Don’t get me wrong, as a vegetarian, I think they taste nice. They are just too damn expensive and not particularly healthy which goes against why I am a vegetarian. In Europe we have so many alternatives that are insanely cheaper and, as an Indian, we have so many alternatives that haven’t been processed to within an inch of their life.
One thing I found to be a great homemade burger maker is simply getting some dried minced soy protein, mix with some eggs, breadcrumbs and seasoning before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty. Tastes great, holds it shape and has a burger like texture.
As someone who doesn't actually really like how Beyond Meat tastes, it's unfortunate that it's the only option sometimes. As someone who likes food variety and practically needs it, eliminating choice is the worst.
I have to concur about processing as well. Indian cuisine has so many unprocessed and nutritious meals that are vegetarian. So does Ethiopian cuisine. Mediterranean foods, Tex-mex, and lots of South American food can be made vegetarian. There are great ideas for burgers from here too. See https://www.shopdeepfoods.com/product/aloo-tikki-141-oz?pid=....
I've wanted to try some of the NYTimes vegetarian and vegan burger recipes when I get the chance. My point is, Beyond Meat seems to reduce the better-testing and less processed competition.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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...
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.
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.
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.
If I went full vegetarian again, I'd stick with the classics - they taste so much better.
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.
But the biggest gripe for me - it greatly shows how much meat and dairy farming is subsidised (at least where I live). When chicken meat is 4-5€/kg (i see ofen discounts on chicken breast/wings for 2-3€/kg) and grains (rice, buckwheat) are ~3€/kg it just doesn’t make sense to me. Similar with milk vs alternative milks.
Hence it doesn’t at all surprise me if you do some “lab grown” meat alternatives from plant proteins - you will have 5x more expensive product (if not more).
With all this technological advancements it seems bizarre that we as a humanity still spend so much earth resources on growing animals for slaughter. I know it will not disappear and I don't wish that, but the amount of problems it causes is insane. Diseases (swine flu and avian flu are never ending problems, mad cow disease is one of the scariest things), completely destroyed water sources from pollution, overuse of antibiotics (because of prevalent infections and unsanitary conditions), etc.
- protein to fat (which is roughly 1.4 in Beyond Meat (20g protein / 14g fat in 100g) versus 2.5-3.5 in beef (30±5g protein / 12.5±2.5g fat in 100g)) - protein to mass (20% vs ~30%) - micro-nutrients to mass (a very wide variety of minerals, vitamins, and other unknown nutrients present in beef) - carbohydrates (not present in substantial amounts in meat and around the same amounts in tofu/tempeh as in Beyond Meat; but I don't think it's as major a statistic as previous ratios)
I eat chiefly vegetarian, and refuse to see why Beyond Meat exists beyond 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.'
The industrial overhead of producing Beyond Meat and all the effort that went into creating it simply doesn't make sense to me compared to beans and plant-based protein friends like tempeh/tofu/seitan. Latter are an order of magnitude more scalable than both Beyond Meat and Regular Meat.
All the processing plants and factories built to make this ultra-processing possible, the logistics and supply chains set up to bring all the necessary additives and components together, the grandiose packaging and marketing efforts... I don't get it. It's not a product made for a real audience.
That's a noble goal in and of itself. Every step to reduce environmental impact and animal cruelty has value.
Beyond and Impossible were my "off-ramp" from eating meat every meal to exploring vegetarianism and veganism. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Apply huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer to grow corn, badly contaminating the Mississippi river and creating a dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico, feeding animals in CAFO where discarding of the manure is a problem and that's something different.
Real life systems are a little more complex than that as a cow might be grown up on scrub land and then fattened up at a CAFO for the last few months. Who knows what the long term fate of land that is cleared in the Amazon rain forest is.
Most land is scrub. You can like leaving more of it that way, but no one else will notice in percentage terms.
The type of food you get from animal agriculture is nowhere near the same thing as what you get from large scale plant agriculture.
On top of that, what you harvest from plant agriculture needs enormous amounts of processing and requires a whole lot of modern machinery and a very complex supply chain. And at the end of it the nutritional profile of your output is not at all the same, you can get closer by adding even more processing, that requires even more supply chain wizardry, more energy and more secondary input but suddenly you are not really more efficient than the animal farm; how shocking...
The idea that normal, healthy people are going to eat ultra processed vegetarian slop so they can pretend they are eating meat was never going to work.
They are a for-profit vegetarian company in a capitalist market, not Nestle's trying to sell African mothers on powdered formula.
As someone doing weightlifting, this is the primary reason I don't bother with vegetarian meats. They actually taste pretty good IMO, but they don't offer nutritional benefits commensurate with animal meat.
It's a shame, really. I'd gladly incorporate them if I could get a similar protein : calorie ratio.
From spending quite a lot of time with those people, my opinion is that they generally are pretty dishonest and will deny the truth to fit their ideology.
Yes, many athletes with large metabolic demands do eat mostly meat. Gross or not, it is functional. I eat for function. Choking down chicken breasts is not fun, but it works very well for results.
But yes, I could try some more references to see if there is something decent. I very much doubt so because the fundamentals are not aligned for this.
Luckily, I am relatively small and I do triathlon training, not weight training so I don't care as much for volume and mass. Yet the need is still there though and it is very noticeable when I fail at balancing the diet (it is extremely easy to indulge in the pleasurable carbs, that are systematically cheaper as well). I need at least 80g of protein per (training) day and it's more challenging than it may look.
So, I try to balance things with various sources but animal meat is by far the easiest to work with. For example, I like nuts a lot but they carry a shit ton of fat with their protein, so it becomes hard to get enough carbs in the caloric budget. Of course, at this rate meat becomes just another thing you have to eat and is not really special or a pleasure. But the thing is that it's much less terrible than a protein shake, there are also plenty of things that you get from animals' meat that I doubt are truly replaceable with today's limited knowledge. I already have to pay close attention to what I eat and cannot indulge too much in some things, I'm not really keen on making my food experience completely miserable; I wish I could because it would be much cheaper/easier this way.
But I think people presenting meat as a pleasure are ideologically motivated. I dont think killing/eating animals is something humans ever did for "pleasure", it was done out of necessity and not much else. I was never a big meat eater, particularly in my youth I was very addicted to sugar and would rather avoid eating meat as much as possible. It contributed to a small frame/build. Now that I'm older and training hard I eat meat not because I like it that much but because I have to.
If you ask me, I would be stoked if I could survive just on chips, candy, nuts, or even just flavored pasta. Those things I can eat unlimited amount with no problem at all. Turns out it's not really what's needed...
If the craving for bullshit food (chips, candy, pasta etc) doesn’t stop, that’s either a signal for nutritional deficiency of some kind (your body is still searching for something), OR a signal that you’re not hungry enough, to eat the healthy options. I spend regularly months-long periods eating the exact same ultra-basic food every day: steamed vegetables (not even salt) and home made biscuits from grains, nuts and seeds. I don’t struggle with cravings for other foods, because all my nutrients are in there and it satiates me. If I don’t feel like eating my food, then I wait until I’m hungry enough to want it. My diet is extreme, but it proves a point.
It's god's food: high prots, fibers, iron, vitamins, unsaturated fats. Low carbs and sodium. Super digestive.
Super versatile: from burgers to bolognese to barbecue to everything, even sweety for the courageous. My easy goto is a dip of whatever open sauce I already have and 1 min micro wave heating. A bit more time ? Fried on the pan with soy sauce, olive oil and some herbs afterwards.
And while we're on the subject, Mike Israetel from Renaissance Periodization gives soy protein high marks for body builders. Good macros, good price, and highest amino acid profile score after milk/meat/eggs. Having tofu on hand is definitely helpful during a bulk.
I can drink milk but feel the same as you do with beans. When it’s fermented cheese I’m totally fine.
Can you eat falafels, tofu or slip peas? If so the hull may be the cause. Also beans trigger gaz on many people because they don’t eat much insoluble fibers, but after a while of regular consumption it comes back to normal. Don’t hurt yourself through, take care.
I can eat a block of cheese a day and feel great. same with extremely lean chicken. When I try plants only without the problem foods, my energy and recover drops. I get depressed and I have huge protein cravings. If I try to squash that hunger with fats or carbs, I get fat. Just never been able to find a sustainable solution for my body
All I see are tiny overpriced plastic packets.
I don't care much about the macros of each individual meal (or any individual ingredient). When dinner comes around, I'm cooking whatever meal will let me hit my targets for the day. If I already got most my protein in, I'll happily eat something with "bad" protein/calorie ratio.
Granted, 99% of people don't track food intake, so yea, probably makes sense to optimize food nutrition for the average person eating an average meal looking for an average balance of macros on a per-meal basis.
I guess my point is there's a time and place for virtually all foods (including junk food... bodybuilders regularly snack on things like sour patch kids during workouts).
Critiquing beyond burgers for their macro breakdown doesn't make sense to me. But criticisms around the level of processing is 100% valid IMO. The last package I opened up quite literally smelled like dog food.
Edit: Also FWIW, I'm a vegetarian (although eat meat maybe once every 1-2 weeks, sometimes beef). Despite that, I'm easily able to get 200+ grams of protein a day. If I took protein powder out of my diet completely, I'd still be able to hit 150g/day at least without really trying.
For instance, eating lentils, which is one of the most proteinated vegetable, bring 18g of proteins per 100g, along with 40g of carbs. You also have to eat a comparable amount of cereal to get a full protein chain.
Given that amount of proteins you mention, this requires eating a very large volume of food (cereals and graminacae swell with water during cooking).
I always wondered how vegetarians could reach a highly proteinic diet as a result!
I wish I could tell you one food, but it’s not primarily from 1 source.
Egg whites, chickpea salad, Greek yogurt - lots of stuff has protein in it.
On the flip side, I’ve never understood how meat eaters can hit their protein goals without frequently exceeding 50-100g fat per day.
For vegans it's extremely hard, a lot of them that I know are proper skinny fat. Rarely overweight (or just a little bit) but with a terrible body composition.
