How Beyond Meat sank from a $14B plant-based protein powerhouse to a penny stock | Hacker News Reader

How Beyond Meat sank from a $14B plant-based protein powerhouse to a penny stock

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31 pointsbookofjoe26 comments

How come they are not able to make a profit? They have more and more competitors, ok, but surely the competitors are not rushing to also lose money, it seems that there is profit to be made. Why were they not able to optimise their costs over the years?

"the price gap between more-expensive meat alternatives and the real thing kept widening since 2022, to $4.20 per pound in 2024" That's quite surprising, what could be the reasons?

Are competitors doing well? It's really a bit of a weird product category - not really appealing to vegetarians or meat eaters. Who are they marketing it to?

People who eat meat but feel bad about it, apparently.

This is an extremely loud online group but apparently barely exists in real life.

So, like most extremely loud online groups then?

For an international perspective, I can tell you that their competitors are doing very well in my corner of Europe, but the competitions quality is 10x-100x that of Beyond.

People buy competitors products because they are simply legitimately fine tasting products on their own, no vegetarian vs meat marketing required.

Beyond just has shit product, even if they genuinely were the first to develop the technology.

I guess I just don't get it. Obviously there's a decent sized market for vegetarian convenience food, but the meat-based branding, and attempts to copy texture/flavor of meat products would seem a turn off for that market. Good flavors and mouth feel (not tofu!) are important, but why explicitly try to copy meat unless meat eaters are the market you are targeting?

It'd make more sense to me to have different products/brands/advertising for different market segments. For the meat eaters the marketing would be "healthy/cheap, tastes just like beef/chicken" (which seems to be what Beyond Meat are going for), and for the vegetarians "delicious flavors, plant based, high in protein" (not "fake beef").

> Good flavors and mouth feel (not tofu!) are important

as one of those vegetarians who isn't particularly compelled by anything intentionally imitating meat, this is always somewhat funny to me. tofu already has good flavor and mouthfeel if prepared well, and presumably the rest of this alleged market segment is as capable of preparing tofu adequately as i am personally. so even if beyond was to pivot to (also) being beyond tofu, i fail to see how that would capture appreciably more of the market.

i could be wrong, but it's always seemed to me that most of the apparent demand for something better than tofu is not in fact coming from inside the house.

May you share a recipe or two?

I love tofu too but mostly buy pre-prepared ones, open and bite it cold (yummy !) My current favorites are the "dried" Taifun like their Japanese Style.

https://www.taifun-tofu.de/en/products/tofu-filets-japanese-...

sorry, can't say i've ever cooked from a recipe, but i highly recommend caramelizing already-crispy tofu with soy sauce, sriracha, and ginger (+ fish sauce if you swing that way)

> I guess I just don't get it

Imagine you liked something, then realized that thing was bad and you didn't want to do it anymore. Then somebody offered you an alternative without the ethical problems.

I ate meat for like 30 years, then as I learned more about the realities of the meat industry in the US (suffering of animals, development of antibiotic resistant bacteria, pollution of air and water, exploitation and harm to workers, etc) I decided I couldn't buy meat anymore. I like having burgers and sausages and such, and Beyond meat gives me something that tastes good, is easy to cook, fits into a healthy diet.

>not really appealing to vegetarians or meat eaters

Why not? I'm a vegetarian/vegan for a long while now (I started during covid) and I enjoy fake meat burger or as protein in my meal once in a while. Same goes or my girlfriend. I assume most (ethical) vegetarians are in the same boat. I am a former meat eater, I enjoy the taste of meat.

FWIW vegan meat substitutes are popular and getting even more popular here (EU country). For example all burger places and many regular restaurants have something similar on the menu. I avoid beyond though, it's always the most expensive option, without quality to justify it.

Vegetarian and vegan menu options are extremely common here in the US too, but I'd say not so much these meat substitute products at fast food places. One of the big chains (Burger King? McDonalds?) had a Beyond burger when it first came out, but otherwise you need to avoid the big chains and may find a veggieburger on the menu, just called that - a veggie patty of some nature, not pretending to be meat. You can buy Quorn etc products in all the supermarkets.

They are not able to make a profit because vegetarians are in the category of what we call "conscious eaters". This category includes people who take their diet seriously, look at the ingredient labels, and try to avoid highly processed foods. Of course it's not only vegetarians, people on carnivore diets and other healthy diets are also conscious eaters, but what unites the entire segment is an aversion to highly processed factory foods, of which Beyond Meat is the poster-child.

So the real market for Beyond Meat would be "casual eaters" -- people who don't look at the label too much, but then this market is going to be sensitive to taste and price, which are Beyond Meat's weaknesses.

So basically problems with product-market fit.

Another issue could be that vegans or vegetarians, or meat-avoiders who want to treat themselves with fast food simply prefer other vendors.

They have zero moat.

And also, when taste is a weakness for a definition of "casual eaters", they have simply failed at their core value proposition.

And for the "conscious" eaters, I'd also imagine that people are not dumb and realize the anount of money they have put into marketing and habe to put into trying to pay out stakeholders.

On the European market at least, there are more popular alternatives and myself I only ever bought BM when it was on discount. It was not better than alternatives (Like Meat, Rügenwalder).

And I'm not even a vegetarian.

Its really only useful as a fast food, which is not healthy, and if you're gonna eat unhealthy why not just eat meat.

Shame, I only tried one once and it tasted quite nice, too expensive though. I guess I was in the minority.

https://archive.ph/w4Gn6

Beyond Meat might be the most ultra-processed “food” I’ve ever come across.

It's actually really simple to eat healthily: Cook yourself using real (non-processed) food. The kind of food that doesn't need a label.

I just never liked their products because none of them tasted very good. Impossible products are much more palatable imo, especially their burgers.

I tried it a few different times a few different places about 7 or 8 years ago, and it wasn’t bad when prepared by the right hands… but after that I never ate again.

At the end of the day, given a choice between meat and not meat, I’m never choosing not meat. On the other side, what vegetarians who are actually dedicated to the cause are going out and seeking something that’s just like meat? There’s a niche, sure, but it’s a niche.

I'm with you. I'm not eating it for philosophical reasons and it's an interesting exercise at best. In the end I'm going with actual meat because it's readily available, half the price and it tastes good.

honest question, do you not care about/take into account the negative externalities such as animal suffering and/or environmental impact?

No.

From the archive.pH link: > company’s current cash position will last four about six more quarters.

Is that the type of mistake an LLM makes?

No, that's the type of mistake a human makes.

LLMs write by picking which next word best correlates to a response from the prompt, so they tend to follow grammar extremely well but make logical mistakes.

Humans write by forming their thoughts into word sounds, then transcribing them, but a single pronunciation can have multiple spellings, depending on the context, but the context is somewhat abstracted by that point, so humans regularly write homophones or malapropisms of the appropriate word.

disgusto revoltient was and is money trying to sell waste to get more money useing hype nobody wants to eat bugs and slime but that does not stop the money from trying to force it down peoples throats. try harder?, it will become illegal to market this as meat, or meat alternative, etc, and will be forced to label as vegetable protien, of which there are thousands of varieties all ready.

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