The problem with Beyond Meat is that it is insanely expensive. I could buy a free range, organic and grass fed beef burger for the price of their ultra processed burger.
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.
The company's products in my and other people's views have caused a significant wane in vegetarian and vegan burger diversity. Gone are the chickpea and black bean burgers on menus—your only choice is Beyond Meat-esque burgers.
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.
I also don't see it as much better than Boca Burgers or Quorn or many other earlier generation products never mind tofu, tempeh, seitan all of which can be great on a bed of rice or as sandwich fillers.
Ecologist Howard Odum developed a system of environmental accounting based on tracing energy back to the sun
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.
Ive never understood the drive to make meat substitutes instead of celebrating vegetarian cuisine. I’m not a vegetarian, but if I eat some dish that is vegetarian, why wouldn’t I want to celebrate the vegetable itself made from instead of trying to make some fake meat that never quite hits the mark?
As a vegetarian I actually prefer stuff like Beyond when eating out.
The reason is simple: it has higher protein content than most other place based fast foods.
I'd love to live in a world with minimally processed high protein vegetarian restaurant food (like lots of legumes), but the only reliable place to get this that I know of is CAVA.
Products like Beyond are at least a step up from carb heavy pastas and grains or oily fried vegetables and starches which are the staples of most restaurant fare for vegetarians.
When you get "black bean burgers" they usually have a bunch of other stuff in them which reduces the protein. Combine with a bun and you get a lot of calories without much protein.
Beyond/impossible are not great, but they are better.
A few fast casual places like Chipotle do have pretty good bean options.
But your friendly neighborhood restaurant? Probably you can get a salad or a Portobello sandwich or some pasta or a black bean burger. In relation to those, the packaged burgers provide a reliable source of protein.
Yes, processed meat alternatives tend to be significantly higher protein per unit mass than beans. But other metrics like protein per calorie can be useful.
As a non vegetarian, I also hate how tofu gets treated as solely a vegetarian meat substitute in the US. I have no interest in having a poor substitution in a meat dish, but tofu itself is a core component of great foods that it belongs in...such as miso soup or mapo tofu.
Diced, fried in cubes, and served on a bed of cous-cous with soy sauce. Might not be traditional in any culture but it is cheap and fast to cook with minimal skill.
I think there are billions of people around the world, in every country on this planet celebrating vegetarian cuisine, and this is a company participating in a drive to provide an alternative. It's not a sinister drive to wipe out traditional vegetarian cuisine.
Is it really that complicated? There are many countries, together over 2b people, with cultural hegemonies, where eating meat is the not-so-invisible part of the racial and national identity. It’s like asking why “we” do not celebrate non-Abrahamic religions.
I think the idea was that Beyond Meat would be a "transitional" product that would provide an ever growing vegetarian/vegan population an option that was familiar to them. For example, if you do not care about celebrating vegetables, and just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat, then a beyond burger was supposed to be for you.
The biggest problem they have is the exhorbinant prices, which relegate it to niche status.
> just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat
Does that actually describe a commercially relevant segment of the population?
Intuitively, having known a lot of vegetarians, I'd expect the people whose primary concern is animal cruelty to be specifically turned off by realistic fake meat.
I'm not vegetarian, but I have a family member that is
He never disliked the taste, on the opposite, he enjoyed, but didn't stand by the means neccessary to put it in his plate
So eventually he stopped eating it, but having always been a curious eater, he's always missed a taste similar to meat
As far as he's told me Burguers and some kinds of Chorizo are passable enough, but still, depends on presentation and it's been so long I don't know if his comparissons are still good
If you ask a bunch of meat eaters how they feel about animal cruelty, they'll get uncomfortable. Many will admit that they would like to avoid it but don't think it's practical. Look in particular at the kind who seek out organic, free range, and other (honestly, not very effective) ways to reduce suffering.
I suspect the market research turned up a large contingent of such. Perhaps not sufficient to justify a whole separate product line, but enough to hope that economies of scale would reduce price and create a virtuous cycle.
So I'm sure it seemed worth a shot. I'm sorry but not surprised that it didn't work.
Count me as a conflicted meat eater. It is terrible, but…delicious. I would be willing to switch to Impossible Foods (much better than Beyond Meat) for most of my hamburger consumption. Yet the price is such a premium that it is hard to justify. Yes, there are scaling problems, meat subsidies, etc which are hard challenges to overcome, but not surprising to me that most consumers are unwilling to switch to a novel product that is more expensive.
I've been vegetarian since January 2011. Back then at restaurants I had to eat side dishes or go hungry, and while I spent months searching I couldn't find any kind of imitation meat that didn't make me wanna puke. But with the modern imitation meat, be it Beyond Meat, Moving Mountains, Nestlé's Garden Gourmet or Rügenwalder, that's not the case anymore.
Food is also a part of the culture, and German culture traditionally contains a lot of meat. Which may be why here in Germany, these products are hugely successful. Rügenwalder (which is a conventional meat factory) is now selling more imitation meat products than actual meat. Recently they even phased out their meat currywurst because the vegan currywurst was selling so much better.
While often times you can just remove meat from the recipe (e.g., Bratkartoffeln uses Speck just as seasoning, so you can replace it with a bit of soy sauce and MSG) or replace it with a simple alternative (e.g., Falafel-Döner), that doesn't work all the time. Sometimes imitation meat (whether store-bought methylcellulose based, or DIY marinated soy or seitan) is the best option.
Even though I had disliked imitation meat for over a decade, nowadays even I'll enjoy veggie currywurst.
I don't think anyone disagrees that 1) vegan/vegetarianism is growing, 2) vegans/vegetarians are being served better than ever, 3) Beyond Meat and similar products will be part of the constellation of choices.
The rest of the thread is full of people saying why vegetarians will mostly keep eating regular vegetarian food and meat eaters will mostly keep eating regular meat. And indeed what we haven't seen is the mass one-for-one substitution by meat eaters that Beyond seems to have bet the firm on. That's not to say the whole category will fail.
I don't live in Germany so haven't had the pleasure of trying the brand you mentioned. It sounds like they found better PMF than Beyond with a more sustainable, incremental growth model. It also sounds like they might not be trying the same one-for-one raw ingredient strategy. Curryworst and packaged meals are already a value-added, prepared product with unique flavor profile that seems more amenable to substitution.
Tangentially, I think Beyond does deserve some credit for taking the first mover risk and bringing the topic into the limelight, where other brands can now benefit from the consumer awareness.
That's me. The first time I had a seitan dish at a chinese restaurant, I was certain they had given me chicken and asked them to check. The poor guy went and dug the empty tin out of the bin to show me.
The miss the taste of meat thing anecdotally doesn’t happen to my vegetarian friends. It is like without exposure they actually lose the taste for meat. They will even get nauseous if they smell it cooked because their senses are so un primed for meat by that point.
Maybe being surrounded by other vegetarians changes this outcome?
Anecdotically, the few (~5) people around me that have gone long stints without meat, never went as far as getting nauseous, but all of them took special care when reintroducing it to their diets
Aggressively marketing the imitation meat is what opened up market share for the products in the grocery marts and how they got on menus. Marketing up ramp for subpar products is too common.
The US is primed for this. Buy the market, invest a lot, then invest less in the product. Hate to say, RFK may be on to, some things. Plain Heinz catsup in Canada makes the US versions (plural) just seem sort of gross.