They're selling a meat replacement. Replacing the meat in my diet with their product does not work for my goals without additional planning to compensate. Therefore it's not a good replacement for me. A criticism need not apply in all cases to be valid.
> I'd still be able to hit 150g/day at least without really trying.
What are your calorie goals? If you're in a surplus, maybe. But I'm currently in a deficit with 150g protein / 1600 calorie. I do not find that I can hit this goal "without really trying", _especially_ without protein powder.
And to clarify, it's 100% possible to hit my goals eating vegetarian/vegan. But with meat in my diet it's much easier because their high protein content gives me more flexibility with the rest of the diet. If I wanted to do it vegetarian, I wouldn't use beyond meat because it'd be even harder than other options.
Over winter/sprint I was targeting 1900-2100 (180g P). It would have been near impossible to do it without protein shakes.
I simply prefer not eating a lot of meat.
Next time I’ll say majority-vegetarian minority-carnivore?
So yeah, this is what you get. At the price sold, whether you are vegetarian, vegan, or anything else is largely irrelevant; you have to be rich first and foremost.
And if we are talking about the product "qualities", it does not make a lot of sense: as a meat eater I cannot fathom people who pretend it's anywhere near close to the real thing, it's much dryer, does not have the burger flavor and disintegrate much like vegetables do.
And the nutritional profile isn't very good as well, as you explain. If I have to eat a lot of fat and associated carbs with my protein, it might as well be cheaper beans/veggie stuff.
All that being said, I'm not a very big fan of the plant-based protein (like tofu) stuff either. It's rarely cheaper than meat, always has a chewy like texture (sometimes it feels like you are eating rubber) and can only taste what you prepare it with. I have a friend who worked at high-end restaurants who became vegetarian and prepared it many times for me, it has never been any good. It's also heavily processed and requires a lot of water/heat to make (it also requires a lot more energy/effort than meat to prepare afterwards) and lacks many other nutrients meat naturally has.
I doubt meat is cheaper only because of subsidies, to me it seems like nature is extremely efficient and we have a truly hard time competing with it.
Processing isn’t bad, as such. Turning beef from a steak into mince is processing and it is fine. But unnatural processing (as I call it) which requires labs and loads of chemicals which we wouldn’t otherwise consume is only logical to presume as unhealthy.
Where's the line drawn, is ground beef ultra processed or not? how about a chicken schnitzel? canned sardines? dark chocolate?
Which part of the ultra-processing is making the foot unhealthy, is it chemicals they add? the fact that they heat it up (but at home when you cook you also heat up stuff)? something else they do with it?
If you bake fries yourself from potatoes with olive oil, is it ultra processed?
They have a different definition of "no culinary use" than I do!
I am curious what items in the list differ for you. When's the last time you grabbed your isolated fructose and maltodextrin to season your steak?
The way I think of it is if I were to cook a chicken breast or bake a loaf of bread and then write down the ingredients, they'd be chicken, oil, salt, pepper; or flour, water, yeast, salt. Now go look at the ingredients of a chicken breast (raw, marinated, or cooked) and a loaf of bread in the grocery store and note the differences between the ingredient list. If the ingredient list for an item from the store includes things a household wouldn't have at home, like fructose or maltodextrin, that item would be considered ultra processed.
I'll note that I don't eat as healthy as I should, people should do what they want, and it's possible to still be unhealthy while avoiding ultra processed foods.
- think about what would happen if something is simply left undone
- can I do the same task with fewer steps
- if I relaxed the definition of success a little, does it get a lot easier?
- can I farm it out to a person or a service? (Like bill autopay, or Instacart)
I don't see anything in the Beyond Meat ingredients which is a scary chemical. It's just various plant proteins, starches, and oils that we've been eating for millennia already. Plus some fruit coloring, vitamins, and the like.
That's not to say it is automatically healthy or a useful product (e.g. one can certainly argue about too much "tropical oils"), but that also doesn't make it automatically dangerous either. That is called the naturalistic fallacy.
Like for example the other day I made a vegan version of my pasta and meat sauce recipe but instead of trying to use a meat alternative like beyond meat, I reached for some mushrooms and end up having my guests ask if I accidentally made the dish with ground beef because the texture and consistency was so similar.
It's not that beyond meat is bad but why reach for something that's had god knows what done to it versus: mushrooms, where the only "processing" is ripping them out of the ground and washing them.
Beyond burgers have no cholesterol, hormones, or antibiotics. They’ve got significantly lower saturated fats. Studies have shown that swapping out regular burgers for Beyond burgers lowers your LDL cholesterol and TMAO.
I’m not going to pretend they’re as healthy as a burger made out of black beans and carrots. But if concerns about UPFs are your primary reason for avoiding them then you can relax; they’re not that bad.
People don't really consume that much "processed meat" on the daily in the form of salami or w/e.
This is true for any food though. A different line of argument would be what if 95% of your protein came from whey and all other nutrients came from other sources. As long as you get the right balance of macronutrients and micronutrients i suspect you will be fine. Unfortunately studies on diet are very difficult to actually implement so we don't have the data to be certain.
Obviously most ultra processed food is low in nutrition, high in sugar, and high palateability so it makes sense that ultraprocessed foods are associated with bad health outcomes but I think it's a step too far to say that all ultra processed food is bad (it's probably a good rule of thumb for most people however).
What? I've had >100g of protein from whey protein shakes every day for months now. I don't know what you're trying to imply.
"According to international consensus, the daily reference intake of protein for the healthy adult population is 0.8 g/kg body weight. However, individuals who engage in physical activity may require more protein, ranging from 1.2 to 2 grams per kilogram of body weight. To fulfill these requirements, many athletes and active individuals opt for whey protein (WP) supplements to increase their protein intake. The appropriate amount of WP intake for individuals depends on their objectives, current level of physical activity, and body composition. Research suggests that a dosage of 20 to 25 g/day of WP provides the desired benefits, while amounts >40 g/day may lead to adverse effects on the body"[0]
People who eat a lot of protein die sooner than people who eat less, but that is probably because plentiful protein prevents the body from entering a state called "autophagy". Intentionally inducing autophagy for 5 days every other month (by using Valter Longo's protocol) while eating plenty of protein the rest of the time is probably better for most people than a consistently low-protein diet as long as one is avoiding red meat (provided the people can afford the protein which will be the case for almost everyone in the developed world).
I definitely feel a bit better, and have a much easier time building muscle.
If you run the numbers, you can actually eat a shocking amout of protein (300g+ / day) from lean meat while maintaining a calorie deficit.
And if you buy frozen chicken breasts from Costco, I think it’s actually cheaper than whey!
That said - you do you, whey has its place in many lifestyles.
And that’s assuming it contains (only) what the label says. Our caveman ancestors did not eat fillers.
How do you make that taste good though
Up thread, people are talking about using minced soy protein. I'm kind of surprised that itself is not ultra processed, given that bread flour is considered to be ultra processed.
>Everyone knows that greens are good for your health and red meat is not. But everyone would laugh if I were to propose that red foods are dangerous and green ones healthy. I could prove my thesis making use of a few additional rules, such as postulating that some shades of red, tomatoes and apples for instance, should not be counted as red.
>The Nova classification system, which sorts foods into four categories depending on the degree of processing they undergo, uses similar logic. There is no scientific justification for the assumption that the number of processing steps is of any relevance for the health properties of foods. Making “ultra-processed” popcorn or chips is exceedingly simple. Making “minimally processed” natural yogurt requires some 20 processes.
>Heating is the process that affects foods the most, but heating is afforded no attention in Nova. It does not neatly fit into the processed or unprocessed scheme. In some cases it is essential for public health, in others it may induce carcinogens. And in a blatant example of the arbitrariness of the Nova classification, putting a loaf of bread into a bag moves it from the minimally processed to the ultra-processed category.
>The flawed, but intuitively easy to grasp, label of ultra-processed food is a handy justification for blaming food-related health problems on profit-hungry food companies. And it enables politicians to divert funding from serious research to meaningless eye-catching interventions.
>Petr Dejmek
>Emeritus professor of food engineering
>Lund University
>Lund, Sweden
Being a vegetarian, after having suffered colon cancer twice, I now too eat only burger patties I've made myself (similar recipe to the one above), and also use only real mayo and sour cream, so as to avoid those emulsifiers.
Edit: Downvote, why? Because I am a vegetarian?
Burgers aren't processed, fried chicken isn't processed. And, you don't need to process food to make it "addictive". People who think you need chemicals and additives to make addictive food are just stupid, frankly.
Take whatever food, douse it in salt, deep fry it in fat, and boom: you have a 2,000 calorie meal that sets off every dopamine receptor in your brain. All natural. No processing needed.
The real harm isn't processed foods, it's hyper-palatable foods. Foods that are extremely delicious, addictive, and easy to overeat. Some are processed, some are not.
Take, for example, high-fiber tortillas. Those are ultra-processed, those aren't from God. But, 98% of Americans do not eat enough fiber. Fiber can lower your risk of obesity and heart disease. The high-fiber tortillas can be a great addition to your diet. They're not hyper-palatable - you're not gonna sit there and crave them like a drug and then eat 2,000 calories worth of high-fiber tortillas.
Sugar derivatives such as glucose-fructose syrup are well-known to cause various problems, among which the fat-liver disease that is skyrocketing in the rich world. https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/abundance-of-fru...
1. Ultra-processed foods contain a lot of hyper-palatable foods. You have to understand that UP foods is an absurdly broad category.
When you measure the harm of UP foods, you're not measure the harm of UP foods - you're measuring the harm of hyper-palatable foods, because naturally those are the foods people gravitate towards. Because they taste good and are easy to eat and overeat.
You also have to understand that UP foods are associated with poorer people, which get significantly worse medical care and just have overall worse lives. What you could be measuring is that poor people are more depressed - which, yeah duh.
The key problem here is that nutritional studies are almost always observation, NOT double-blind. Because following people for decades in a double-blind study where you control their diet is very, very, very hard and expensive.
