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Comment by wonderwonder | Hacker News Reader

Agree, as long as it's meat. Lab grown meat from cells is meat. The reason impossible never worked was becuase it wasn't meat. Very few people are going to trade meat for soy and vegetables

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Yeah impossible was targeting a weird small niche.

The intersection of 'vegan by all means', 'loves the taste of meat', 'does not care about ultra processed food', 'enough money to go for the expensive option'.

No wonder it did not work.

Even though I do eat meat I still enjoy black bean burger patties far more than Impossible because a black bean patty is tasty in its own way and not trying to replicate meat.

A black bean patty or similar is a tasty bit of food that works well in a burger form.

I like meat but not every meal I eat needs to have meat in it. Give me tasty (and cheaper) alternatives to meat and I’ll eat them in place of meat sometimes.

Where do you find those patties ? If you haven’t, recommend you to try tempeh as well, works very well in burgers but in everything else as well. Quite easy to find in big cities where I live but HN crowd often talk about those beans patties and I don’t see them in shops.

Truthfully, it’s very hard to find them these days, in my experience. Around 2005-2015 they seemed to be everywhere and were tasty options on their own merits. Every once in a while I’ll still find them in the grocery store but it’s hard.

These days all I can find in groceries stores is various “plant protein” meat-wannabes.

I do make tempeh from time to time, but the flavor just isn’t quite right for me. It’s good, but not my preferred option.

Fortunately a black bean burger is not hard to make at home.

IDK what "never worked" means here, the market cap for Impossible/Beyond alone is still over a billion dollars. You can still get an Impossible Whopper at any Burger King in the US.

There's plenty of issues with selling meat alternatives, I don't think you're the person to speak to them for some reason...

According to Google AI "The global beef industry has a total market value of approximately $465 billion to $526 billion"

Impossible/Beyond barely exists in comparison

That’s a weird comparaison between one or two brand and "an industry". Let’s compare two ranch’s with… the global legumes industry !

On the topic of replacing meat with fake meat, yeah it kind of does invite comparison, because they are essentially entirely competing industries at that point

That was not the issue pointed by GP. They noted that the comparison was between two companies, a whole industry.

>That’s a weird comparaison between one or two brand and "an industry".

In other words, Impossible and Beyond are not the only companies in meat replacement space. They are probably the largest, but comparing them to the whole industry makes no sense.

You're off by ~40%.

Their combined market cap seems to be around 600M.

Sorry to necro-post this, but, you're wrong.

Hit me up with some citations please, mine are below.

https://notice.co/c/impossiblefoods https://robinhood.com/us/en/stocks/BYND/

Yep. I mostly eat meat for the benefits to my athletic training. Plant-based protein is just inferior. I am also constantly aware that my eating meat is unethical, but prioritize my training over ethics at the moment. I would switch to decent tasting lab meat even at fairly high prices.

There are so many examples of pro-athletes* (not just, some dude "training") who are plant based.

Define "inferior" I guess? If the goal is "ingest as much usable protein as your body needs" plants can do it at levels beyond whatever you're going for. Is this a cost value analysis situation? Is it about taste/texture/enjoyment?

*Lazy source: https://www.greatveganathletes.com/

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