Can't agree enough. I just don't think that beyond meat is good. I'm a meat eater who grew up vegetarian and still enjoy eating vegetarian food. A well done black bean burger (my favorite blend is with quinoa) is delicious. I'd eat that over a regular burger plenty of times.
If I went full vegetarian again, I'd stick with the classics - they taste so much better.
I’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.
Besides ultra-processed foods 'hysteria,' basic ratios I consider here are:
- 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.
It can. In permaculture models where you are not supplying a lot of inputs and able to cycle 100% of the manure back on grass it's great. In 20 years of running a horse farm the quality of our pasture and hay has been steadily getting better because we've been building soil.
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.
Indian here. We can eat vegetarian without this processed crap. Happy to see this die. We had equivalent companies here in India too. And they also are struggling. Happy to see this being rejected by masses
If you're going to eat vegetarian, eat vegetarian. There are lots of foods out there.
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.
Well, they do have $330M in revenue and the product is all over the place, so I'm not sure your hypothesis is correct. Many people simply don't share your view "if you're going to eat vegetarian, eat vegetarian". I think the biggest problem is that they have not been able to get cost under control.
Burgers were never considered a "health" item so replacement with slop qua occasional treat is not q crazy concept. As another user has whined about, burger restaurants almost always offer some variant of it, and grocery chains carry it. Beyond Meat has competition now, cheaper too
Vegetables as a meat substitute were. I don't think it's wise to pretend meat unto itself is not appealing to many humans because it's different from vegetables, grains, and fruits.
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.
Did you try Tempeh? 20gr of protein / 150cal. It looks like a steak.
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.
The parent said "vegetarian meats" so I hope we can assume that's not meant to include tempeh and tofu (but rather things like TVP or mycoprotein products).
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 dunno. I track macros religiously with daily protein/fat/carb targets for weight lifting.
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.
Out of curiosity, how do you get 150g/day of full proteins?
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'm not personally a vegetarian though I cook for vegetarians quite often and my reason for not using it more philosophical: if you're going to cook vegetarian, stop looking at what you can't use and start looking at what you can use.
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.
The bulk of the harm from ultra-processed foods was specifically from meats, with smaller contributions coming from sugary drinks and dairy desserts. It’s the pink slime, reconstituted McRib, and hot dogs that are causing the most significant health problems.
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.
The obesity crisis, and metabolic syndrome issues, has far more to do with sugary drinks and snacks made up of flour and oil devoid of fiber and protein. The risk attributed to processed meat is cancer, and CVD by extension of being meat and fatty, not BC its processed.
People don't really consume that much "processed meat" on the daily in the form of salami or w/e.
The rule of thumb is that the ultra-processed food should not account for a too large part of your diet. The protein powder is usually taken as a supplement and in small quantities, as opposed to food like twinkies people can easily overeat on. But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
> But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week
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).
Okay, I genuinely thought that consuming as much protein powder as you describe would make person feel sick, you surprised me. To each his own. The fact remains, research suggests overdosing on protein supplements has potential health hazards.
"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]
Is that from the protein supplements themselves, or from consuming excessive protein in the first place? In other words if you ate the same amount but as steaks/eggs, would you feel the same symptoms?
40 g of protein per day is only 6.1 oz of chicken tenderloins (raw weight) per day which is very unlikely to cause the effect described in the paper ("hyperfiltration and increased urinary calcium excretion which can, in turn, lead to chronic kidney disease development").
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).
As with all things it depends on you. In general lots of protein can impact blood sugar. Whey protein without sufficient exercise can cause liver issues, so you shouldn’t go crazy with it unless you’re regularly monitored by a doctor. (Standard blood panels would detect an issue iirc)
I’ve heard you can cut intake by a third if you switch from chicken breast to fish. Not cheap but you can get frozen tilapia cheap and tuna is safe if limited to once or twice a week. Part of the problem with whey is processing and potential contamination, but also dyes and flavorings, which may be why you felt better without it.
Do you think that the poster who used the phrase "processes food hysteria stuff" unprompted is intending to make a statement about the broadness or usefulness of the category.
The problem is that it's not necessarily the case that ultra-processing that actually makes the food unhealthy. It's a good rule of thumb, but we shouldn't pretend that's actually how the world works. This piece summarizes the point quite nicely:
>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.
As a skeptic, I think that they have defined too broad of an umbrella in the research, and so they're sweeping up huge swaths of people's diet under one label and then claiming it's bad.
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.
Soy protein isolate is considered ultra processed just like whey. The problem is people taking a technical term then using it in casual discussion, especially for something as complicated and diverse as diet and nutrition.
No, nothing to do with hysteria. We simply have not had access to the substance long enough to be able to accurately say what the long term effects on health are and I cannot help but to assume that there has been a lot of unnatural processing in-order to turn a small, green, pea into a patty which resembles beef.
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.
Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not?
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?
> Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.
They have a different definition of "no culinary use" than I do!
Earlier in the definition it uses the more conservative phrase "no or rare culinary use," which I think is more accurate. The point is just to attempt to categorize foods by processing levels in a way the public can understand.
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.
Thanks for linking that. Their rubric for ultra-processed is easy enough to grok that folks could use this at a grocery store. We're on a kick to remove "parameters" from tasks right now, so this definition is clearer than thoughts like "stick to the outside of the store."
This is venturing off-topic, but can you expand on "eliminating tasks." Is eliminating a task like setting up auto bill pay, or getting rid of items that I don't want to clean?
I mean, the cattle itself is turning a green pea into beef through a highly complicated and expensive process. Call me a scientific reductionist but there's no reason you can't theoretically replicate that in a lab.
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.
There’s not much hysteria in that highly processed foods tend to give less satiety relative to both their calorie density and nutrient content (since your digestive process and signals don’t trip the same way they do with whole foods).
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.
Many vegetarian meat substitutes, including the Beyond Burger, contains methylcellulose. It is one of several emulsifiers both often associated with "ultra-processed foods", and known from several studies to affect the mucus lining the intestinal wall, increasing the risk for infection and suspected of increasing cancer risk.
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.
It is, mostly, hysteria. The problem is that we're just assuming processed foods are bad period, but even if you don't eat processed foods you can eat a very poor diet.
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.
These studies are legitimately worthless, and I'll explain why.
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.
Not at all. We're in the post-truth era. Anything you dislike can be denied and dismissed, and nothing anyone says will convince you otherwise. There's no objective truth, just what you prefer and therefore insist must be.
Many people are clearly going overboard and using processed foods as an excuse for making the naturalistic fallacy. (Or maybe today we would say that processed foods are used as a "thought terminating cliche".)
It was more unhealthy in the past due to the sodium, saturated fat, and possibly some of the additives/preservatives. It was unhealthy enough that the company even changed to a new formula with avocado oil, which might be better, but I haven't looked into it.
What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.
Using the amount of processing - particularly processing that hasn't been studied - as a heuristic for health vs. unhealthy is pretty reasonable. We have lots of examples over the last 70 years of companies claiming a new processed food is better or safe, only for it to be harmful. And a lot of the changes seemed innocuous:
- 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
The problem of course is looking at foods in isolation vs as part of a diet.
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.
> clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed
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.
