the associated costs, just to imitate the real thing, and still fall short.
Plant based food has been around for millennia, focus on that. More people would eat plant based food if it was more accessible in terms of price and effort to prepare. Imitating a meat burger wastes resources and results in something most meat eaters won't actually find as a good alternative, beyond the novelty factor.
Again, missing the opportunity that vegetarian/vegan food can be healthier, not just removing of animal cruelty and death.
I love this analogy.
This is an extremely strong generalization that is obviously not true in many cases.
It is just too much to ask the public to buy worse tasting food at a higher price, all to feel morally better about yourself.
They’re not buying plant-based proteins. (The conscientious are already eating plants.)
Beyond Meat is broken as a mass-market brand. It should be restructured as a niche play.
> young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption
Statistically insignificant [1].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691922...
I don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand.
The whole dismissal doesn’t make sense to me. It’s marketed at well-off former meat eaters.
The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans just like they have for the last hundred plus years.
I have never understood the implicit premise here.
I can get a 4 lb. bag of split yellow peas for $6 CAD locally without even trying to look for a sale; most of my supply has been purchased at about $4. By weight, it's on par with raw ground beef for protein content, and 4 lb. of that would cost several times as much.
Beyond Meat's problem is that they're catering to a tiny, highly-specific niche: people not willing to eat meat but are willing to pay through the nose for hyper-processed fake meat. So their audience is:
1. Vegan or vegetarian 2. Fairly well-off 3. Willing to consume highly-processed foods. 4. Craving a beef burger
This is all sorts of problematic as a combination.
First off, people who have stopped eating red meat (even if they haven't gone vegetarian) tend to really not enjoy the smell of beef, so their craving for a beef burger is under question from the get-go. Second, many vegetarians/vegans made that choice for health reasons (rather than ethical reasons), so "highly processed foods" are a no-go. Once you've cut out those two groups, you only get to keep the wealthier people of the leftovers.
Honestly, as a meat eater who loves vegetarian food, I just don't understand the appeal of fake meat like this. Give me a chana masala or a dal dish instead, any day of the week.
A beyond burger might be more like meat than a patty made from beans or lentils, but it tastes worse and has a worse nutritional profile. Beyond chicken isn’t even all that similar to chicken and it’s a worse substitute than seitan for something like wings.
Or you could take the position that it's at least noninferior. But you'd have to show the work for how you got to the idea that it's inferior.
Neither do I, but it's a highly competitive market that competes with both the established industrial meat market, as well as people actually educating themselves on cooking without "meat". I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy, let's just swap one thing out for another, instead of find / cook something different entirely. I see it as a kind of middle-class virtue signaling, which wasn't helped by the fact the meat replacements are (or used to be, I haven't checked) more expensive than meat. Even though on paper they should be cheaper because growing vegetables should be a lot less resource intensive and more sustainable than the meat equivalent.
And even though I like tofu, it's 90% water and that's a terrible deal. A 500g pack of tofu doesn't go nearly as far as 500g of beef mince.
Meanwhile you can buy it in a UK Chinese supermarket for under £3.50 per kg.
Pretty harsh to expect people to throw away their entire food culture just to cut down on meat consumption.
There was a period of my life when I went dairy-free as part of investigating some health issues. At first I bought almond milk. It was clearly not an adequate replacement, and rather expensive, so I quickly ended up just dropping it entirely. I can't imagine a point to using these alternatives in coffee (or tea) — I'd sooner use an artificial whitener, or again just go without (although still with plenty of sugar, knowing me).
Of course vegans or vegetarians have more vegan or vegetarian friends.
If it helps you, I know hardly anyone who eats plant base meat.
Same thing with coffee. Just drink black coffee? Nope, let’s work out how to convert nut juice into something that froths using emulsifiers!
One thing I noticed after moving to the UK: alternative milk is normalized here. Like, it’s so common to avoid milk that if you order coffee without specifying, you will be asked what kind of milk you want.