If you just replaced all the UP food with burgers and fried chicken, would those people be better off? No. So you shouldn't be so confident you're measuring what you think you're measuring.
2. All sugar is bad, period. It's not HFCS that's causing liver disease, it's sugar in the absence of fiber. We know sugar causes liver disease.
If we want to decrease this, we must lean into Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. They are better than sugar, period. Straight up, Aspartame is healthier than any sugar, including table sugar you put in your morning coffee.
2. Second article says it's fructose specifically. And the ultra-processed form allows instant assimilation of it, far from the classic forms found in nature. They also allow to add much more of it. See: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-hig...
Which means they are looking at people who already don't eat UP foods and comparing them to people who do. But UP foods are more likely to be hyper-palatable.
So you're comparing foods that are likely to be hyper-palatable to those that aren't. That's what you're measuring.
If you conduct a double-blind study where you compare UP foods that are NOT hyper-palatable to non UP foods that are NOT hyper-palatable you won't find a difference. Such a study does not exist, because it's almost impossible to do.
People who are already health conscious will be healthier. You're not forcing anyone to eat healthier, so you're not measuring anything valuable.
2. HFCS is 60% fructose, sugar is 50% fructose. Does that 10% increase make a difference? Yes. But it's miniscule. If you replace all HFCS with sugar, you lower your fructose intake only a tiny bit.
Also appeal to nature is stupid. It's just dumb and nobody cares about that.
Besides the study doesn't studies obesity (it is a control), but depression, which isn't linked to food being palatable or not.
2. Sugar is itself a highly processed food. HFCS contains more fructose, which saturates faster the intestine's absorption capacity.
Sugar is mostly derived from beetroot and sugar cane. Of course you can get diabetes from fruits or sugar beets alone, that said it's much harder than from eating UP foods.
Since we started agriculture in the fertile crescent, we have been making stuff like beer and flour-based bread which are based on processing of various cereals.
Depending on the variable, the glycemic index isn't that good. And yes, it is pretty easy to overeat bread, as long as you have something decent to use with (it can be as simple as dipping it in olive oil).
Your opinion is just hysteria indeed, and it is just that. There is absolutely no logical explanation/evidence that all the problems linked to food come from "ultra-processing" instead of just good old regular abuse and mis-use.
In all the studies you talk about, if you were to correct for exercice/activity and lifestyle you would find a nothing burger (sometimes just living in a poorer neighborhood will give worse outcome, because of the water quality).
The problem is mostly abundance, which is very often something other species also have to deal with. If you leave a pony/donkey in an area with lots of young sugary grass and don't make him work for it, he will overeat until he is so fat that it becomes a problem for his health. But I guess the grass is too "ultra-processed" or something...
Why on earth is that a problem? People only eating fresh food is absolutely fine. Any processing on top should be met with skepticism.
Again, is eating burgers and fried chicken the solution? Those are not processed. So if you just tell people to not eat processed foods, you haven't helped them at all.
For many people, a healthy and achievable diet will include processed foods, such as high-fiber bread alternatives. A diet of only whole foods is not achievable for most people, so it's not good advice.
You don't even need to prepare food for it to be extremely delicious and easy to overeat: nuts are SO good that before you know it, you ate your full daily caloric requirements (for not very active people). At around 600kcal per 100g it is really easy.
The thing is that in nature you have to collect and get the nuts out of their shell, so it's a time and labor-intensive thing, it would be much harder to abuse it "naturally", but it still possible with time/patience (but I would venture that if it took that much effort to get it ready, you would rather avoid wasting it by overeating).
I don't like "ultra-processed" food that much but that's mostly because I find them too expensive for what they bring and the taste/texture is generally too caricatural and one dimensional, not exactly very interesting or satisfying. But people buy this because it's cheaper than the good stuff and they would rather not put the effort into preparing the good stuff.
That alone is a good enough reason to avoid highly processed foods in many cases. It’s not always true, but it’s more often true than not.
- Partially hydrogenated oils (most margarines in the US for a while) were pushed as a healthier alternative to butter, but turns out those are terrible for you due to trans fat. And the main difference between a trans vs cis fat is that cis fat have a kink in molecular chain and trans fats don't. Small change, but huge health difference
- The sugar industry paid food scientists in the 60s to downplay sugar's impact on heart disease and play up fat and cholesterol (Check out the "Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents" published at UCFS). This lead to food companies replacing health fats with sugars in much of their food over the last 60 years, resulting in much worse health outcomes based on bias, paid for research
- Apples and other fruit generally have a higher fructose to glucose ratio than high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). But, all of the sugar is surrounded by other nutrients and fiber, which make apples a healthy food choice and HFCS pretty bad for you.
One of the common patterns is that new processes introduced harms that were unknown at the time. Food companies have very little incentive to proactively look for harms that occur over a longer time horizon. And one thing has consistently been true: that closer a food is to how we've eaten it historically (chopped/crushed, cooked, boiled, fermented, and filtered), the less likely it is to have an unknown harm
You can always say something is fine "as part of a healthy diet."
Clearly the problem is when people eat too much of their diet from processed foods. Because they are high in calories, low in micronutrients, and designed to stimulate appetite so people overeat.
But to say that any processed food (like Beyond Burgers) is automatically bad because they are processed is simply and example of the naturalistic fallacy.
I don't know much about Beyond Meat's specific processes. I wanted to like their burger, but they smelled too much like dog food when coming and tasted worse than cheaper black bean burgers. Aside, from my personal preferences, they could be totally fine.
But, of someone is trying to go through their life eating relatively healthy without having to try to keep up on the latest research, less processing is the way to go. You'll cut out things that are perfectly fine (e.g. there's a small backpack against Xanthum gum that currently makes no sense to me), but you'll also avoid a lot of the cutting edge garbage that gets added and then recalled.
Whole fruits, veggies, nuts, grains, and meat is always a solid choice. I have trouble faulting people for using that as a heuristic
Edit: why disagree?
The problem with processed foods is not their individual construction per se, but how overall bad diets are easily enabled by them.
As far as studies go, I can't give you one that directly controls. But look at the "30 plants per week" topic, which suggests that overall diversity of fiber consumption is more correlated to health than any specific details of the diet.
So based on the studies around your 30 plants topics, even they make the point about choosing whole food or minimally processed sources.
The processing is done with a purpose.
> All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption
Source?
Processed food is, in a sense, pre digested. The simple fact that e.g. starches and sugars are unbound from the cells that contained them before any of it hits the mucous linings of your mouth and duodenum dramatically changes the food’s physiological effects. And it’s difficult to undo the gastric, gastrobiomic, metabolic, cellular and other effects of UPFs with an otherwise-healthy diet.
While true, this is also the case with all cooking, which makes it difficult to separate the various other things.
Don't get me wrong, the older I get the more negligence I see in corporations promoting their new things, so I'm now absolutely on-board with a cautious and conservative set of testing requirements for novel foods.
This is just to say that the boundary condition for such novelty isn't what most people think it is.
Like ultra processed american bread is not so good comparing with european wholegrain sourdough bread.
Bread, the example they used, is a particularly stark example where Americans are subjected to stuff that is rightly banned in most of the rest of the world.
When you grow a tomato, you use pesticides and herbicides. When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria.
Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
And didn't they teach you at school to soak all vegetables for a couple hours in water after buying them and before storing/using them? As for injected hormones, in my part of the world (Asia and Europe), we reject such produce if we're trying to eat healthy. My family literally grows pineapples in our backyard (which I bring to Europe) because industrial pineapples are injected with ripening stimulators.
> When you grow meat, you use drugs on the animals and then you also wash the meat in bleach to kill bacteria.
In most of the civilized world, we typically ensure humane conditions as much as possible even in industrial farming, so that chicken need not be drugged and bleach washed. Like basic hygiene and humanity such as animals not being made to live in their own shit.
> Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
Again, in most of the civilized world, we don't take issue with preserving minced garlic with citric acid. In fact, I regularly preserve a lot of veggies and sometimes even fruit this way. But I do have an issue when some industrial company decides to add sodium benzoate to their pickle to preserve it for months on end.
That wasn't the point they were making. They made a purely pedantic point about the meaning of the word 'chemicals' in this context.
> Why are these chemicals less harmful than, say, citric acid used in "processed" minced garlic to preserve it?
I never said they are.
Besides which, I pay a premium for organic for that very reason. Glyphosate residue is a serious problem. And then there's all the agricultural runoff, biosphere contamination, chemical interactions, etc.
Less 'chemicals' is generally better; safer and healthier. It's super weird that people take issue with this simple statement, whether for pedantic reasons or through false equivalancies.
Anyway, since “we all know”, why don’t you go check out the ingredients for beyond burgers, and report back which “chemicals” you think are so disastrous.
European bread as of today is highly processed btw.. it's pretty rare to find a bakery that actually bakes starting with the ingredients. Most just bake pre-processed and pre-made stuff coming from a huge factory.
Typical European/German bread is not terribly healthy to begin with.
For example, common ingredients like potassium bromate or ADA are straight up banned in the EU for health concerns.
Reading the ingredient list of American bread is plain shocking at times.
> In the US, this color was listed in 1939 as Ext. D&C Red No. 10 for use in externally applied drugs and cosmetics. It was delisted in 1963 because no party was interested in supporting the studies needed to establish safety. It was not used in food in the US.
> Azorubine has shown no evidence of mutagenic or carcinogenic properties and an acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0–4 mg/kg was established in 1983 by the WHO.
Wikipedia's article on E180 is a stub. Wikipedia's article on E105 says it's now banned in both the US and EU, but it doesn't say when it was banned: did the US ever approve it?
This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"
In that it informs absolutely nothing, is true, and sounds scary.
The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".
Unfortunately, patents being what they are, even if you linked me to the patent in question I expect it to be borderline incomprehensible, which is definitely the opposite of reassuring for anyone who cares about health.
> This is like saying "the main chemical in vaccines is just one atom from bleach!"
No, a better equivalent would be injecting a single PFAS atom in your drinking water. You don't know where it's going to end up, but you do know that it's going to cause some issues wherever it goes if accumulated in quantity.