Do you have some studies proving out that control for vegetables and sugar is all that is needed? I am skeptical that just controlling for those would eliminate the risks with other processing ingredients such as cured meats.
Well lumping packaged cookies and cured meats together is already part of the problem. The former is bad in excess because of the high calories and poor lipid profile. The latter because of colon cancer risk.
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.
Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
Particularly pointless pedantry. We all know what they mean, and are to assume the best reading of what they're saying.
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.
It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals.
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?
Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general.
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.
“Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements.
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.
Individual cases are interesting. For example, Wikipedia says this of E122:
> 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?
I don’t understand the downvotes. Replacing foods that have been prepared in the same way for hundreds of years with foods treated with processes that have not yet been considered harmful is inherently risky. There are plenty of examples of unknown byproducts, isomers, and side effects that take years to flesh out.
I have noticed that Americans get wildly defensive about their bread, which is mostly objectively inferior, by far, to any decent European bread.
I don't know if it's reciting the pledge every day or the lack of experience on what good bread actually feels like; or if the health effects of eating US bread are just taken for granted because it's eaten daily, but American bread is bloody scary and should be recognized as such.
> They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.
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.
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).
It allows you to add some pressure to the patty while providing it a restricted space in which it can expand. By doing so the ingredients seem to form a much stronger bond (from my experience). I used to do the same with beef when I ate it.
Also, rolling it into a ball and then wrapping before flattening gives a much better shape to the resulting patty
Cool, we have a semantics issue. Processing can mean "any change to a food item" such as chopping, cooking, etc. In these kinds of conversations, it's often used as "significant alterations that are not possible or common outside of a food lab". E.g. I can do cured meats, or add corn starch to a soup at home. I'm not going to make partially hydrogenated oils or pink slime for chicken nuggets.
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
Is this really a problem with Beyond Meat or a problem with our policies not correctly pricing meat due to not caring about the environment or animal welfare?
It's the same policy whether it's real meat patties or beyond meat, because beyond beef has the same main ingredient as the feed for the cattle: soybeans.
Why does that matter? US ag subsidies are for crops. They effect cow prices the same as they effect beyond prices. Beyond is more expensive because it doesnt have enough competition.
"The entire population" doesn’t want to eat only beef and drink milk, however those are way more subsidized than other food. The real winners are food mega corps and a few rich farmers.
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.
While the entire population externalises the negative effects of their diet on the rest of the world. If you’d sit alone on that branch you’re sawing off, I’d say good riddance! But unfortunately, you’re destroying this marvellous spaceship we all depend on, just for a little convenience.
That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those 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.
> That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those subsidies.
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.
The market decides the price, but politics decide the constraints of the market. Agriculture in particular is heavily involved with the government, because agriculture is very risky, and needs large investments. The government already decides what we care about, and is already pretty corrupt because of the "market" powers - the different lobbies - influence it.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
Besides the reasons of sheer taste, another good reason is culture. Meaning, the preexisting meat-eating culture at a place. One of the reasons why vegan / vegetarian / etc options are often lacking is because there is no longstanding culture of eating those dishes at that certain place, and so, a vegan dish will likely come from a meat dish, minus the meat. But that dish is created around the meat, so without the meat, it will be lacking, like taking the patty out of a burger, or taking the meatballs out of the spaghetti with meatballs.
So, a quick solution is to create a substitute to the missing thing. That way, the culture problem is immediately solved, as the alternative dish will the be the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted. As a bonus, it will be very similar to the existing, accepted culture, so the participant doesn't become an outsider. Also, for many, it's easier to adopt, than changing the culture entirely.
My experience has been that nobody gives a shit if you go to a restaurant in a group and order an explicitly vegetarian meal that isn't trying to emulate meat patties etc.
But they do care if you're trying to drag the entire friend group to a vegetarian restaurant.
In university, a group of friends once decided on heading out to dim sum for a celebration; one of them was Jewish, and ended up basically becoming a vegetarian for a day (since pork is all over the place in that cuisine). It was a source of lighthearted amusement for all and everyone was fully accommodating.
North American food culture doesn't depend on familiarity ("the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted") at all. If anything, being a picky eater is discouraged and a sense of culinary adventure is praised. The service at QSRs has gotten slower in part because of pressure to reconfigure their basic ingredients into new, unfamiliar recipes. (Taco Bell is basically dedicated to this craft — and the greasy ground-beef slop doesn't even really look that different from the black bean slop anyway.)
Which is to say, it's not the meat eaters trying to impose culture on others. Vegetarians and vegans in my experience demonstrate an entirely unjustified persecution complex — the "they'll tell you" stereotype arises from the fact that people simply wouldn't care if it weren't explicitly brought up. That Simpson's episode with Lisa attempting vegetarianism was amusing, but also portrayed a world entirely alien to me.
Yes, North Americans eat a fair bit of meat on average. That's not at all the same thing as the dishes being "created around" the meat. We don't say "meatballs and spaghetti" (I even started automatically typing it the normal way around); substituting the meatballs for ground meat in the sauce is as natural as substituting a different shape of pasta.
Whole pieces of meat have a particular cachet, but this is because it's harder to hide a quality issue this way. Making a patty is missing the point. A hamburger is simply not highbrow cuisine. It's one culturally-established recipe, out of many, which is preferred in the context where it is mainly for convenience as finger food.
The proper vegetarian equivalent to a burger is a vegetarian wrap. (Or veggies on a bun, if the "bun form factor" is contextually important.) The proper vegetarian equivalent to a fancy meal with whole cuts of grilled meat is a fancy meal with artfully plated grilled vegetables.
Why do so many people ask this question about burgers? It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.
> It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.
Sure, but I would say that means vegetarian cuisine has less reason to emulate the form. It's entirely arbitrary. The point of eating a burger is that it's yet another convenient way of getting meat on a bun. (cf. fast-food places describing them as "sandwiches".) The social ritual of eating burgers with friends isn't about seeing the patty extend past the edges of the bun and thinking about the cow. It's about everyone holding something they'll enjoy eating, conveniently wrapped and portable, and chowing down. The burger is recognizable as a "burger" (as distinct from a wrap or a traditional sandwich) from the bun before it's recognizable from the contents. (Which is part of why the marketplace had no problem accepting chicken burgers.)
So anything that holds the vegetables together and keeps them inside a bun ought to work just fine. If our prospective new vegetarian wants the burger filling to taste like (or match texture etc.) a beef patty, that's a personal issue.
These replacements have value because sometimes you want the thing that gives you that nostalgia kick or whatever specific feeling you associate with food. Old school plant based replacements don't always feel right for this.
This is a really important point that I think a lot
of people who aren't vegan don't get. There might
be an understanding that food is culture (lets order chinese,
or italian), but realizing that's not a culture you
experience but a culture you live.
The first thing many new vegans ask is "what do I eat
now?" The replacement food comes first, and beyond
hits the mark a lot more than seitan does because
we don't culturally eat seitan.
And even more so, I think beyond has made it so an
entire generation realized they could go vegan.
A black bean burger just never hit the same way.
I always feel like people are being intentionally obtuse when making these arguments. I'm vegan and know many vegans who enjoy beyond meat. We didn't go vegan because we didn't like the taste of things which were traditionally derived from animal flesh, and it's nice to be able to enjoy effectively the same foods without the animal exploitation.