PS: I'm a lazy vegetarian who will eat a real burger every few months. When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
This is a myth and needs to die. Olive oil is fine at high temperatures, even EVOO.
https://www.seriouseats.com/cooking-with-olive-oil-faq-safet...
Their sausage works well for that, no added oil needed.
Cheese I really doubt will get there any time soon. It's pretty doable to make milk-free cheese alternatives with eggs - at least in terms of taste - which is probably per gram a lot more sustainable than proper cheese, but there wouldn't be any market for it.
Have you tried nutritional yeast? I use it everywhere I’d put parm. The taste is a bit different but as much delicious.
I guess San Francisco also has much more oatmilk latte's than rural villages
(take “medium to large” with a grain of salt given that means population of 100k)
On the other hand, we were staying in larger cities, stopping in towns along major transit routes, and going to the "kind of coffee shops" where you would expect such a thing.
According to Good Food Institute (which is a plant-based food lobbying group), 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023 and 33% of UK households bought plant-based meat alternatives at least once during 2023.
https://gfieurope.org/blog/plant-based-meat-and-milk-are-now...
For a less biased source, a 2022 ipsos poll found that 48% of the UK uses alternative milk and 58% " use at least one plant-based meat alternative in their diet".
I think things dropped a bit since then due to cost of living crisis.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/almost-half-uk-adults-set-cut-in...
I also care about it being cheap in theory, even if it's more expensive in practice because the company hasn't scaled up. But really, as long as it's not ridiculously expensive, and isn't missing some nutrient or balance that would mess up my diet, I'd buy it for the environment.
4 oz raw/patty:
Impossible → 19 P / 14 F / 9 C, 240 kcal, 370 mg Na, 0 mg chol
Beyond → 20 P / 13 F / 7 C, 220 kcal, 260 mg Na, 0 mg chol
80/20 beef → 19 P / 23 F / 0 C, 287 kcal, 75 mg Na, ? chol (high)
Plants hit beef-level protein, ditch cholesterol, trade more sodium & a few carbs; beef still packs the fat.
Products like Beyond and Impossible seem to be designed with the unspoken assumption that meat is junk food that meat-eaters simply lack the self-control to stop eating. Maybe that does represent a common relationship with meat, but for me it's just off-putting when I see things like canola oil in place of a saturated fat like coconut oil so they can market it as "healthier". (But again, all else being equal, I'll still prefer non-UPF.)
That's why I'm continually surprised at how little attention Meati seems to get. It's been my go-to protein for a little while now. It doesn't have high saturated fat (or high fat in general) like meat, but that's easy to fix with a little butter. What it does have is high-quality complete protein with high micronutrition, low carbs, and minimal processing. It's a form of mycelium that's fairly similar to lean chicken meat. Not quite as nice as a fatty steak, but it does the job with a lower mortality rate.
UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
The problem is that UPFs come from manufacturers who are trying to get you to buy more of their product, by playing tricks with the brain's response to it.
There are food labs where people are having their brain scanned while they sip different soda formulations, tobacco companies buying food companies to apply their research methodologies, and people figuring out packaging noises and shapes in order to make your old/slow brain excited at the crap you're about to eat (the pringles can is hard to use on purpose, for example). This is all symptomatic of a global food industry that needs you to buy more food, so needs you to consume more food, regardless of nutritional impact.
I recommend reading Chris van Tulleken's book and watching (if you can) the documentaries he made on the subject.
Yes, the Brazilian paper that started all this said "UPF is harming the health of the nation", but the root cause was not UPF processes, it was food industry processes that often require them to produce UPF.
It isn't the UP that makes the F bad, it's that some profitable but bad F needs UP to be viable.
It is therefore perfectly possible for meat substitutes to be UPF and healthy, just as some other UPFs are healthy. In fact, arguably they need to be both to survive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_bean_curd#/media/Fil...