> The main chemical in vaccines being water: H2O -> H2O2; and the processes humans have been using for millennia to alter protein structures being "cooking", "mixing it with alcohol or vinegar", or "adding lots of salt".
Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules.
https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox
Around the 1:30 mark.
Mixing up atoms and molecules is not a great start as comebacks go.
> Equating Beyond's process to cooking is such a disservice when they literally state they use heat and pressure to alter protein structures in globular plant molecules to transform them into stuff resembling fibrous animal molecules.
You're literally describing "cooking" with that sentence. Not metaphorically, that is literally what cooking does to the proteins in food.
For example, bread dough is at a minimum flour and water, which you then knead.
Water partially unfolds the gluten (collective name for a category of various protein) molecules, the mechanical force then encourage the gluten proteins into a different configuration, and it polymerises: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03088...
Then you heat it.
On a related note, when you say:
> Are you seriously comparing something used to trigger an infrequent immune response vs something that we take in on a daily basis to run our bodies? The latter being things that are transformed and transported to every part of the body.
A lot of proteins are both of those things at the same time. The gluten in your bread, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten_immunochemistry
Beyond Meat is apparently gluten-free, I picked bread because it's one of the least-processed foods you can get without it being raw.
Hydrogen peroxide in particular is a common hair bleach, hence "peroxide blonde"
Moving a chemical process out of a living being and into a lab can make it safer: you’re doing it without the bacteria and viruses omnipresent in the natural world, and you know exactly what is going into the reaction…
When you “cook” a piece of fish in salt and lime (a la Ceviche) you are also altering the protein structures).
When you're cooking a piece of fish, you're not changing its structure using heat and pressure so that globular plant cell structures are transformed into stuff resembling fibrous animal cell structures.
https://youtu.be/uTHCqjIspKU?si=pFqoQOuGbIPNnJox
Around the 1:30 mark.
You are if the fish ate any plants before they died (and you cooked with heat, I'm vegetarian so am unfamiliar with the other poster's a la Ceviche).
And even if the fish didn't eat any plants, you're still changing the protein structures — this is even part of the point of cooking, as amongst other things this does, changing the proteins inside the food is a process that kills any bacteria and other parasites.
Try it with dried cranberries and sunflower seeds for a great salad! (Don’t forget the salt, pepper, and garlic)
In many countries, it's a heavily subsidized industry. Even if you have VC funds, it's not the same as being backed by country subsidies.
To be clear, I'm not making a judgment, just saying that meat would probably be a lot more expensive.
Leveling is much needed, I agree on that. But in case of agriculture, we can only get there by adjusting the field on a government level, in the shape of the support the industry receives.
Whatever the case (I'm sure there are soy patties as well), I think as long as they are not pricing it cheaper than beef, it won't gain widespread adoption. Animals are cute and all but people need an incentive that they can directly feel.
Looking at my local grocer, Impossible Beef is currently cheaper per pound than several of the organic ground beef options. There is also consensus among American dietitians that vegan diets are suitable for all stages of life. Further, "ultra processed" does not have a common definition - could you share how Impossible Beef is so much different than TVP?
Even TFA talks about this onslaught of misinformation - "CEO Ethan Brown has alleged significant “misinformation and misdirection” about the health profile of plant-based meat, and Beyond Meat has gone on the offensive to refute claims that its products are too processed.".
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Organizational_Rese...
Sounds like processing to me
If you're being genuine and trying to point out that it's difficult to draw a clear line between "good" and "bad" processing - absolutely! Processes that have been used for a long time (decades, hundreds, or thousands of years) are generally well understood and safer. Newer processes and changes have risks. So, "can I do this in my kitchen" is a great heuristic for trying to walk a very fuzzy line.
If you're deliberately misunderstanding the intent to further an argument, get outta here with that BS :P
If I have a medical issue, the risks often outweigh the rewards. Chemo ain't good for you, but it's better than cancer. Artificial food coloring isn't necessary, and multiple dyes appear to contain carcinogenic contaminates. I can appreciate that chemo exists and avoid artificial dyes.
The US food industry also has historically introduced a lot of unhealthy and/or poisonous additives that were later banned or recalled. Formaldehyde was added to milk in the early 1900s because the industry didn't want to adopt pasteurization. Partially hydrogenated oil as margarine was advertised as a healthier butter alternative in the 50s and 60s.
There are cool things that come out of food labs (Xanthum gum is one of my favorites), but it seems weird to be condescending towards people for taking a reasonably cautious approach towards food - especially when there's historical and scientific evidence that backs the approach
Best example of this is when people say they want to pay "only their fair share of taxes". That's just, not how taxes work...
Remove the targeted subsidies and "the entire population" will eat less meat and more peas. Subsidize the peas and not the meat and you’ll see vegans skyrocket.
If it's too much you could do it for a smaller area ...
Generations later it's easy to look back and say "of course that stuff was bad, I would have fought against it too".
If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
By global average, under 15% of farm revenue is derived from government subsidies. USA is below that, at about 10%. Not sure if I'd call that massive, but that's semantics so it's a little hard to argue against. Does potato agriculture get massive subsidies?
> If all subsidies were removed - in order to avoid the influence of moralising politicians - people would eat a lot more potatoes, and a lot less beef.
The assumptions being that 1. potato farming get relatively much less subsidies as beef (and other meat) farming; 2. cost is such a factor in consumption that price change would cause "a lot" of difference. I don't think either are very safe, and as a general statement it doesn't follow that just reducing agricultural subsidies increases ratio of beef to potato (or meat to vegetable): EU subsidies are much higher than US, but USA eats far more beef per capita.
Subsidies go mostly to corn and soybeans. Think those are multipurpose but corn is used to feed livestock, of course. 10 or 15% may be a lot in a low-margin industry, and I don't know how it's split among crops.
No all subsidies are direct. For example, water costs too little in Arizona so foreign companies grow feed stock there to ship home.
If your farm is the recipient of a 15% subsidy, and your margin is only 10%, then the subsidy disappearing means you cannot continue producing the same stock going forward, as you'll be making a 5% loss.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
From what I understood why BM production was limited and expensive is that nothing beats nature. Cow meat manufacturing process was refined by nature for ten of thousands of years to be the most optimized possible.
Every food is less destructive than beef by a ridiculous margin.
And eating any food directly is less destructive than losing most of the calories to grow animal biomass. Beyond Meat is just mixing together plant products directly which is trivially better than growing animals.
Why do you wrap it? Couldn't you also form the burger patty without the cling film?
Also, rolling it into a ball and then wrapping before flattening gives a much better shape to the resulting patty
That’s a problem given that $1 billion in convertible bonds come due in March 2027. Beyond Meat has no way to repay that debt, and the credit markets know it: The bonds currently trade at about 17 cents on the dollar.
If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
> The company expects the figure to reach about $330 million in 2025, roughly 10% higher than it was six years earlier despite a huge increase in the number of products offered.
It’s not like they have any growth potential to speak of that would enable them to service that debt.
It’s a bit hard to see who their target market is or, rather, it’s a bit hard to see that the market segment they’re aiming for is big enough for them to grow at an appreciable rate. To me it reads like they just didn’t do their homework up-front - e.g., an in depth segmentation - in determining their addressable market.
Vegetarians and vegans I know want protein sources in their diets but they don’t necessarily want meat substitutes, so perhaps BM’s products aren’t that appealing to them.
Meat eaters possibly have low awareness of BM and, unless they’re particularly principled - and wealthy enough to absorb the additional cost - are unlikely to pay the same price, or more (at least here in the UK), for meat substitutes than they’d pay for actual meat.
Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.
If BM’s products were more affordable and better advertised they’d have a better chance at widespread adoption but it’s very hard to plot a route from where they are now to there. Also, this doesn’t solve for the portion of the market who aren’t looking for explicitly meaty meat substitutes.
As you say, it does appear hopeless.
(FWIW, I’ve eaten BM burgers on several occasions. They’re excellent but I’m not normally willing to pay the premium for them versus actual beef patties, or making our own.)
I like beyond meat products, the price is obviously a problem but they go on sale locally frequently enough to be a good substitute for us.
Something about them I HATE though is that they have two burger products that are extremely similar with one main difference: product A is kept frozen and requires thawing to cool properly and product B is kept frozen and cooks from frozen.
They are so similar that we accidentally get the wrong one all the time.
Once cooked, both products are indistinguishable from an eating perspective. Get product A the fuck outta here, please.
Humans have evolved to enjoy the taste/texture/smell of cooked meat
I am, along certain axes, a big fan of DIY forums like the r/DIYUK subreddit, and it pisses me off to no end that when anybody asks a serious question looking for serious help the top 5 comments will, as like as not, be bullshit, cheap, obvious, "funny" one-liners from people whose sense of humour has never evolved beyond the playground and that contain zero useful information. I've even considered volunteering as a mod on that particular sub just so I can delete all of these "humorous" comments so that the actual useful information makes it to the top of the page. So, yeah, I've come around to the HN point of view on humour.
But, nevertheless, like you, I found this funny.
Which, not to rain down on everyone's BBQ, but I personally find it ridiculous how we have been protecting people's feelings during flip-a-patty time more than the environment!
Sorry for the rant — not personally directed at you... but, I ... clearly feel strongly about the subject.
Full disclosure: not vegan nor vegetarian, and perhaps even a hypocrite for writing a (hopefully not too) holier-than-thou rant and eating unhealthy amounts of junk food occasionally.
Definitely agree that texture (and price) will play a big factor in weaning off people from authentic meat.
I hope we are able to surpass the challenges we're facing and live to see healthy food sources that are also within reach (physically and economically) for all people.
[0] Again, in the UK: I'm not familiar enough with their pricing in other markets to know if that's the case globally. IMO you'd have to be out of your mind to imagine a meaty tasting meat substitute would succeed in the US if it was more expensive than actual meat so, if the high price holds in the US, it should be no surprise that they're failing.