I became vegetarian early in life mostly because of the industrialisation of meat production, and the treatment of animals within that system, and the perception that it's just an incredibly unhealthy production line (e.g. steroid use in livestock, etc)
I recall enjoying meat flavours, so I'd be tempted to try this fake meat for occasional, one-off enjoyment.
And I say one-off as my experience says there are enough flavours and alternatives out there such that a replacement like this isn't really needed at all. That might be the real market issue for Beyond Meat (in my life, anyway).
This is a non sequitur, but I don't know. I don't. I think the reason is people aren't used to eating plants and find the tastes and textures disagreeable. It's a taste that can be acquired at any time, though. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, but I'd only go back if I was literally starving. Vegetables taste so much better, but you need a cuisine that does vegetables properly, like Indian or Mexican. Trying to do a bland cuisine like American or British without meat isn't going to be a good time.
Why do you fucking think? Because it's tasty. You can disagree with the ethics of how we make animals suffer because they taste nice and still think they taste nice.
All in all, despite the fact that it is not real meat, nothing proves that Beyond Meat production is better for the planet. If you factor production materials, energy,... Not sure what it gives.
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.
Agriculture is very risky, and needs large investments, and has low margins, so it's a good candidate for subsidies and other such government measures, like insurance. And the people need to eat, so it's essential as well.
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.
I checked out one resource, and they say that there it's "pea protein isolate" mostly.
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.
Most soybeans are fed to animals and only a tiny amount of soybean calories are converted into meat. So a soybean subsidy scales better in the meat industry and makes their product disproportionally cheaper.
That's a political decision that needs to be applied to the alternative protein industry. However, given the current political climate and the acceptance of disinformation, that's going to be challenging.
So the biggest problem here is that Beyond Meat has a huge debt due in just 2 years:
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.
To put the "$1B" number into the context, Beyond Meat sold $300M worth of plant-based meats last year, and made a net operating loss of $156M. Their total assets are $600M, and the market capitalization is only $260M as of today.
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.)
> 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.
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.
I would guess the primary target market is ex meat eaters that are trying to go vegetarian but have been raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat. I am in this group. I agree it’s not a very large market for the reasons you stated above. However, maybe BM hoped they could grow that market, I.e. convince more meat eaters to give it up for ethical reasons.
I am in a similar group; the mostly-vegetarian. Chicken when I don't have a real choice, red meat at a wedding like once a year or something.
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.
Why would it have to only be ex-meat eaters? It may be just my (admittedly biased) opinion, but I think that Big Meat has managed to turn meat-eating into a quasi-religion — almost like football. I also try to not shy away from knowing where my food comes from, and how it was processed and produced; if you know about the cruel and unsanitary living conditions for cattle, the underpaid and overworked labor that helps process it, and the deforestation and water needed in order to produce it... you then find the meat does not go down as easy anymore.
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.
I totally agree with your strong feelings on the meat industry. The reason I said the main market is ex meat eaters is because if you’re still eating meat then any craving for the taste/texture/smell of meat is at least getting partially satisfied by the meat you’re still eating. There’s definitely some market for people just trying to cut down on meat though, and that’s great too.
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.
If you speak with vegetarians/vegans who have been raised that way and never eaten meat you will find many that are repulsed by it. Nurture seems to be able to override nature here and, as far as I’m aware, there’s no strong evidence that we’re born with an inherent taste for meat, we’re just born with bodies that need certain nutrients that are easily obtained from meat but can be found elsewhere.
Yeah. HN doesn't really have a sense of humour, which I used to find frustrating, but which (having now spent a lot more time on other forums, like Reddit), I fully appreciate the wisdom of.
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.
I think the company was a bet that if you make a good enough meat substitute, then meat eaters will switch to it (sometimes), and that's a huge total addressable market. I would say that bet has not come off. But that's hindsight - the whole point of startups is to take bets.
I think you're right: that was definitely the bet, but it really should have entered their heads that being more expensive than actual meat[0] would guarantee the bet wouldn't pay off.
[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.
> If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
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.
The article mentions this as an agreement between the bondholders and shareholders, I believe, who are both mutually incentivized to come to agreement. If I understood correctly the bondholders agree to a future convertible note of some sort.
That's got to be an incredible expenditure then. Considering their pricing compared to the better store brand alternatives, while not lacking any scale disadvantages, I expect high margins on the products themselves.
They need to announce that they are working on lab grown meat and expect to be shipping 10 million patties a month by the end of the year. Then at the end of year say you have a new formula that will halve costs and will be shipping 15 million a month by mid 2026. Rinse and repeat. Just like Tesla.
> If they could magically ... it would take 20+ years ...
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.
The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that. I rather see more and more friends and people avoid eating meat or reduce their consumption drastically. Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.
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.
> The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed.
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.
Often I think it's largely based on the types of food people grew up with. Meat and potato diets seem to struggle with reducing the meat part of their diet. People often try to eat the same stuff but substitute meat with bad imitations of meat. In other places, as an example, Indian food has plenty of choices without meat and is delicious.
Maybe they went with burgers because it's low effort: everything else is the same (bun, salad, fries). Just replace the patty, which still goes through the same process.
Again, missing the opportunity that vegetarian/vegan food can be healthier, not just removing of animal cruelty and death.
> Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.
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).
As a meat eater trying to casually reduce my meat consumption, I find myself buying more tofu, lentils and beans, rather than processed meat-like substitutes. I think that is the issue. People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.
Beyond Meat is industrial plant-based protein. The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants. That means their market is is poor and lower middle-class folks—hence the distribution through fast food and mid-grade grocery channels.
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
> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.
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.
> don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand
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.
The market must be very different in the US. In the UK, Beyond Meat is the most expensive meat free option in my local supermarket, other than one type of fake steak. There are some other premium brands at slightly lower prices, then cheaper brands, and finally supermarket own brands.
> Beyond Meat is the most expensive meat free option in my local supermarket
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.
More like "hyper-processed plant-based faux-meat may not succeed".
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.
There are lots of high end vegetarian restaurants in Beijing that focus on fake meat. Pure Lotus is a famous one, that goes over the top on everything. I don’t really get the appeal, I would rather have more vegetarian-honest dishes at a veg place (I’m not a vegetarian)
Beyond meat burgers taste like flavored plastic grounds, so until these plant based alternatives can close the taste gap its not going to go anywhere. And they have had years to make it taste better, so I suspect theres something fundamental that makes it very difficult.
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.
Relatively cheap, it feels like fast food now has more emphasis on convenience/consistency and less on price/value (in my experience in the US midwest).
The mcdonalds/wendys/etc nuggets are junk, injection molded meat paste in 4 shapes. You have to go to popeyes or chic fil a to get actual chicken nuggets.
Enjoyment and beneficial two different concepts that often get mashed together. Excessive amounts of sugar and salt are often added to food to make it "taste" good and become "enjoyable".
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.
The biggest issue to me is that beyond and impossible aren’t just making replacements that are worse than meat, they are making things that are worse than the alternatives we already had.
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.
Delicious vegetarian food is already a thing, and doesn't require new technology, and it's not necessary to completely eliminate meat-eating to significantly reduce your ethical-harm footprint. It's a matter of changing food culture. Once you adapt to an omnivore diet that contains tasty meals from both meat and non-meat cuisine, it's actually quite easy to reduce your meat intake further.