I haven't tried it as a blue cheese sub dressing but if I just taste it on my chop sticks I feel it's at least in the same general direction. I'm pretty confident I could blend it into a a dressing or put it on a burger as a blue-cheese substitute.
Unrelated to cheese but MyBacon is fantastic if you can get it near you.
I really like Field Roast Chao slices for things like burgers or sandwiches.
Damn shame about the corporate drama, so it's possible the formula could/might change but the products were outstanding for the problem they're trying to solve the last time I tried them
Why do you want to? Lactovegetarianism is far more precedented than veganism.
And sometimes it just hits you: this is bad for me, I haven't been wanting it for a good while, and I want it gone now. I've quit meat just like that, almost exactly 15 years ago, never looked back.
I've never liked Beyond or such, it was unlike anything I'd actually want to eat. But we should still empower people who want to quit, but can't do so easily.
But what they don't get is that the market has exploded with competition. Even grocery stores in places like Houston have gone from a couple shelves of vegan products to half-aisles or full-aisles of plant-based food.
Beyond Meat might die in spite of the success of the market it entered into or helped create.
It's a situation of "You know that thing you don't eat, don't like, and don't have cravings for anymore? We made something that tastes exactly like it. You're going to love it!"
I'm glad they existed when I first went vegetarian as they made the transition easier, but its a tough market when people will go off them in a couple years.
I'm not vegan nor vegetarian, but I definitely align with many of the reasons that one would choose to be so. There are environmental and animal welfare concerns with the meat industry that simply cannot be ignored.
With that in mind, I try _choose_ a non-meat-based option when it's feasible. I do my best to vote with my dollar. Beyond Meat and Impossible have made this option available significantly more often in the past couple years.
When I shop for meat at the grocery store to cook at home, I've effectively stopped buying "real" meat for my standard meals. Unless I'm cooking some special or something specific, I simply buy Beyond Meat/Impossible for my standard meals. The same applies when eating out -- if there's a meat alternative, I will go for it (even absorbing the $2-3 upcharge).*
This is not to say that I _only_ go for the meat-alternative-based non-meat dishes. I often go for a tofu or mushroom alternative too. I don't even think Beyond Meat/Impossible taste _like_ the meat they're trying to substitute -- they're just simply good, meat-y, protein-y, umami-y flavors that I simply can't get enough of.
The more options there are for people like me the better. My diet has been able to shift closer and closer to removing meat entirely, but it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing battle. I just want to eat _less_ meat, not _no_ meat.
* One thing that's frustrating to me as someone that's not _actually_ a vegetarian/vegan is that restaurants often make the assumption that if I'm choosing the meat-alternative, then I must be vegetarian or vegan. No, I still want the cheese or the dairy, or even the meat (e.g.: an Impossible Cheeseburger with real bacon is still delicious). I'm trying to reduce, not _eliminate_, meat from my diet.
Kind of wild how they're treating creators.
You're literally not supporting a company which, as you admit, made your life more pleasant. And might potentially do so for others.
I'm confused.
I'll still get them if there's literally no other vegetarian option on the menu, but that's rare.
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/impossible-foods-growth-...
People seem inclined to buy hybrids over full EVs which is a comparable situation.
In any case, I assume Beyond was relying on getting more market penetration past just vegetarians and vegans. There just aren't enough of us to get to the revenue they seem to be targeting. Personally, I'll be disappointed if they end up disappearing.
That is not everyone's experience with being vegetarian.
I would replace all animal products if they tasted like the real thing. I'm sorry but tofu is not cheese
I don't think most people think about the environmental implications of consuming meat even remotely
I'm a vegan who loves & misses the taste of meat. Without Beyond (and Impossible), it would have been way harder for me to have become vegan. I think black bean burgers are disgusting. When picking a restaraunt for a team dinner with non vegans, I specifically look for menus that offer Impossible or Beyond, and I avoid restaurants that offer homemade bean/pea/etc burgers.
