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.
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.
The biggest problem they have is the exhorbinant prices, which relegate it to niche status.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Care to elaborate?
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.)
Beyond Meats original mission statement starts: "By switching from animal to plant-based protein sources, Beyond Meat..."
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
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'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.