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Comment by karahime | Hacker News Reader

Having lived in both the US and Europe, I have to imagine at least some of that comes down to cost. In Europe, the plant based alternatives (at least where I lived) were actually cheaper, and meaningfully so.

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Also, they taste better? I have been a vegetarian since 1999. Even in the small village I lived with my parents, the local supermarket had a meat replacement section. Later I moved to a larger city and the product selection at supermarkets is very large and nice. A few years ago, supermarkets also started carrying Beyond Meat products. We tried them a few times, but they taste absolutely horrible compared to local offerings that have been developed for decades now.

In my neck of the woods you can easily find plant-based alternatives, but I've found that the best ones are those that don't try too hard to mimic meat.

From a "macro" nutrition perspective they're also much, much better (more protein, less carbs) and don't usually contain a bunch of weird oils and other crap.

However, they're usually a bit more expensive than actual meat.

Interesting, in Britain it's completely the opposite. Alternative milk is way more expensive.

Same in Germany (~1€/l for milk, 2€/l for pretty much all milk replacements.

You can obviously buy more expensive milk to, which would give it price parity... But there are also more expensive replacement products. On average, the replacement products cost about 50-100% more.

The only way to save money via vegetarian meals is by making everything yourself and not the finished products from the supermarkets (at that point the relationship reverses - making meat meals about twice as expensive)

And I feel the urge to point out the obvious: the reason why the vegetarian replacement products get ever more space in supermarkets is precisely because they've got a gigantic profit margin, whereas the "traditional" milk/meat products have razor thin margins

> [profit margin]

Sure, but if nobody buys them, a 1000% profit margin won't get them very far. So I think that it's a good enough indicator that more people are buying these products.

Lidl has oat/soy milk for 99 cents, and the NoMilk clones for 1,50. In fact, Lidl had a respectable replacement line up now. If you only buy Alpro Milk then yeah, it's gonna be more expensive, but prices have come down tremendously, especially once the discounters hopped on that train.

Yesterday I bought some oat-based milk-like at Aldi for 90c/l (regular price). It's labeled "oat drink", so might not substitute milk. The (literal) "almost milk" product is listed online for 1,09€/l. They also had options based on other stuff for a similar price.

First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.

This is only true if you buy the chilled branded stuff, most of the big supermarkets sell generic soy, oat, almond, coconut for £1/litre

Here in Korea where soy milk has been a staple forever, its price has more than doubled over the last 5 years, now ~$1.4/L. Still cheaper than milk currently at ~$1.7/L, but it used to be twice as cheap as milk.

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