Impossible Foods was always more impressive, both from a taste and scientific perspective. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars into cutting-edge food science, including a new plant-based heme production process. That's in contrast with much of their competition (like Morningstar, or countless other brands) who just slapped together some bean paste and spices and called it a day.
Impossible has better patties last I tried.
But Beyond Sausage is good (though expensive). And Beyond Steak chunks are great in tacos: just pop them in an air fryer. It's like $6.50/bag which is enough tacos for two people.
I've tried the thick cut filet and just like you're not going to mistake Impossible for actual burger, so too with the filet but it's a good texture and does help fill the longing for steak for me
I wonder if reducing the price (without selling at a loss) would increase sales enough to offset the lower revenue
The meat alternatives are a product by itself, and they have to justify their whole supply chain. That's tough.
There is WAY too much competition from regular meat, to bean/tofu/other vegetarian options that alternative meat just can't compete with on price.
From what I've seen, Vow (https://www.eatvow.com/) are the only company that has taken a different approach and gone ultra-high end with their "cultured meats". Rather than trying to re-create a simple burger, they've made meats that can't exist in the real world. Their Japanese Qual Foix Gras has been available in Singapore for a while now and is coming to Sydney this month (I believe).
This product is only sold at ultra-high end restaurants where people want the experience and are willing to pay for it.
Vow didn't need to scale manufacturing to huge levels and try to boil the ocean all at once. They have a step by step plan ala Tesla where they start with the ultra-small scale very expensive foods, then move slightly down market, and continue until they are able to make affordable mass-market cultured foods for everyone.
I agree that the level of process is questionable but, if done well, I don't think it lacks in flavor.
I’m a vegetarian and have been for about 30 years. None of the fake meat really appealed to me. I don’t factor anything that looks or tastes like meat into my diet. The same is true of other long term vegetarians that I know. I did try the products and they were “meh”.
It suspect it mostly appealed to meat eaters who felt a little guilty about it due to marketing and social pressure. But the expense and the general inferiority of their products was enough for it to wear off quickly. I don’t blame them for not bothering.
I will add I’m not a strict vegetarian - I’ll eat meat in places where it’s not socially understood what vegetarians are. Arguing with some guy in the middle of nowhere in Central Asia about the chunk of horse you just got served isn’t productive. Whatever you want to do is fine.
I always believed these things are like nicotine patches/chewables/etc.
Just because I went vegan doesn't mean I hate the taste of meat. I love the taste of meat. I sometimes treat myself to products that taste like meat.
There is no "final stage veganism" for me where I hold my fingers together in the "X" shape towards anything that reminds me of animal-based foods. And a lot of people seem to think this caricature is realistic based on the amount of times people think they're trolling me on Twitter by posting an image of a sizzling steak.
They taste nice, sure. But my supermarket now also has Mushroom burgers, lentil burgers, normal soya burgers... All for 1/3 of the price.
The premium product of vegatarian meat is meat, not more expensive veggie meat, it seems.
Personally I think this will become that premium spot: mosameat.com
But who knows, it's too early to tell.
I like beef, but the price probably makes it harder to compete with.
For ppl who care about nutrients, artificial meat seemingly gets more expensive and you also need licenses probably and what not.
Health wise it's in your own best interest to eat animals that fave been able to forage and graze in the sun. See Vitamin d and so on. Those ppl won't buy factory slurry.
Ginkgo Bioworks, IPO Date: Sept. 2021, EBITDA: -$325m Rivian, IPO Date: Nov. 2021, EBITDA: -$455m
Beyond Meat has seen less growth than their some of these examples, but my conclusion is still the same: it would have been better for them to find their footing as a private company, then use the IPO money to expand, rather than to pour the IPO money into R&D. Publicly trading stock causes more overhead and restricts the companies ability to pivot. Investors, founders, and employees are able to cash out before the real value has been created. The money generated does not guarantee longer term success or better long term investments as much as they thought it would.
I am still bullish on many of these companies but if I were to get in my time machine back to 2019, I would have avoided investing.