I was raised as a meat eater and ate it for 30 years. I’ve been vegetarian for about a decade for ethical reasons that I do believe are incompatible with eating any meat. I consider myself a good cook and make vegetarian/vegan meals for my family every night. However: I will never stop thinking that the taste of chicken, pork, beef and lamb are desirable. The conditioning is too strong. Sticking with vegetarianism is still an act of willpower for me. This is why I like meat alternatives.
> Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that.
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.
Soy and oat milk is also incredibly expensive compared to cow for what it is. Same for most supermarket tofu in the West. The cheapest own-brand tofu in Tesco is the same as the beef mince (£6.50/kg).
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.
Perhaps there isn’t much demand in your Tesco. Store brand (organic) soy milk is 0.9€ here in Paris which is cheaper than the organic cow alternative - which is subsidized btw.
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.
Also why does everything need to come with a snide remark?
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.
I think it’s largely a cultural problem though. Good tasting alternatives to meat and vegetarian dishes have existed in other cultures for a long time. But Western cultures, you immediately try and find a facsimile that needs a start up to produce rather than just cook something else.
Same thing with coffee. Just drink black coffee? Nope, let’s work out how to convert nut juice into something that froths using emulsifiers!
Everything comes down to world population, which has quadrupled in a century, making the previously-sustainable now unsustainable.
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.
When we look at the places that have experienced degrowth in this country such as the midwestern cities, it is hard to argue today that the effects were truly all that bad. They still have all the services, institutions, and plenty of the entertainment options you'd expect. Major hospitals and universities. They aren't full of derelict homes either, those have been all more or less razed by now.
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.
HN Bio: FinTech + Space + B2C angel & seed investor. Jackson Hole local; frequently in New York and the Bay Area.
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.
Is it? Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth. Even if it isn’t us, there will be a last generation that enjoys growth as the motor of wealth. At some point, resources will deplete and the standard of living will decrease as a consequence. This is logically inevitable. Everyone just pretends this can go on and on without stopping, but that’s wrong.
> Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth
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.
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.
> This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.
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.
Beans dude. Beans are absolutely delicious. They grow in the ground by accident. A good bean burger is way more appetizing than a biosludge patty. Unfortunately nobody is getting rich selling beans. But they are all we need here
It’s interesting that alternative meat consumption in the U.S. is struggling but taking off in Europe.
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.
Here in hill country Texas, even Walmart sells MorningStar corn dogs. H-E-B carries most of the Impossible line including meatballs. I made some dirty rice with the IF ground "beef" and it was awesome. There's almost no oil in it, browning onions and peppers required adding some avocado oil (never use olive oil for high temperature cooking).
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.
> When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
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.
Part of their financial woes might come from them paying for shelf space at retailers and/or making sale guarantees. A grocery chain will gladly carry a poorly performing product if the manufacturer is paying them to do so.
I live in the US and it's normalized here as well. Not sure where you lived but there's ample variety of dairy alternatives that are offered at grocery stores, coffee shops, etc.
Obviously it depends on the venue. We visited many coffee shops on our recent trip through the Baltics and then across Ireland, and were always asked which of 6 "milk" options we wanted.
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.
I don't know I've been in Bristol and Cornwall last week and was always asked. I guess you can extend that to anywhere they might reasonably expect a Londoner to turn up.
It's more about the density of hipsters than Londoners per se. Lots of Londoners go to Canvey Island for a holiday, but you probably won't get oat milk there, because it's not that kind of Londoner. Bristol and the West Country are crawling with their own local hipsters.
(actually, you probably will oat milk on Canvey, it really is everywhere now)
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.
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.
> 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023
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.
Having lived in both the US and Europe, I have to imagine at least some of that comes down to cost. In Europe, the plant based alternatives (at least where I lived) were actually cheaper, and meaningfully so.
Also, they taste better? I have been a vegetarian since 1999. Even in the small village I lived with my parents, the local supermarket had a meat replacement section. Later I moved to a larger city and the product selection at supermarkets is very large and nice. A few years ago, supermarkets also started carrying Beyond Meat products. We tried them a few times, but they taste absolutely horrible compared to local offerings that have been developed for decades now.
In my neck of the woods you can easily find plant-based alternatives, but I've found that the best ones are those that don't try too hard to mimic meat.
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.
Here in Korea where soy milk has been a staple forever, its price has more than doubled over the last 5 years, now ~$1.4/L. Still cheaper than milk currently at ~$1.7/L, but it used to be twice as cheap as milk.
Same in Germany (~1€/l for milk, 2€/l for pretty much all milk replacements.
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
Lidl has oat/soy milk for 99 cents, and the NoMilk clones for 1,50. In fact, Lidl had a respectable replacement line up now. If you only buy Alpro Milk then yeah, it's gonna be more expensive, but prices have come down tremendously, especially once the discounters hopped on that train.
Yesterday I bought some oat-based milk-like at Aldi for 90c/l (regular price). It's labeled "oat drink", so might not substitute milk. The (literal) "almost milk" product is listed online for 1,09€/l. They also had options based on other stuff for a similar price.
First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.
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.
I posted before: I care more about the nutritional content being close to meat than the look and taste; specifically, similar macro-nutrient ratios and whatever micro-nutrients are rare outside of meat.
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 remember when veggie burgers first came out and they actually featured veggies and tried to taste like veggies instead of psuedo-meat patties. They were so good! Then everything tried to just clone meat, poorly, in taste and texture and they were so much worse. But those first ones that really tasted like veggies were delish.
Are you a vegetarian? I'm not, and really enjoy a good black bean patty. But when I crave a juicy beef hamburger, I have one. Vegetarians might prefer to satisfy cravings with something closer to their childhood memories than a black bean patty.
The burger is already in the store. The way the food industry works they'd probably kill the same number of cows every year to preserve the size of their asset (the farm/heads of cattle) and get a subsidy from government for the crop loss that didn't sell.
I remember the veggie burgers they're talking about and they weren't black bean patties. The one I remember had potato with peas in it... god, it was delicious
The thing with vegetarians is they tend to lose their sense of taste and smell for meat. Many vegetarians actually find the smell of cooked meat pretty revolting/nauseating since they are no longer primed for it. Anecdotally I know a vegetarian who hates one of these patties, I can't remember if it was the beyond product or the impossible burger, specifically because they tried and make it a little bit more "bloody" like a meat patty which made it disgusting to them.
I'm glad that people have the option of those if they like them. Personally, I find the veggie patties to be awful in both taste and especially texture. I was thrilled when there started being options other than the pervasive gardenburgers.
>they do not include the seasoning required to make it taste like a hamburger.
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.
Zero sodium also kills you because you need electrolytes to live. Like almost literally every complex system, there is a zone of moderation/goodness/health.
It actually nearly killed my wife’s grandmother. Until some doctor realized she avoided salt like the plague, gave her some and she made a miraculous discovery.
OK, we need to pick something apart here, because I see this a lot and it's annoying.
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.
>UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
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 think the UPF debate just comes down to "things I want to be healthy are not UPF, and things I want to be unhealthy I call UPF."
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.
"Ultra Processed Food" - I suspect? I disagree, IMO. It feels like a oversimplification, it's a sometimes useful rule of thumb that works in some cases, but not in others. Definitely not the end all be all of nutrition.
