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Ive never understood the drive to make meat substitutes instead of celebrating vegetarian cuisine. I’m not a vegetarian, but if I eat some dish that is vegetarian, why wouldn’t I want to celebrate the vegetable itself made from instead of trying to make some fake meat that never quite hits the mark?

I think the idea was that Beyond Meat would be a "transitional" product that would provide an ever growing vegetarian/vegan population an option that was familiar to them. For example, if you do not care about celebrating vegetables, and just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat, then a beyond burger was supposed to be for you.

The biggest problem they have is the exhorbinant prices, which relegate it to niche status.

> just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat

Does that actually describe a commercially relevant segment of the population?

Intuitively, having known a lot of vegetarians, I'd expect the people whose primary concern is animal cruelty to be specifically turned off by realistic fake meat.

Well, that's why that thesis seems to have failed. There has not been a huge cultural sea change driving meat eaters towards the products.

Has it failed?

I've been vegetarian since January 2011. Back then at restaurants I had to eat side dishes or go hungry, and while I spent months searching I couldn't find any kind of imitation meat that didn't make me wanna puke. But with the modern imitation meat, be it Beyond Meat, Moving Mountains, Nestlé's Garden Gourmet or Rügenwalder, that's not the case anymore.

Food is also a part of the culture, and German culture traditionally contains a lot of meat. Which may be why here in Germany, these products are hugely successful. Rügenwalder (which is a conventional meat factory) is now selling more imitation meat products than actual meat. Recently they even phased out their meat currywurst because the vegan currywurst was selling so much better.

While often times you can just remove meat from the recipe (e.g., Bratkartoffeln uses Speck just as seasoning, so you can replace it with a bit of soy sauce and MSG) or replace it with a simple alternative (e.g., Falafel-Döner), that doesn't work all the time. Sometimes imitation meat (whether store-bought methylcellulose based, or DIY marinated soy or seitan) is the best option.

Even though I had disliked imitation meat for over a decade, nowadays even I'll enjoy veggie currywurst.

I don't think anyone disagrees that 1) vegan/vegetarianism is growing, 2) vegans/vegetarians are being served better than ever, 3) Beyond Meat and similar products will be part of the constellation of choices.

The rest of the thread is full of people saying why vegetarians will mostly keep eating regular vegetarian food and meat eaters will mostly keep eating regular meat. And indeed what we haven't seen is the mass one-for-one substitution by meat eaters that Beyond seems to have bet the firm on. That's not to say the whole category will fail.

I don't live in Germany so haven't had the pleasure of trying the brand you mentioned. It sounds like they found better PMF than Beyond with a more sustainable, incremental growth model. It also sounds like they might not be trying the same one-for-one raw ingredient strategy. Curryworst and packaged meals are already a value-added, prepared product with unique flavor profile that seems more amenable to substitution.

Tangentially, I think Beyond does deserve some credit for taking the first mover risk and bringing the topic into the limelight, where other brands can now benefit from the consumer awareness.

> It sounds like they found better PMF than Beyond with a more sustainable, incremental growth model.

Indeed, and I believe the flaw is that food products are a low-margin, zero-sum market with no potential for moats and limited growth opportunities.

It never made sense to start a typical VC funded startup in this space.

But it certainly makes sense for a food manufacturer to expand into the vegan market, increasing their market share and improving their margins.

> It also sounds like they might not be trying the same one-for-one raw ingredient strategy. Curryworst and packaged meals are already a value-added, prepared product with unique flavor profile that seems more amenable to substitution.

Ah, maybe that wasn't clear. I wasn't talking about prepared, pre-packaged meals. Just the same like for like replacement products beyond meat products.

e.g., 250g veggie minced meat: https://www.ruegenwalder.de/de/produkte/vegane-produkte/vega...

If you ask a bunch of meat eaters how they feel about animal cruelty, they'll get uncomfortable. Many will admit that they would like to avoid it but don't think it's practical. Look in particular at the kind who seek out organic, free range, and other (honestly, not very effective) ways to reduce suffering.

I suspect the market research turned up a large contingent of such. Perhaps not sufficient to justify a whole separate product line, but enough to hope that economies of scale would reduce price and create a virtuous cycle.

So I'm sure it seemed worth a shot. I'm sorry but not surprised that it didn't work.

Count me as a conflicted meat eater. It is terrible, but…delicious. I would be willing to switch to Impossible Foods (much better than Beyond Meat) for most of my hamburger consumption. Yet the price is such a premium that it is hard to justify. Yes, there are scaling problems, meat subsidies, etc which are hard challenges to overcome, but not surprising to me that most consumers are unwilling to switch to a novel product that is more expensive.

I'm a meat eater, but don't eat much red meat as I have mild arthritis and too much red meat causes me to get flare ups. I tried one of those burgers a few years ago (can't remember if it was Beyond or Impossible now) and didn't like it. The taste and texture had a bit of an uncanny valley vibe as they were sort of almost there, but not quite the same. The taste was a bit odd and then I was left with a pea protein after-taste for hours, which was not pleasant at all.

> honestly, not very effective

Care to elaborate?

Unfortunately, the legal definitions are the result of regulatory capture. Commercial organic farming has effectively nothing in common with JI Rodale's use when he coined it. (Well, popularized it.)

If you want to know how the animals are treated you need to visit the farm. Which you cannot do for commercial organic farms.

If you can, you could satisfy yourself that the animals are being treated in accordance with your conscience. Unfortunately it will cost at least twice as much. (And, aggravatingly, possibly emits more greenhouse gases.)