The health pitch on these products has always struck me as incredibly weird.
This is why I avoid Beyond Meat (and Impossible) products: too close for comfort.
Vegetables and grains have a great taste in themselves; they don't need to imitate meat to be tasty!
I'm currently trying to minimize my meat consumption where feasible based on some other factors, for several years in the past have been a stricter vegetarian as well. My motives for that are and were entirely based on cruelty and environmental concerns, so for me (and again, I suspect many other people who are vegetarian for their own combination of reasons) being close to the real thing isn't a downside at all.
I love vegetables and grains too. Tofu and lentils etc. are delicious but sometimes I just want a burger.
1. Would rather not cook, and eating Beyond Meat in a way that's financially meaningful for them as a company means me cooking
2. If I'm going to put in the effort to cook, I want the result to be something that I have outsized enjoyment for. If I get a middling burger for my trouble, I'm simply not going to care enough to do it.
The chicken nuggets and popcorn chicken sound the closest to something I can casually heat up, but neither of those are things that would replace something in my existing diet. They have beef and chicken and sausage and all sorts of other stuff, but they're just the meat. They replace an ingredient.
I buy Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls. I'd happily get ones that used Beyond Meat. I buy frozen noodle and pasta meals: same deal. Sandwiches. Chicken salad. Soup. I'm struggling to think of a single product that I can swap out for a Beyond Meat alternative.
I don't need every bit of meat that I consume to even be especially good. But if it's only just fine and it's not convenient, I'm just not going to get it. If it was cheaper, I might consider. Or if it was more nutritious. Or if it was more filling than regular meat (or less filling, even). Or if I felt strongly about the plant based products that I buy being a somewhat compelling meat facsimile. But there's just nothing that inspires me to pick up any of their products.
1. You really like meat but have reasons to avoid it.
2. You want to broaden the diversity of foods in your exclusively plant based diet.
And that's not me. And probably not very many other people, either.
Hell, I buy a lot of vegetarian meals that require a fair amount of preparation. But they're not meat substitutes, because if I'm optimizing for enjoyment, I'm buying something that tastes good on its own rather than mimicking something that tastes good.
Let's not forget how, in the late 2010s, VC money successfully pushed the idea that Beyond Meat et al didn't just taste as good as what it mimmicks, but that it acutally tastes better.
Then-Celebrety Chef David Chang even said "it melted my brain" (Impossbile Foods). Chain stores around the world fell over each other to first announce stocking their shelves with it, then told their customers they had to wait due to too much demand in existing markets, and ultimately that they won't be selling any actual meat at all in in a couple of years.
It was the full display of top-to-bottom class-war, elitist groupthink drooling over the power to pull a staple of our cuisine, culture and life quality from us – exactly because we like it. And then shove super processed improvements into the mouths of the dull plebs. And make a killing with eyewatering stock prices of up to 190 USD.
How did you decide when the rally was over?
To be fair: Price actually returned to that valuation a year later during Covid but by then I wasn't exposed and didn't bother to double down. Probably bad financial behaviour, since I was betting against "the market can be incorrect longer than you can remain solvent", but the visibility of it's products vis-a-vis the hype, and the unlikelyness to me that a patty of hyperprocessed legumes could ever achieve a moat large enough to sustain such a market cap, gave me confidence that with BYND sanity would return to markets rather sooner along side the first quaterly results.
Impossible also has a "Lite" version (which doesn't seem to exist near me) with 1g [4], although apparently it doesn't taste very good.
[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514744/nutrients
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514743/nutrients
[2] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-CA/products/the-beyond-burger/...
[3] https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189392...
[4] https://impossiblefoods.com/beef/plant-based-impossible-beef...
Sometimes the reason is as simple as: I just think meat is gross. No judgment on anyone else who eats it.
Just like the drug ads on TV, this is one of those situations where industry must be reigned in before the market discovers the truth.