BM is getting rarer on the shelves in Austria. When it first showed up, it was something special, but now there are heaps of great other alternative meats, often cheaper and made here. I guess BM is struggling because of increased competition. During my 20 years of plant based dieat it has never been easier to find fancy plant based things.
Yeah, there is a camp of people who see headlines like this and (giddily) think it spells the demise of plant-based alternatives, probably because since they don't shop plant-based products, their mental concept is stuck 15 years ago where BM was new and experimental, so now they think "heh, not surprised that flopped and we can move on".
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.
This is too bad. Beyond and Impossible opened up the door to me gradually becoming vegan. It was similar enough to real meat that I didn’t miss meat anymore, and from there I found other substitutions which were healthier. Without them I’m sure I never would have started a plant-based diet.
Deciding to abandon meat is a lot like quitting cigarettes. Sometimes you need a long time to ease off, some artificial/processed replacement (e.g. nicotine patches), it won't feel the same or "good enough", there's a lot of psychological struggle, even your body just demands its shot. It can take a lot of dedicated effort.
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.
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.
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
Cheese uses lots and lots of milk. There are questions of ethics (the treatment of dairy cows is often less than stellar) and carbon footprint (cheese is worse than pork, for example.)
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.
You are definitely from a culture that doesn't guzzle cheese like Americans. So out of curiosity I went to your comment history and your previous comment was "Here in Korea".
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.
You can split the difference by shelling out for high quality grass fed cheeses only on occasion. In terms of treatment it seems to me cows suffer far less than chickens and pigs.
I've been vegetarian for about 8 years and won't buy them and try to avoid them in restaurants because they're too meat-like. Unfortunately they've made good non-fake meat vegetarian burgers (black bean, wild rice, etc) harder to find.
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'll echo what some of the other commenters have stated:
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.
If you care about the ethical reasons for plant-based meat, you should look at the companies business practices behind the scenes when they think no one is paying attention - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1927531529883762920
You shouldn't take it so personally that they're suing you. They're obligated to try to defend their copyright if they want to be able to continue using it.
Because after 8 years the idea of eating meat has no remaining appeal and is switching more to mild revulsion. Why would I order a substitute that is a close copy of that?
I'll still get them if there's literally no other vegetarian option on the menu, but that's rare.
There’s no way to say this without sounding like an asshole but perhaps in 8 years your memory of what meat is like has drifted. I only say that because the rest of us wish the fake stuff was remotely comparable in taste and texture.
I've been vegetarian for a long time and I still think Beyond burgers are great. I have a pack of them from Costco in the freezer. I like black bean burgers, too, but Beyond burgers taste like my (distant) memory of a "normal" burger.
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.
Was a vegetarian for about 8 years and now a pescatarian. We practically always have some Beyond products in our house and will order them at restaurants. Losing Beyond products would be a huge bummer.
Why do you assume people will stop consuming them after a few years? I think most people enjoy the taste of meat but are concerned about the environmental implications of consuming meat.
I would replace all animal products if they tasted like the real thing. I'm sorry but tofu is not cheese
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.
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
Juicy Marbles is legitimately the best plant-based replacement if you're interesting in smoking/BBQ'ing on a grill. I use them for pot-lucks with people.
Ingredients make it look like engineered soy. Is there a secret sauce to making it better than meat for someone who doesn’t have that level of ethical granularity?
As a vegetarian, the problem with Beyond Meat (and other such products) is that they're too close to the original. I'm a vegetarian; I don't want to eat meat. If what I'm eating tastes too close to meat, I begin doubting it. It has happened several times in the past where I've been served (real) meat when I explicitly asked for a non-meat version (e.g. "beef burrito" instead of "bean burrito", etc.)
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 think this will vary largely based on individual opinion. Many vegetarians will feel the same way as you of course.
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.
My experience with Beyond (~4 years ago), was that it wasn't as good as Impossible. Impossible seemed like meat, Beyond seemed like nuts mashed into paste.
Yeah, I never understood the hype for Beyond's products. They must have just had great marketing or something because their meat barely tasted any better than any other frozen veggie burger.
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.
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.
Whether they taste nice is debatable. They had an odd aftertaste for me. I would much rather have a good mushroom or black bean burger. They taste better to me, are cheaper, and probably more healthy.
Hate these burgers. As a dairy-loving vegetarian, first the vegans came along and ruined everything by evicting most of the tasty options from restaurants, and then the meat eaters somehow wanted vegan food that tasted of animals and that became the default option on many menus. Vegetarians (who I grant you are difficult to pity as the centrists of the food world) got utterly screwed.
I kinda think beyond meat is for ppl who care about taste. You can fake meat taste and texture much cheaper.
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.
It’s always been awful IMO. Tastes like sawdust with a congealed vegetable oil binder and chemical flavorings that approximate meat. A straight up bean burger is better and far less processed.
Its way better than a bean burger IMHO. As a vegan, what I like most about Beyond burgers are that they are consistent, and pretty amazing at not being awful. If I'm in a random restaurant with a few token vegan options, the last thing I want to do is take a chance on some potentially terrible homemade bean or chickpea burger. If they have Beyond or Impossible, I know exactly what I'm getting.
Absolutely better than the crappy black bean or chickpea patties you'd get at most burger joints. I'd much rather have Beyond or Impossible at a cookout as well.
Our local drive in movie theater (remember those) offers various meal options including burgers, and I've taken to ordering the Impossible there because somehow several times in their beef burgers I've gotten significant bone chunks, to the extent that I was surprised I didn't break a tooth on them.
It could have to do with how they're prepped. Even the real thing can taste like sawdust and grill marks if done incorrectly. I'm personally biased towards veggie burgers and prefer them over the real thing but in the last year, I've been to multiple cookouts where both "burger dudes" and kids have chosen beyond over meat.
I agree that the level of process is questionable but, if done well, I don't think it lacks in flavor.
I bought one of these by mistake during the pandemic and immediately gagged trying to eat it. Then checked the label and realized what I had bought wasn't what I thought it was.
I think the problem is that crappy supermarket meat is really cheap, and most people don't seem to care about the quality of the meat. For those people, it's hard to justify buying a more expensive product that's not even meat.
I wonder if reducing the price (without selling at a loss) would increase sales enough to offset the lower revenue
There's crappy meat. Have you ever had cheap salmon sashimi? It's completely flavorless, with a rubbery, watery mouthfeel. Conversely have you had expensive salmon sashimi? A delicate umami flavor with a mouthfeel of liquified butter. It's not preparation. They're not the same fish.
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.
Part of the reason that cheap meat is cheap is because it's a byproduct of producing nice meat. Chicken thighs are cheap because the chicken seller makes money on breasts. Round is cheap because the cow is paid for with the revenue from brisket and ribeye etc.
The meat alternatives are a product by itself, and they have to justify their whole supply chain. That's tough.
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.
Over here, beyond meat is simply more expensive than just buying meat. On top of that, it feels like you eat pure ultra processed product magic chemistry and thats not good. So who exactly is the target audience for that?
I'd totally buy it, if it competes with meat prices by being cheaper and if there wasn't so much effort into trying to look like meat and taste like meat, which goes against the entire premise.
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.
I recently travelled the US (California, Arizona, Utah, Ohio), I found it really hard to find vegan options. Some restaurants that used to sell vegan burgers or vegan options have stopped (McDonalds, Applebees) - because not enough people ordered them. Some restaurants that have Beyond Meat burger patties as on option "don't have any in stock" - probably for the same reason.