When Beyond Meat announced their IPO, I can recall thinking quite distinctly: "wait, this isn't the Impossible Burger. They aren't even making any kind of breakthrough in the 'convincing meat substitute' department in the first place. And this stuff is expensive. Who tf is this for?"
> Moreover, people I know who are trying to cut down on meat, like their veggie and vegan counterparts, mostly aren’t looking for meat substitutes in their meat-free meals either.
It's true. I eat probably considerably less meat than I did many years ago. Which is to say, still in generous portions, but not every day (I still freely eat dairy). When I supplement with vegetable sources of protein, I'm just preparing legumes (and grains) normally, without even the slightest desire to make them "meat-like".
I've had "ordinary" vegetarian burgers before. I don't even evaluate them as a substitute, but as their own thing.
One thing worth noting here is that, contrary to the popular belief, Beyond Meat is not a high-margin business.
You can check out their latest financial result (2025 1Q) to confirm this:
First Quarter 2025 Financial Highlights
- Net revenues were $68.7 million, a decrease of 9.1% year-over-year.
- Gross profit was a loss of $1.1 million, or gross margin of -1.5%, compared to gross profit of $3.7 million, or gross margin of 4.9%, in the year-ago period.
Basically they are spending $95-101 to produce $100-worth of plant meat. Compared to traditional meat companies, Homel (SPAM) is operating at 20% gross margin and Pilgrim (chicken) is at 10%.
BM is barely profitable even before sales and administrative expenses.
Why is that hopeless? Maybe I'm too green or optimistic but that just requires long-term planning.
Also inflation will make it a bit easier.
One thing I find tough for them personally is that I like the Impossible burger a lot more. I find Beyond meat not tasting like meat, not enough. Since that's the case, I'd rather just have any mushroom/whatever veggie burger. I wonder how other consumers perceive this.
because you can’t take 20 years to pay off debt that is due in 2 years.
They don't have 20 years to pay it off. Debt is due in 2 years
That they lose 45 cents from every dollar of sales is the killer.
Was it always that bad? If so, how did the business get past the spreadsheet model phase? There’s no way the typical corp “re-org” fixes that.
It's worse than that - 10% profit on $300M sales is only $30M/year.
Vs. "risk-free" US Treasury bonds currently yield 4% to 5% - so parking $1B there would earn you $40M to $50M per year.
Nobody's insane enough to loan money to Beyond Meat at US Treasury rates. And even if someone was - Beyond would still fall deeper into debt every year, because they couldn't even keep up with the interest.
I have been eating plant based meat alternatives for four years now, and I am never going to go back to eating meat. Yes, these products may be ultra processed food, but I cannot justify the ecological consequences and the suffering brought upon the animals just so I can eat a piece of their muscle tissue.
Our lifestyle is not sustainable, we have to look for alternatives. And young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption.
I don't see this message in there. If you ask me the real message is that companies trying to sell overly processed, way too expensive, imitations of "something" will struggle. They're trying to sell a very expensive mechanical horse. Just give people a car.
Maybe it's a US thing where people are more emotionally attached to the concept of the burger. But I think these companies would be better off selling plant based stuff that doesn't need to be processed to the moon and back with the associated costs, just to imitate the real thing, and still fall short.
Plant based food has been around for millennia, focus on that. More people would eat plant based food if it was more accessible in terms of price and effort to prepare. Imitating a meat burger wastes resources and results in something most meat eaters won't actually find as a good alternative, beyond the novelty factor.
Again, missing the opportunity that vegetarian/vegan food can be healthier, not just removing of animal cruelty and death.
I love this analogy.
This is an extremely strong generalization that is obviously not true in many cases.
It is just too much to ask the public to buy worse tasting food at a higher price, all to feel morally better about yourself.
The real issue is that it’s not stocked in many supermarkets in the USA. Whole foods for example doesn’t sell it.
Anecdotally I've heard similar thoughts "I can taste the chemicals" from someone that didn't realize they were eating a handmade veggie burger made from chickpeas.
Did you miss the part where lots of people preferred Impossible over real beef? This is just cope lol.
In the modern age, if you're poor, or just time poor, you can enjoy a tasty meal thanks to cheap food coming out of the modern food industry.
Why would you pay more for a less enjoyable experience when tasty food might be one of the only joys in an otherwise mundane or hard-up existence?
This is exactly why McDonalds is popular. It tastes relatively good, it's comforting, and it's cheap.
(Yes, this is a "nuggets are made from butt meat" joke on a typo.)
What does that even mean?
- I'd give 6/10 to the regular nugget's taste, and 6/10 to the beyond meat (sorry for typo in precedent post).
- BM and regular are both highly processed food. 22 ingredients for the regular (not even counting "spices extracts"): https://www.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/sites/ch/nfl/pdf/2023_...
Food quality is Europe is often better then the USA. USA is a heavy user of oil by-product to fertilize the planets, which have less nutritious value than non-oil based fertilizers.
Those in poverty that are on food assistance programs can only use the funds for raw goods. This means no pre-made pizza or McDonald.
* Personally, I hate the idea of going to a restaurant that benefits a Wall Street ticker and a millionaire CEO that pays their real hard-working employees a non-living wage.
They’re not buying plant-based proteins. (The conscientious are already eating plants.)
Beyond Meat is broken as a mass-market brand. It should be restructured as a niche play.
> young folks already grow up with a very critical attitude towards meat consumption
Statistically insignificant [1].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030691922...
I don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand.
The whole dismissal doesn’t make sense to me. It’s marketed at well-off former meat eaters.
The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans just like they have for the last hundred plus years.
It’s not. The premium options for plant-based foods are vast, fresh and more expensive than BM.
Beyond Meat isn’t serving premium. It’s premium to the lowest-grade ground beef. But that’s like saying a basic economy seat is premium to Greyhound. Technically true. But misleading relativism.
> The poor will live on rice and tofu or pinto beans
Globally? Sure. In developed countries, of course not.
I think that’s true here too. The point is it’s less expensive than both high-quality meat and very fresh vegetables bred and grown for taste versus weight.
Not even the poor immigrants from countries with those food cultures? Really?
I have never understood the implicit premise here.
I can get a 4 lb. bag of split yellow peas for $6 CAD locally without even trying to look for a sale; most of my supply has been purchased at about $4. By weight, it's on par with raw ground beef for protein content, and 4 lb. of that would cost several times as much.
Not as tasty as meat or garden-fresh vegetables.
Beyond Meat's problem is that they're catering to a tiny, highly-specific niche: people not willing to eat meat but are willing to pay through the nose for hyper-processed fake meat. So their audience is:
1. Vegan or vegetarian 2. Fairly well-off 3. Willing to consume highly-processed foods. 4. Craving a beef burger
This is all sorts of problematic as a combination.
First off, people who have stopped eating red meat (even if they haven't gone vegetarian) tend to really not enjoy the smell of beef, so their craving for a beef burger is under question from the get-go. Second, many vegetarians/vegans made that choice for health reasons (rather than ethical reasons), so "highly processed foods" are a no-go. Once you've cut out those two groups, you only get to keep the wealthier people of the leftovers.
Honestly, as a meat eater who loves vegetarian food, I just don't understand the appeal of fake meat like this. Give me a chana masala or a dal dish instead, any day of the week.
A beyond burger might be more like meat than a patty made from beans or lentils, but it tastes worse and has a worse nutritional profile. Beyond chicken isn’t even all that similar to chicken and it’s a worse substitute than seitan for something like wings.
Or you could take the position that it's at least noninferior. But you'd have to show the work for how you got to the idea that it's inferior.
Neither do I, but it's a highly competitive market that competes with both the established industrial meat market, as well as people actually educating themselves on cooking without "meat". I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy, let's just swap one thing out for another, instead of find / cook something different entirely. I see it as a kind of middle-class virtue signaling, which wasn't helped by the fact the meat replacements are (or used to be, I haven't checked) more expensive than meat. Even though on paper they should be cheaper because growing vegetables should be a lot less resource intensive and more sustainable than the meat equivalent.
And even though I like tofu, it's 90% water and that's a terrible deal. A 500g pack of tofu doesn't go nearly as far as 500g of beef mince.
Meanwhile you can buy it in a UK Chinese supermarket for under £3.50 per kg.
6.5£ for seems super cheap for beef and I’m sure tofu can be even cheaper when optimized. I find it here at the same price but it’s organic and grown in France. I wish it become more popular where you live so the prices become more competitive.
Pretty harsh to expect people to throw away their entire food culture just to cut down on meat consumption.
We buy plant-based meats because we grew up with meat, love the taste, and like to recreate our favorite dishes of the past.
Everyone loves to use the phrase virtue signaling but seems blind to when they do it, like how they would never do such a lazy thing like buy a plant-based meat; they're just too much of a culinary epicurean who crafts artisanal experiences in their home kitchen.
Yet I'm virtue signaling when I want to eat a burger every couple weeks unless I support the beef industry when I do it.
There was a period of my life when I went dairy-free as part of investigating some health issues. At first I bought almond milk. It was clearly not an adequate replacement, and rather expensive, so I quickly ended up just dropping it entirely. I can't imagine a point to using these alternatives in coffee (or tea) — I'd sooner use an artificial whitener, or again just go without (although still with plenty of sugar, knowing me).
Of course vegans or vegetarians have more vegan or vegetarian friends.
If it helps you, I know hardly anyone who eats plant base meat.
Same thing with coffee. Just drink black coffee? Nope, let’s work out how to convert nut juice into something that froths using emulsifiers!
But even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'. And 'growth' is most easily obtained by creating more consumers and more workers.
This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.
> even many of the climate catastrophists can't get away from the mentality of 'we still need growth at any cost'
Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.
Yeah, I can see why degrowth looks extreme to you. It must be rather frightening to lose your sense of control, comfort, and purpose in an unsustainable path.
To me personally? It’s fine. I work fewer hours than I did a decade ago, and generally travel and consume less than I did then too.
The wealthy can do with degrowth fine since degrowth implies deflation. The wealthy were doing fine before the agricultural revolution, too, for example.