A Beyond Burger has ~300 mg sodium. You could eat one every day and come in well under the recommended daily allowance of sodium as long as the rest of your diet is appropriate.
> the end of Beyond Meat stock doesn’t mean the end of the Beyond Meat business ... reorganized company can continue its work, and perhaps even go public again in the future
The stock price is simply unnaturally low because there's a decent chance it'll go through Chapter 11 soon.
According to GPT o4-mini, these are the restaurants that have stopped in the past few years: Habit Burger & Grill; McDonald’s; Carl’s Jr.; TGI Fridays; Del Taco; Denny’s; Dunkin’; Wendy’s.
I will say beyond meat tasted pretty good, and I would prefer to eat that than to go hungry at US restaurants. But it's very expensive and very annoying to cook at home (smoky). Not sure how healthy it is either - highly processed?
Also, people who are vegetarian/vegan know the health benefits. They're not going to pay more to get less healthy.
This is probably the cause of their problems. You need to be one of the big food brands to have leverage to get it on shelves in a prominent position and they are small.
We don't need this idiot fad of eating one of them while conving us that we are eating the other.
I don’t care about the nutrition/health of it at all.
Hope they can turn things around!
why not plant based lobster, crab, sea cucumber or sea urchin or sharks fin or something similar. that is unproductive? or impossible to farm? and perhaps even endangered? something that plant based processes are closer to competing on price.
Because they are living, somewhat sentient, animals that are capable of suffering. And using them as a food source requires that we kill them on a large scale.
And because industrial-scale meat production causes huge suffering to the animals caught-up in it, as well as serious environmental damage.
Plus, they apparently lost 45c in every $1 of sold product.
Quorn, allergy issue noted, continues. Growing edible fungi in tanks using classic bioreactor methods works, is economically sustainable. TVP likewise. 1960s tech which works at scale.
Me? I liked eating it a bit. I like eating flesh and organ meat, fowl and fish a lot. A lot beats a bit. I like inari sushi too. So it's not I dislike the veg alternatives.
"on an operating basis Beyond Meat lost 45 cents from every dollar of sales."
that is a culprit. Bad management. How else can your plant based product at comparable to meat prices be a loss instead of great profit. Even pure avocados are cheaper than meat. What is better and pricier than avocados do you put into your product? Then it should taste much better than avocados and meat. Yet there is no avocados, it is more like low quality cat/dog food:
"Key components include pea protein, rice protein, and lentil protein, alongside avocado oil, refined coconut oil, and canola oil. Other notable additions include methylcellulose, potato starch, and apple extract. "
That stuff at their prices should be super-profitable.
As Impossible expanded beyond their launch partners, they lost their control over the consumer experience. I think many restaurants now serve wretched Impossible Burgers because they just substitute a beef patty and don't try to accommodate the differences.
If you are savoring it as part of a taste test, it will never fool you; the first impression isn't the takeaway. If beef is not the focal point of the dish, as in their Impossible Mapo Tofu recipe (https://impossiblefoods.com/recipes/impossible-mapo-tofu) or a chili or something, it can slot in pretty well. They are nowhere near substitutes for ribeye steak or smoked brisket.
We're not at the point where high quality meat can be replaced, but that doesn't mean the product is worthless.
Given the amount of animal suffering and environmental destruction involved in beef, this great taste shouldn't be taken so lightly. Everyone should make some effort to reduce its consumption.
Cost: three onions, one tin of beans, some old bread, negligible spices. Yield: four delicious, fresh, very healthy burgers.
I am a lifelong vegetarian and the likes of beyond meat are just frankly disgusting to me. They're expensive, upf, have a horrid texture, and aren't aimed at me. But I guess that's the point -- their target market is "real men" who want to try being vegan for a while, not the likes of me. Yet I fear real men don't want to get the message and the demographic who are veggie or vegan have better, cheaper, nicer alternatives.
At this stage if they scaled back would they stand a chance to survive? Or do they owe too much money?