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.
Beyond is hard to buy in supermarkets too. Whole Foods doesn't stock it at all and many others never have it in store even if the chain does technically stock it online. I just want it because it's 0 cholesterol and tastes the same as meat to me.
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.
One of the things I've noticed about shopping carefully at the local supermarket (Albertsons, in Oregon) is that they very often use beef as a 'loss leader' to get people to shop there, so beef is often cheaper than it 'should' be, and especially so if more of the externalities involved in the production of beef were included in the price.
I like beef, but the price probably makes it harder to compete with.
Ground beef needs to move quickly, and you've got to sell some to go with the nicer cuts of meat, so it makes sense to sell at low or negative margins.
Impossible is good enough that - in the right context, if you squint real hard - you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish it from the real deal. Beyond just isn't there, it still comes off as a weird faux meat.
Note that Impossible, unlike Beyond, isn't publicly traded, so the only time anyone knows for sure what it's worth is right after it raises capital. It sounded like the 50% thing was some kind of internal projection.
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
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.
Not a customer but it’s a shame it’s not working out for them. I’m sure they have people who would enjoy it but the feedback I’ve heard was mostly negative with respect to quality of ingredients and the like.
At this stage if they scaled back would they stand a chance to survive? Or do they owe too much money?
They owe way too much. The article actually touches on this - they have such little hope of paying back their debt that they are leaning into this so that they can get better renegotiation terms with bond holders
I am all for eating more vegetables. But putting ultra processed mashed up shit to replace the real thing just sounds like an avenue for disaster health wise.
It is, and people seem to ascribe some implicit goodness to these companies because they’re seen as providing an alternative to an implicitly evil industry and degenerate dietary choice. Truth is, they’re running the same game, just with a less wholesome food product.
i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat.
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.
> i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat.
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.
Not surprised. Expensive, taste like shit. Nice Asian vegetarian food exist. A always seemed like stupid amount of resources a d effort to cater to burger markets.
I feel like I'm the ideal customer for Beyond Meat and its competitors. I am not price sensitive, I don't mind the idea of plant based meat products, and I am willing to try new things. My biggest reasons for not buying Beyond Meat are that I:
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.
I do cook, I didn't say that I don't. My point is that if I'm going to pay a premium for a main ingredient and go through the effort of cooking it, I do not want it to be mediocre at best. Beyond Meat, imo, just isn't a more pleasing option, and the only reasons that I can see to choose it are:
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.
Last I looked, there was an awful lot of saturated fat in their burgers. I tended to order something other than a veggie burger when their was the only one on the menu.
Vegetarians and Vegans turn out to prefer less UPF dominant protein in their diet?
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.
Here's a really good vegan burger recipe: caramelise about three large red onions with garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. Drain a tin of red kidney beans, keep the liquid, mash together with fried onions, add about 100g of breadcrumbs, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, chilli powder, and a pinch of allspice. Add aquafaba or breadcrumbs to adjust consistency. Press into round shapes. Fry (about six minutes).
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.
I absolutely love beef. A good ribeye steak, or some smoked brisket are two of my favorite foods. I was intrigued by the claims these meat alternative companies were making, so naturally I tried them all. It's not surprising to me that they are struggling. I could barely swallow their products. I think it was a mistake to compare these to one of the greatest foods on the planet. It set the expectation was too high.
When Impossible was new and only available in burger format at a small number of partner restaurants, I ventured out to SF to try two of them. I concluded that it can make for a genuinely convincing substitute, but the key is preparing it with a sleight of hand to misdirect from the noticeable imitation texture and flavor. Those early burgers were made with thin patties, with flavorful burger sauces and toppings.
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.
They work well enough as a replacement in a fast food burger or in a dish where the meat itself isn't really the star player. Using their ground meat alternatives in a hamburger helper is totally fine.
We're not at the point where high quality meat can be replaced, but that doesn't mean the product is worthless.
everybody mostly discusses real vs. imitation/vegan, yet i think it has nothing to do with the current BYND situation.
"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.
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.
The Beyond Meat story for me is a boon since its IPO. I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally.
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.
The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
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.
> The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
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.
What I would like to see in a fake meat is a product engineered to have lower level of histidine, since there is evidence that gut microorganism processing of histidine creates a chemical that causes atherosclerosis.
That's disappointing, they've done a great job making plant meat ubiquitous and took away some of the hippy aura that has kept many people from trying plant-based meat alternatives. I really hope they can turn it around, both selfishly as a happy customer, as well as for the planet.
The problem with Beyond Meat is that it is insanely expensive. I could buy a free range, organic and grass fed beef burger for the price of their ultra processed burger.
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.
The company's products in my and other people's views have caused a significant wane in vegetarian and vegan burger diversity. Gone are the chickpea and black bean burgers on menus—your only choice is Beyond Meat-esque burgers.
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.
I also don't see it as much better than Boca Burgers or Quorn or many other earlier generation products never mind tofu, tempeh, seitan all of which can be great on a bed of rice or as sandwich fillers.
Ecologist Howard Odum developed a system of environmental accounting based on tracing energy back to the sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergy
a calorie of vegetarian food is estimated to require 200,000 calories worth of sunlight when you factor in energy to drive the wind, make rain, all of that.
Invariably there is part of a product or service that you can't account for in detail so you take the remaining dollar cost and multiply it by the emergy/$ ratio for the economy as a whole.
Although you can argue a "cheap" product has a price that is subsidized or doesn't represent externalities, this leads to the corollary that an outrageously expensive product is not green because the money is a license for somebody to do things that impact the environment be it the employees driving around in a big-ass pickup truck or the executives or investors flying in private jets.
There's that and there's also the fact that most people's main objection to meat substitutes is high cost.
Ive never understood the drive to make meat substitutes instead of celebrating vegetarian cuisine. I’m not a vegetarian, but if I eat some dish that is vegetarian, why wouldn’t I want to celebrate the vegetable itself made from instead of trying to make some fake meat that never quite hits the mark?
As a vegetarian I actually prefer stuff like Beyond when eating out.
The reason is simple: it has higher protein content than most other place based fast foods.
I'd love to live in a world with minimally processed high protein vegetarian restaurant food (like lots of legumes), but the only reliable place to get this that I know of is CAVA.
Products like Beyond are at least a step up from carb heavy pastas and grains or oily fried vegetables and starches which are the staples of most restaurant fare for vegetarians.
Plenty of places will give you beans. Are beyond burgers really higher protein than a bean? Taco bell the whole menu can be subbed for black beans.
When you get "black bean burgers" they usually have a bunch of other stuff in them which reduces the protein. Combine with a bun and you get a lot of calories without much protein.
Beyond/impossible are not great, but they are better.
A few fast casual places like Chipotle do have pretty good bean options.
But your friendly neighborhood restaurant? Probably you can get a salad or a Portobello sandwich or some pasta or a black bean burger. In relation to those, the packaged burgers provide a reliable source of protein.
Yes, processed meat alternatives tend to be significantly higher protein per unit mass than beans. But other metrics like protein per calorie can be useful.