Whether it will happen "naturally" because of climate catastrophes and war, or whether we will somehow understand this and do something before it's too late, I can 100% assure you that the world economy in 2100 will be smaller than today.
I can't assure you that the moon or the planet Mercury will exist in 2100, because 75 years is much too far ahead to forecast if we do or don't get e.g. von Neumann replicators by 2040 years and spend the next 60 using them to disassemble either or both into a Dyson swarm.
As you say, this is simple.
Growth doesn’t require increasing use of finite resources. A more-productive widget can (and generally is) less material intensive than its predecessor. The material and even energy intensity of GDP has been falling in the developed world for decades. Value is subjective; its substrate isn’t finite. A world of artists producing digital works could be incredibly materially unintensice, but still feature growth, as an absurd example.
And sure, there's room for now, but 3%-year-on-year growth halves the remaining gap to whichever limit is critical every 24 years. I'm not at all clear how close e.g. current computer tech is to the Landauer limit, but it is definitely still developing much faster than 3%-y.o.y.
For truly infinite growth, we'd have to find a way to make mass and dark energy in balanced quantities — that would allow us to have not only arbitrarily more actual stuff, but also make sure it doesn't then collapse into a black hole.
The biggest benefit is far more people can actually afford a life of property ownership in these cities. Look at what 250k buys you in these places vs the places that didn't experience a degrowth period. We are talking a complete 4 bedroom home outright vs a 10% down payment on a comparable home.
This might seem perverse why it could be beneficial to experience degrowth. But the answer to that is simple: no where actually accommodates growth sufficiently to keep costs from going out of control. So a degrowth period really means prices are no longer being significantly influenced by an ever incoming class of high income earners, but are more in line with the actual median incomes found in the area.
Do they work without subsidies from the growing parts of the country?
And what is even the subsidy? Interstate road works? Hardly matters to your daily life. The other subsidies are probably things like welfare benefits or medicaid, which might be a significant thing in your daily life if you qualify but if you don't are also irrelevant.
Lower property prices on the other hand lift all boats. Renters benefit. Homeowners benefit. Corporations benefit. At every income level in the market.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-federal-aid-r...
I really don't think subsidy is a factor in keeping things cheap in terms of cost of living. I think it is pretty solely due to the relationship between the size and rate of growth of the local high income demographic and housing inventory. For example it is even cheaper to live in Mexico due to this relationship, and there is probably a lot less subsidy going on there.
Sure does if you want trucked vegetables in the winter!
> think it is pretty solely due to the relationship between the size and rate of growth of the local high income demographic and housing inventory
The American housing market is broken. You are absolutely correct in that shrinking Rust Belt cities sidestep this problem by being in the rare position of housing surplus.
What I’m challenging is the notion that life in those cities would be as nice as it is if the entire country copied their population and economic contraction.
It's not nonsense. In overwhelming majority of cases GDP is tied to energy consumption. We have not yet learned how to decouple it.
With renewables, there is faint hope, but the transition is slower than we would ideally like. It also remains to be seen what % can be decoupled by pure solar and wind (hydro is already tapped out, mostly).
> Degrowth is an extremist dead end. If an environmental movement falls for it, it should be ignored.
So is growth at any cost.
That's entirely dependent what % of the planet we feel like tiling in PV; wind is ultimately solar powered, and there's more places we can usefully put PV than wind anyway.
Environmentalists will be Very Unhappy if we tile the Sahara with something as close to black as PV is; but that location alone (we have more deserts), using middling quality PV (20%, we have stuff more than twice that good), and the current global average capacity factor (13%, but it's a good latitude and could plausibly get 23%), would still be 11.8 times current global primary energy demand, which itself is 6-7 times current global electricity demand.
> hydro is already tapped out
As a source, yes; as storage, no. I only mention this because it's very easy to mix them up.
Yes. It is. We deeply regulate growth in every economy.
One thing I noticed after moving to the UK: alternative milk is normalized here. Like, it’s so common to avoid milk that if you order coffee without specifying, you will be asked what kind of milk you want.
PS: I'm a lazy vegetarian who will eat a real burger every few months. When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
This is a myth and needs to die. Olive oil is fine at high temperatures, even EVOO.
https://www.seriouseats.com/cooking-with-olive-oil-faq-safet...
All this in F of course
Their sausage works well for that, no added oil needed.
Cheese I really doubt will get there any time soon. It's pretty doable to make milk-free cheese alternatives with eggs - at least in terms of taste - which is probably per gram a lot more sustainable than proper cheese, but there wouldn't be any market for it.
Here is a video for vegan blue cheese[1]. The basic idea is nut milk and the culture for the blue cheese.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cxMAl_LiSUU&pp=ygUZR29ydW1ldCB...
Channel is “Gourmet Vegetarian Kitchen”
Make soy sauce marinated eggs ([1] Korean version, but there's Japanese as well). Boil them a bit more so the yolks get crumbly rather than runny. Crumble those yolks. The result tastes similar to grated/powdered parmesan or grana padano, and the texture isn't too far off. Which makes sense given the similarities between fermented soy sauce and cheese, in their glutamates and fatty acids (see e.g. isovaleric acid). It doesn't work as well with tofu, there might be a food chemist here who knows their stuff and can explain why, I assume it's something inherent to the animal proteins.
Proper Thai fish sauce (nam pla) also shares quite a bit of its taste profile with cheese. It's no coincidence that all of these are fermented foods.
[1] https://tiffycooks.com/korean-marinated-eggs-mayak-gyeran-ea...
Egg cheese recipes tend to have milk in them any way, so you would likely not avoid needing a milk substitute.
Have you tried nutritional yeast? I use it everywhere I’d put parm. The taste is a bit different but as much delicious.
I guess San Francisco also has much more oatmilk latte's than rural villages
(actually, you probably will oat milk on Canvey, it really is everywhere now)
So it isn't only London then?
(take “medium to large” with a grain of salt given that means population of 100k)
On the other hand, we were staying in larger cities, stopping in towns along major transit routes, and going to the "kind of coffee shops" where you would expect such a thing.
According to Good Food Institute (which is a plant-based food lobbying group), 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023 and 33% of UK households bought plant-based meat alternatives at least once during 2023.
https://gfieurope.org/blog/plant-based-meat-and-milk-are-now...
For a less biased source, a 2022 ipsos poll found that 48% of the UK uses alternative milk and 58% " use at least one plant-based meat alternative in their diet".
I think things dropped a bit since then due to cost of living crisis.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/almost-half-uk-adults-set-cut-in...
I'd estimate my household purchased ~200 litres of cow's milk in 2023. We also "purchased plant-based milk at least once" or twice when we had guests over that don't drink cow's milk.
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.
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
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.
First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.
I also care about it being cheap in theory, even if it's more expensive in practice because the company hasn't scaled up. But really, as long as it's not ridiculously expensive, and isn't missing some nutrient or balance that would mess up my diet, I'd buy it for the environment.
I honestly don't understand the vegetarian who constantly craves meat.
4 oz raw/patty:
Impossible → 19 P / 14 F / 9 C, 240 kcal, 370 mg Na, 0 mg chol
Beyond → 20 P / 13 F / 7 C, 220 kcal, 260 mg Na, 0 mg chol
80/20 beef → 19 P / 23 F / 0 C, 287 kcal, 75 mg Na, ? chol (high)
Plants hit beef-level protein, ditch cholesterol, trade more sodium & a few carbs; beef still packs the fat.
The McDonald’s quarter pounder patty (just the cooked patty, no bun and no toppings), which I believe is comparable, comes with 210mg of salt.
Since the DRV is 2000mg, the differences aren’t as significant as they appear.
True for many midwestern homes.
This also doesn't include what you need to do to cook a beyond/impossible burger. At least when I've made one, they absorb oil like a sponge. A burger will actually render out fat and doesn't need any oil in the pan. And no I'm not converting to teflon in this lifetime. You will find you want to season them heavily as well as the taste is pretty plain and heavy on the cooking oil used.
Products like Beyond and Impossible seem to be designed with the unspoken assumption that meat is junk food that meat-eaters simply lack the self-control to stop eating. Maybe that does represent a common relationship with meat, but for me it's just off-putting when I see things like canola oil in place of a saturated fat like coconut oil so they can market it as "healthier". (But again, all else being equal, I'll still prefer non-UPF.)
That's why I'm continually surprised at how little attention Meati seems to get. It's been my go-to protein for a little while now. It doesn't have high saturated fat (or high fat in general) like meat, but that's easy to fix with a little butter. What it does have is high-quality complete protein with high micronutrition, low carbs, and minimal processing. It's a form of mycelium that's fairly similar to lean chicken meat. Not quite as nice as a fatty steak, but it does the job with a lower mortality rate.
UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
The problem is that UPFs come from manufacturers who are trying to get you to buy more of their product, by playing tricks with the brain's response to it.
There are food labs where people are having their brain scanned while they sip different soda formulations, tobacco companies buying food companies to apply their research methodologies, and people figuring out packaging noises and shapes in order to make your old/slow brain excited at the crap you're about to eat (the pringles can is hard to use on purpose, for example). This is all symptomatic of a global food industry that needs you to buy more food, so needs you to consume more food, regardless of nutritional impact.
I recommend reading Chris van Tulleken's book and watching (if you can) the documentaries he made on the subject.
Yes, the Brazilian paper that started all this said "UPF is harming the health of the nation", but the root cause was not UPF processes, it was food industry processes that often require them to produce UPF.
It isn't the UP that makes the F bad, it's that some profitable but bad F needs UP to be viable.
It is therefore perfectly possible for meat substitutes to be UPF and healthy, just as some other UPFs are healthy. In fact, arguably they need to be both to survive.
The only thing in that list that I agree with is Yogurt. Sure, if you live in Europe where they've banned some of the more harmful ingredients and processes and you are taking about very limited quantities, maybe they are not so bad for you but that just puts in the same league as wine or beer.
I am current reading the book you mentioned which is why I made this comment.
But the less processed the better. And eating something else is probably better still.
I feel the UPF "debate" is just an appeal to nature, and calorie/nutrient density should be what we fixate on.