That's me. The first time I had a seitan dish at a chinese restaurant, I was certain they had given me chicken and asked them to check. The poor guy went and dug the empty tin out of the bin to show me.

Amusing. Seitan (which is - also amusingly IMO - just pure wheat gluten) is functionally identical in texture to reconstituted meat.

Chinese Buddhist cuisine is essentially the art of tasting exactly like meat without the meat.

Beyond Meat isn't designed to appeal to vegetarians. It's designed to appeal to people who would be vegetarians but aren't because they like meat.

That’s inaccurate (source: vegatarian)

I'm happy you enjoy the product, and hopefully you find it to be tasty and healthy. Certainly vegetarians can enjoy it! But the original goal of Beyond Meat was to move people away from eating animals.

Beyond Meats original mission statement starts: "By switching from animal to plant-based protein sources, Beyond Meat..."

I'm not vegetarian, but I have a family member that is

He never disliked the taste, on the opposite, he enjoyed, but didn't stand by the means neccessary to put it in his plate

So eventually he stopped eating it, but having always been a curious eater, he's always missed a taste similar to meat

As far as he's told me Burguers and some kinds of Chorizo are passable enough, but still, depends on presentation and it's been so long I don't know if his comparissons are still good

Every single vegetarian I have known admits they miss meat to some degree, especially bacon.

I spent a year vegan just to see if I could. What I really missed was cheese.

The miss the taste of meat thing anecdotally doesn’t happen to my vegetarian friends. It is like without exposure they actually lose the taste for meat. They will even get nauseous if they smell it cooked because their senses are so un primed for meat by that point.

Maybe being surrounded by other vegetarians changes this outcome?

Anecdotically, the few (~5) people around me that have gone long stints without meat, never went as far as getting nauseous, but all of them took special care when reintroducing it to their diets

I think the idea was actually that it would give people who like the taste/texture/experience of meat an option to skip meat, and lower the bar for people to eat a more plant based diet, not cater to vegetarians or vegans.

I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but I think eating meat is morally terrible, I just can't be bothered to go through all the trouble to not eat or use animal products when they're everywhere, cheap, and taste fantastic. But I enjoy Impossible's products immensely, and follow the artificial meat and dairy field closely, and have been long a champion of these efforts so as to make it easy to not cause any harm to animals rather than it being a royal pain in the ass.

Is it really that complicated? There are many countries, together over 2b people, with cultural hegemonies, where eating meat is the not-so-invisible part of the racial and national identity. It’s like asking why “we” do not celebrate non-Abrahamic religions.

As a vegetarian I actually prefer stuff like Beyond when eating out.

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.

Plenty of places will give you beans. Are beyond burgers really higher protein than a bean? Taco bell the whole menu can be subbed for black beans.

When you get "black bean burgers" they usually have a bunch of other stuff in them which reduces the protein. Combine with a bun and you get a lot of calories without much protein.

Beyond/impossible are not great, but they are better.

A few fast casual places like Chipotle do have pretty good bean options.

But your friendly neighborhood restaurant? Probably you can get a salad or a Portobello sandwich or some pasta or a black bean burger. In relation to those, the packaged burgers provide a reliable source of protein.

Yes, processed meat alternatives tend to be significantly higher protein per unit mass than beans. But other metrics like protein per calorie can be useful.

As a non vegetarian, I also hate how tofu gets treated as solely a vegetarian meat substitute in the US. I have no interest in having a poor substitution in a meat dish, but tofu itself is a core component of great foods that it belongs in...such as miso soup or mapo tofu.

Diced, fried in cubes, and served on a bed of cous-cous with soy sauce. Might not be traditional in any culture but it is cheap and fast to cook with minimal skill.

I think there are billions of people around the world, in every country on this planet celebrating vegetarian cuisine, and this is a company participating in a drive to provide an alternative. It's not a sinister drive to wipe out traditional vegetarian cuisine.

I’m a vegan. I don’t longer eat meat because I find industrial farming repugnant and environmentally problematic, not because I suddenly dislike the flavor. I grew up with meat on my plate and liked it. Now I use plant-based products to recreate the tastes and textures I remember while leaving behind the cruelty and waste. I also doubt many meat eaters are pausing to “celebrate the animal”. They’re just grabbing shrink-wrapped, shelf-stable convenience foods without much thought to how they got there.

I also don't see it as much better than Boca Burgers or Quorn or many other earlier generation products never mind tofu, tempeh, seitan all of which can be great on a bed of rice or as sandwich fillers.

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.

Quorn is awful. I pray to never be subjected to it again. Impossible is amazing in comparison.

Existing veggie burgers were sort of trapped by trying to present themselves as "close enough to beef". You will be lapped by a more accurate replacement. It makes me think of Boca Burgers-- I used to enjoy one occasionally as a carnivore, but I wonder if they're still around with Beyond Meat and Impossible on the chain menus.

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.

Aggressively marketing the imitation meat is what opened up market share for the products in the grocery marts and how they got on menus. Marketing up ramp for subpar products is too common.

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.

Can't agree enough. I just don't think that beyond meat is good. I'm a meat eater who grew up vegetarian and still enjoy eating vegetarian food. A well done black bean burger (my favorite blend is with quinoa) is delicious. I'd eat that over a regular burger plenty of times.

If I went full vegetarian again, I'd stick with the classics - they taste so much better.

I agree.

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.