As much as the same can be said about plants.
It's why the debate rarely exits the semantic stage into the empirical stage of argument where we look at the human health outcome data on supposedly scary chemicals.
Meanwhile, we also have data on not-so-processed foods that are bad for us, and the level of processing did nothing to spare us the negative health impact.
(the shelf-stable varieties are often ultraprocessed though, and are less healthy than the non ultra-processed ones)
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermented_bean_curd#/media/Fil...
I haven't tried it as a blue cheese sub dressing but if I just taste it on my chop sticks I feel it's at least in the same general direction. I'm pretty confident I could blend it into a a dressing or put it on a burger as a blue-cheese substitute.
Unrelated to cheese but MyBacon is fantastic if you can get it near you.
I really like Field Roast Chao slices for things like burgers or sandwiches.
Damn shame about the corporate drama, so it's possible the formula could/might change but the products were outstanding for the problem they're trying to solve the last time I tried them
Why do you want to? Lactovegetarianism is far more precedented than veganism.
I'd really love to see some good alternatives, too. I don't really expect to give up all cheese anytime soon, but having a substitute for at least some of it would be helpful.
Such figures are usually "per gram of protein", in which case, sure. Thing is, it's very common for people to eat 200+ grams of pork in one meal, whereas e.g. grated cheese on a pasta dish is <10g. A big slice of cheese is 25-28g, and half the time it's significantly less than 100% actual cheese, with a good amount of filler. The only cheeses that one might eat 50g+ of in one sitting are extremely mild ones like mozzarella, and those are the easiest to replace.
Yeah, growing up in the US I ate more cheese than meat which is probably super common among US kids. I'd devour the whole bag of cheese sticks if I could. And you can look at restaurants like tex mex where the enchilada sits in a lake of cheese. Or go to Olive Garden and try to find someone who stopped at <10g of cheese when the waiter is asking you when you want him to stop shredding it over your pasta.
Anyways, I bet it can be hard to transition from this dairy-heavy lifestyle to a plant-based diet. I personally gave up the idea of a cheese substitute entirely except on vegan pizza where it's dominated by other ingredients. It's just not as good.
Since there is animal-free dairy milk (https://tryboredcow.com/) on the market I wonder when we'll see animal-free dairy cheese.
What you're saying could be true for the US, but in Europe people tend to put 1-2 slices of cheese on their bread, or grate it over something. Even if had as part of a platter with crackers, like with brie, it's nowhere near that much. For cacio e pepe, where the whole sauce is cheese, you only use maybe ~25g per person. This [1] is what 200g of pecorino romano looks like. Good luck eating all of that in one sitting - or don't, as you'll 100% regret it!
> I'd devour the whole bag of cheese sticks if I could.
If we take all cheese sticks that have been sold across the world in the last 24h, I'd be surprised if more than half their total weight was actual cheese.
[1] https://gastronomica.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Pec.-R...
Search for "vegan" ... sorry I didn't specify which location.
They have at least six locations, and not all of them do the vegan thing
And sometimes it just hits you: this is bad for me, I haven't been wanting it for a good while, and I want it gone now. I've quit meat just like that, almost exactly 15 years ago, never looked back.
I've never liked Beyond or such, it was unlike anything I'd actually want to eat. But we should still empower people who want to quit, but can't do so easily.
But what they don't get is that the market has exploded with competition. Even grocery stores in places like Houston have gone from a couple shelves of vegan products to half-aisles or full-aisles of plant-based food.
Beyond Meat might die in spite of the success of the market it entered into or helped create.
It's a situation of "You know that thing you don't eat, don't like, and don't have cravings for anymore? We made something that tastes exactly like it. You're going to love it!"
I'm glad they existed when I first went vegetarian as they made the transition easier, but its a tough market when people will go off them in a couple years.
I'm not vegan nor vegetarian, but I definitely align with many of the reasons that one would choose to be so. There are environmental and animal welfare concerns with the meat industry that simply cannot be ignored.
With that in mind, I try _choose_ a non-meat-based option when it's feasible. I do my best to vote with my dollar. Beyond Meat and Impossible have made this option available significantly more often in the past couple years.
When I shop for meat at the grocery store to cook at home, I've effectively stopped buying "real" meat for my standard meals. Unless I'm cooking some special or something specific, I simply buy Beyond Meat/Impossible for my standard meals. The same applies when eating out -- if there's a meat alternative, I will go for it (even absorbing the $2-3 upcharge).*
This is not to say that I _only_ go for the meat-alternative-based non-meat dishes. I often go for a tofu or mushroom alternative too. I don't even think Beyond Meat/Impossible taste _like_ the meat they're trying to substitute -- they're just simply good, meat-y, protein-y, umami-y flavors that I simply can't get enough of.
The more options there are for people like me the better. My diet has been able to shift closer and closer to removing meat entirely, but it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing battle. I just want to eat _less_ meat, not _no_ meat.
* One thing that's frustrating to me as someone that's not _actually_ a vegetarian/vegan is that restaurants often make the assumption that if I'm choosing the meat-alternative, then I must be vegetarian or vegan. No, I still want the cheese or the dairy, or even the meat (e.g.: an Impossible Cheeseburger with real bacon is still delicious). I'm trying to reduce, not _eliminate_, meat from my diet.
Kind of wild how they're treating creators.
You're literally not supporting a company which, as you admit, made your life more pleasant. And might potentially do so for others.
I'm confused.
I'll still get them if there's literally no other vegetarian option on the menu, but that's rare.
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/impossible-foods-growth-...
People seem inclined to buy hybrids over full EVs which is a comparable situation.
In any case, I assume Beyond was relying on getting more market penetration past just vegetarians and vegans. There just aren't enough of us to get to the revenue they seem to be targeting. Personally, I'll be disappointed if they end up disappearing.
That is not everyone's experience with being vegetarian.
I would replace all animal products if they tasted like the real thing. I'm sorry but tofu is not cheese
I don't think most people think about the environmental implications of consuming meat even remotely
I'm a vegan who loves & misses the taste of meat. Without Beyond (and Impossible), it would have been way harder for me to have become vegan. I think black bean burgers are disgusting. When picking a restaraunt for a team dinner with non vegans, I specifically look for menus that offer Impossible or Beyond, and I avoid restaurants that offer homemade bean/pea/etc burgers.
Impossible Foods was always more impressive, both from a taste and scientific perspective. They invested hundreds of millions of dollars into cutting-edge food science, including a new plant-based heme production process. That's in contrast with much of their competition (like Morningstar, or countless other brands) who just slapped together some bean paste and spices and called it a day.
Impossible has better patties last I tried.
But Beyond Sausage is good (though expensive). And Beyond Steak chunks are great in tacos: just pop them in an air fryer. It's like $6.50/bag which is enough tacos for two people.
I've tried the thick cut filet and just like you're not going to mistake Impossible for actual burger, so too with the filet but it's a good texture and does help fill the longing for steak for me
I wonder if reducing the price (without selling at a loss) would increase sales enough to offset the lower revenue
The meat alternatives are a product by itself, and they have to justify their whole supply chain. That's tough.
Different subspecies of plant and animal taste different. Farmers have learned to charge more for the ones that taste better.
You wouldn't say "there's no crappy tomatoes, only crappy preparation." Nah, some tomatoes are simply junk.
Some of the best food cultures in the world - Italy, France, Japanese - lean much more heavily on ingredient quality than on preparation. Fine dining as a whole revolves around ingredients.
There is WAY too much competition from regular meat, to bean/tofu/other vegetarian options that alternative meat just can't compete with on price.
From what I've seen, Vow (https://www.eatvow.com/) are the only company that has taken a different approach and gone ultra-high end with their "cultured meats". Rather than trying to re-create a simple burger, they've made meats that can't exist in the real world. Their Japanese Qual Foix Gras has been available in Singapore for a while now and is coming to Sydney this month (I believe).
This product is only sold at ultra-high end restaurants where people want the experience and are willing to pay for it.
Vow didn't need to scale manufacturing to huge levels and try to boil the ocean all at once. They have a step by step plan ala Tesla where they start with the ultra-small scale very expensive foods, then move slightly down market, and continue until they are able to make affordable mass-market cultured foods for everyone.
I agree that the level of process is questionable but, if done well, I don't think it lacks in flavor.
I’m a vegetarian and have been for about 30 years. None of the fake meat really appealed to me. I don’t factor anything that looks or tastes like meat into my diet. The same is true of other long term vegetarians that I know. I did try the products and they were “meh”.
It suspect it mostly appealed to meat eaters who felt a little guilty about it due to marketing and social pressure. But the expense and the general inferiority of their products was enough for it to wear off quickly. I don’t blame them for not bothering.
I will add I’m not a strict vegetarian - I’ll eat meat in places where it’s not socially understood what vegetarians are. Arguing with some guy in the middle of nowhere in Central Asia about the chunk of horse you just got served isn’t productive. Whatever you want to do is fine.
I always believed these things are like nicotine patches/chewables/etc.
Just because I went vegan doesn't mean I hate the taste of meat. I love the taste of meat. I sometimes treat myself to products that taste like meat.
There is no "final stage veganism" for me where I hold my fingers together in the "X" shape towards anything that reminds me of animal-based foods. And a lot of people seem to think this caricature is realistic based on the amount of times people think they're trolling me on Twitter by posting an image of a sizzling steak.
They taste nice, sure. But my supermarket now also has Mushroom burgers, lentil burgers, normal soya burgers... All for 1/3 of the price.
The premium product of vegatarian meat is meat, not more expensive veggie meat, it seems.
Personally I think this will become that premium spot: mosameat.com
But who knows, it's too early to tell.
I like beef, but the price probably makes it harder to compete with.
Ginkgo Bioworks, IPO Date: Sept. 2021, EBITDA: -$325m Rivian, IPO Date: Nov. 2021, EBITDA: -$455m
Beyond Meat has seen less growth than their some of these examples, but my conclusion is still the same: it would have been better for them to find their footing as a private company, then use the IPO money to expand, rather than to pour the IPO money into R&D. Publicly trading stock causes more overhead and restricts the companies ability to pivot. Investors, founders, and employees are able to cash out before the real value has been created. The money generated does not guarantee longer term success or better long term investments as much as they thought it would.
I am still bullish on many of these companies but if I were to get in my time machine back to 2019, I would have avoided investing.
For ppl who care about nutrients, artificial meat seemingly gets more expensive and you also need licenses probably and what not.
Health wise it's in your own best interest to eat animals that fave been able to forage and graze in the sun. See Vitamin d and so on. Those ppl won't buy factory slurry.
The health pitch on these products has always struck me as incredibly weird.
That "grass-fed beef" is like a healthy standout is an unsubstantiated myth.
Plausible. But both unproven and unlikely.
To the extent we’ve found anything out in nutrition, it’s that processing away from the kitchen is generally bad.
> That "grass-fed beef" is like a healthy standout is an unsubstantiated myth
Nope [1].
Not sure why you claim that, there definitely are studies in that direction. https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1291... for example, you can find many more. I'm not saying it's absolutely certain, but it's definitively not unlikely.
"Processing away from the kitchen" on the other hand is a very broad field, and the current thinking seems to be that it is too broad. There are absolutely negative health outcomes observed there, but it is likely about aspects. So at first one has to have certainty about which part of processing is bad, to then known if Beyond Meat is processed in an unhealthy way. That is not at all clear.
There is a big difference between a pizza and a chicken nugget is what I'm saying.
> > That "grass-fed beef" is like a healthy standout is an unsubstantiated myth
> Nope [1].
> [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8728510/
One study, negative and positive aspects in the composition, no tests and thus no conclusion about the overall health aspects of eating that. Your nope is frankly bullshit.
> negative and positive aspects in the composition, no tests and thus no conclusion about the overall health aspects
This is sort of like saying a study that shows a certain food contains lead that doesn’t also test for the effects of that specific way of ingesting lead is useless.
That said, what you ask for exists [1]. Though I suppose now we’ll need a double-blind controlled study.
This is why I avoid Beyond Meat (and Impossible) products: too close for comfort.
Vegetables and grains have a great taste in themselves; they don't need to imitate meat to be tasty!
I'm currently trying to minimize my meat consumption where feasible based on some other factors, for several years in the past have been a stricter vegetarian as well. My motives for that are and were entirely based on cruelty and environmental concerns, so for me (and again, I suspect many other people who are vegetarian for their own combination of reasons) being close to the real thing isn't a downside at all.
I love vegetables and grains too. Tofu and lentils etc. are delicious but sometimes I just want a burger.
1. Would rather not cook, and eating Beyond Meat in a way that's financially meaningful for them as a company means me cooking
2. If I'm going to put in the effort to cook, I want the result to be something that I have outsized enjoyment for. If I get a middling burger for my trouble, I'm simply not going to care enough to do it.
The chicken nuggets and popcorn chicken sound the closest to something I can casually heat up, but neither of those are things that would replace something in my existing diet. They have beef and chicken and sausage and all sorts of other stuff, but they're just the meat. They replace an ingredient.
I buy Jimmy Dean breakfast bowls. I'd happily get ones that used Beyond Meat. I buy frozen noodle and pasta meals: same deal. Sandwiches. Chicken salad. Soup. I'm struggling to think of a single product that I can swap out for a Beyond Meat alternative.
I don't need every bit of meat that I consume to even be especially good. But if it's only just fine and it's not convenient, I'm just not going to get it. If it was cheaper, I might consider. Or if it was more nutritious. Or if it was more filling than regular meat (or less filling, even). Or if I felt strongly about the plant based products that I buy being a somewhat compelling meat facsimile. But there's just nothing that inspires me to pick up any of their products.
1. You really like meat but have reasons to avoid it.
2. You want to broaden the diversity of foods in your exclusively plant based diet.
And that's not me. And probably not very many other people, either.
Hell, I buy a lot of vegetarian meals that require a fair amount of preparation. But they're not meat substitutes, because if I'm optimizing for enjoyment, I'm buying something that tastes good on its own rather than mimicking something that tastes good.
Let's not forget how, in the late 2010s, VC money successfully pushed the idea that Beyond Meat et al didn't just taste as good as what it mimmicks, but that it acutally tastes better.
Then-Celebrety Chef David Chang even said "it melted my brain" (Impossbile Foods). Chain stores around the world fell over each other to first announce stocking their shelves with it, then told their customers they had to wait due to too much demand in existing markets, and ultimately that they won't be selling any actual meat at all in in a couple of years.
It was the full display of top-to-bottom class-war, elitist groupthink drooling over the power to pull a staple of our cuisine, culture and life quality from us – exactly because we like it. And then shove super processed improvements into the mouths of the dull plebs. And make a killing with eyewatering stock prices of up to 190 USD.
How did you decide when the rally was over?
To be fair: Price actually returned to that valuation a year later during Covid but by then I wasn't exposed and didn't bother to double down. Probably bad financial behaviour, since I was betting against "the market can be incorrect longer than you can remain solvent", but the visibility of it's products vis-a-vis the hype, and the unlikelyness to me that a patty of hyperprocessed legumes could ever achieve a moat large enough to sustain such a market cap, gave me confidence that with BYND sanity would return to markets rather sooner along side the first quaterly results.
All those fake meat products were bound to fail because once you remove the ideology, they are just bad products. If at least they could be cheap, they could make sense as a substitute for something better but that's not even the case. If you have to eat bad tasting plant-based product, you might as well eat shitty tofu, at least it's somewhat cheaper (still ridiculously overpriced).
Impossible also has a "Lite" version (which doesn't seem to exist near me) with 1g [4], although apparently it doesn't taste very good.
[0] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514744/nutrients
[1] https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/food-details/2514743/nutrients
[2] https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-CA/products/the-beyond-burger/...
[3] https://faq.impossiblefoods.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600189392...
[4] https://impossiblefoods.com/beef/plant-based-impossible-beef...
Sometimes the reason is as simple as: I just think meat is gross. No judgment on anyone else who eats it.
Just like the drug ads on TV, this is one of those situations where industry must be reigned in before the market discovers the truth.
A Beyond Burger has ~300 mg sodium. You could eat one every day and come in well under the recommended daily allowance of sodium as long as the rest of your diet is appropriate.
> the end of Beyond Meat stock doesn’t mean the end of the Beyond Meat business ... reorganized company can continue its work, and perhaps even go public again in the future
The stock price is simply unnaturally low because there's a decent chance it'll go through Chapter 11 soon.
According to GPT o4-mini, these are the restaurants that have stopped in the past few years: Habit Burger & Grill; McDonald’s; Carl’s Jr.; TGI Fridays; Del Taco; Denny’s; Dunkin’; Wendy’s.
I will say beyond meat tasted pretty good, and I would prefer to eat that than to go hungry at US restaurants. But it's very expensive and very annoying to cook at home (smoky). Not sure how healthy it is either - highly processed?
Also, people who are vegetarian/vegan know the health benefits. They're not going to pay more to get less healthy.
This is probably the cause of their problems. You need to be one of the big food brands to have leverage to get it on shelves in a prominent position and they are small.
We don't need this idiot fad of eating one of them while conving us that we are eating the other.
I don’t care about the nutrition/health of it at all.
Hope they can turn things around!
why not plant based lobster, crab, sea cucumber or sea urchin or sharks fin or something similar. that is unproductive? or impossible to farm? and perhaps even endangered? something that plant based processes are closer to competing on price.
Because they are living, somewhat sentient, animals that are capable of suffering. And using them as a food source requires that we kill them on a large scale.
And because industrial-scale meat production causes huge suffering to the animals caught-up in it, as well as serious environmental damage.
Plus, they apparently lost 45c in every $1 of sold product.
Quorn, allergy issue noted, continues. Growing edible fungi in tanks using classic bioreactor methods works, is economically sustainable. TVP likewise. 1960s tech which works at scale.
Me? I liked eating it a bit. I like eating flesh and organ meat, fowl and fish a lot. A lot beats a bit. I like inari sushi too. So it's not I dislike the veg alternatives.
"on an operating basis Beyond Meat lost 45 cents from every dollar of sales."
that is a culprit. Bad management. How else can your plant based product at comparable to meat prices be a loss instead of great profit. Even pure avocados are cheaper than meat. What is better and pricier than avocados do you put into your product? Then it should taste much better than avocados and meat. Yet there is no avocados, it is more like low quality cat/dog food:
"Key components include pea protein, rice protein, and lentil protein, alongside avocado oil, refined coconut oil, and canola oil. Other notable additions include methylcellulose, potato starch, and apple extract. "
That stuff at their prices should be super-profitable.
As Impossible expanded beyond their launch partners, they lost their control over the consumer experience. I think many restaurants now serve wretched Impossible Burgers because they just substitute a beef patty and don't try to accommodate the differences.
If you are savoring it as part of a taste test, it will never fool you; the first impression isn't the takeaway. If beef is not the focal point of the dish, as in their Impossible Mapo Tofu recipe (https://impossiblefoods.com/recipes/impossible-mapo-tofu) or a chili or something, it can slot in pretty well. They are nowhere near substitutes for ribeye steak or smoked brisket.
We're not at the point where high quality meat can be replaced, but that doesn't mean the product is worthless.
Given the amount of animal suffering and environmental destruction involved in beef, this great taste shouldn't be taken so lightly. Everyone should make some effort to reduce its consumption.
Cost: three onions, one tin of beans, some old bread, negligible spices. Yield: four delicious, fresh, very healthy burgers.
I am a lifelong vegetarian and the likes of beyond meat are just frankly disgusting to me. They're expensive, upf, have a horrid texture, and aren't aimed at me. But I guess that's the point -- their target market is "real men" who want to try being vegan for a while, not the likes of me. Yet I fear real men don't want to get the message and the demographic who are veggie or vegan have better, cheaper, nicer alternatives.
At this stage if they scaled back would they stand a chance to survive? Or do they owe too much money?