As a non vegetarian, I also hate how tofu gets treated as solely a vegetarian meat substitute in the US. I have no interest in having a poor substitution in a meat dish, but tofu itself is a core component of great foods that it belongs in...such as miso soup or mapo tofu.
Diced, fried in cubes, and served on a bed of cous-cous with soy sauce. Might not be traditional in any culture but it is cheap and fast to cook with minimal skill.
I think there are billions of people around the world, in every country on this planet celebrating vegetarian cuisine, and this is a company participating in a drive to provide an alternative. It's not a sinister drive to wipe out traditional vegetarian cuisine.
Is it really that complicated? There are many countries, together over 2b people, with cultural hegemonies, where eating meat is the not-so-invisible part of the racial and national identity. It’s like asking why “we” do not celebrate non-Abrahamic religions.
I think the idea was that Beyond Meat would be a "transitional" product that would provide an ever growing vegetarian/vegan population an option that was familiar to them. For example, if you do not care about celebrating vegetables, and just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat, then a beyond burger was supposed to be for you.
The biggest problem they have is the exhorbinant prices, which relegate it to niche status.
> just want to end animal cruelty, but you miss the taste of meat
Does that actually describe a commercially relevant segment of the population?
Intuitively, having known a lot of vegetarians, I'd expect the people whose primary concern is animal cruelty to be specifically turned off by realistic fake meat.
I'm not vegetarian, but I have a family member that is
He never disliked the taste, on the opposite, he enjoyed, but didn't stand by the means neccessary to put it in his plate
So eventually he stopped eating it, but having always been a curious eater, he's always missed a taste similar to meat
As far as he's told me Burguers and some kinds of Chorizo are passable enough, but still, depends on presentation and it's been so long I don't know if his comparissons are still good
If you ask a bunch of meat eaters how they feel about animal cruelty, they'll get uncomfortable. Many will admit that they would like to avoid it but don't think it's practical. Look in particular at the kind who seek out organic, free range, and other (honestly, not very effective) ways to reduce suffering.
I suspect the market research turned up a large contingent of such. Perhaps not sufficient to justify a whole separate product line, but enough to hope that economies of scale would reduce price and create a virtuous cycle.
So I'm sure it seemed worth a shot. I'm sorry but not surprised that it didn't work.
Count me as a conflicted meat eater. It is terrible, but…delicious. I would be willing to switch to Impossible Foods (much better than Beyond Meat) for most of my hamburger consumption. Yet the price is such a premium that it is hard to justify. Yes, there are scaling problems, meat subsidies, etc which are hard challenges to overcome, but not surprising to me that most consumers are unwilling to switch to a novel product that is more expensive.
> honestly, not very effective
Care to elaborate?
Beyond Meat isn't designed to appeal to vegetarians. It's designed to appeal to people who would be vegetarians but aren't because they like meat.
Well, that's why that thesis seems to have failed. There has not been a huge cultural sea change driving meat eaters towards the products.
Has it failed?
I've been vegetarian since January 2011. Back then at restaurants I had to eat side dishes or go hungry, and while I spent months searching I couldn't find any kind of imitation meat that didn't make me wanna puke. But with the modern imitation meat, be it Beyond Meat, Moving Mountains, Nestlé's Garden Gourmet or Rügenwalder, that's not the case anymore.
Food is also a part of the culture, and German culture traditionally contains a lot of meat. Which may be why here in Germany, these products are hugely successful. Rügenwalder (which is a conventional meat factory) is now selling more imitation meat products than actual meat. Recently they even phased out their meat currywurst because the vegan currywurst was selling so much better.
While often times you can just remove meat from the recipe (e.g., Bratkartoffeln uses Speck just as seasoning, so you can replace it with a bit of soy sauce and MSG) or replace it with a simple alternative (e.g., Falafel-Döner), that doesn't work all the time. Sometimes imitation meat (whether store-bought methylcellulose based, or DIY marinated soy or seitan) is the best option.
Even though I had disliked imitation meat for over a decade, nowadays even I'll enjoy veggie currywurst.
I don't think anyone disagrees that 1) vegan/vegetarianism is growing, 2) vegans/vegetarians are being served better than ever, 3) Beyond Meat and similar products will be part of the constellation of choices.
The rest of the thread is full of people saying why vegetarians will mostly keep eating regular vegetarian food and meat eaters will mostly keep eating regular meat. And indeed what we haven't seen is the mass one-for-one substitution by meat eaters that Beyond seems to have bet the firm on. That's not to say the whole category will fail.
I don't live in Germany so haven't had the pleasure of trying the brand you mentioned. It sounds like they found better PMF than Beyond with a more sustainable, incremental growth model. It also sounds like they might not be trying the same one-for-one raw ingredient strategy. Curryworst and packaged meals are already a value-added, prepared product with unique flavor profile that seems more amenable to substitution.
Tangentially, I think Beyond does deserve some credit for taking the first mover risk and bringing the topic into the limelight, where other brands can now benefit from the consumer awareness.
That's me. The first time I had a seitan dish at a chinese restaurant, I was certain they had given me chicken and asked them to check. The poor guy went and dug the empty tin out of the bin to show me.
The miss the taste of meat thing anecdotally doesn’t happen to my vegetarian friends. It is like without exposure they actually lose the taste for meat. They will even get nauseous if they smell it cooked because their senses are so un primed for meat by that point.
Maybe being surrounded by other vegetarians changes this outcome?
Anecdotically, the few (~5) people around me that have gone long stints without meat, never went as far as getting nauseous, but all of them took special care when reintroducing it to their diets
Aggressively marketing the imitation meat is what opened up market share for the products in the grocery marts and how they got on menus. Marketing up ramp for subpar products is too common.
The US is primed for this. Buy the market, invest a lot, then invest less in the product. Hate to say, RFK may be on to, some things. Plain Heinz catsup in Canada makes the US versions (plural) just seem sort of gross.
Can't agree enough. I just don't think that beyond meat is good. I'm a meat eater who grew up vegetarian and still enjoy eating vegetarian food. A well done black bean burger (my favorite blend is with quinoa) is delicious. I'd eat that over a regular burger plenty of times.
If I went full vegetarian again, I'd stick with the classics - they taste so much better.
I agree.
I’m not a vegetarian by any means but really enjoyed many of the vegetarian items inspired by things like burgers. I often found them a great vessel for hot sauce as a condiment v. ketchup on meat.
Why do you believe it's not healthy? Because of the processes food hysteria stuff?
Besides ultra-processed foods 'hysteria,' basic ratios I consider here are:
- 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.
> 'we can do it and it may get more people to eat vegetarian.'
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.
Animal agriculture converts scrub land into carbon sinks that produce food.
It can. In permaculture models where you are not supplying a lot of inputs and able to cycle 100% of the manure back on grass it's great. In 20 years of running a horse farm the quality of our pasture and hay has been steadily getting better because we've been building soil.
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.
Indian here. We can eat vegetarian without this processed crap. Happy to see this die. We had equivalent companies here in India too. And they also are struggling. Happy to see this being rejected by masses
If you're going to eat vegetarian, eat vegetarian. There are lots of foods out there.
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.
Well, they do have $330M in revenue and the product is all over the place, so I'm not sure your hypothesis is correct. Many people simply don't share your view "if you're going to eat vegetarian, eat vegetarian". I think the biggest problem is that they have not been able to get cost under control.
Burgers were never considered a "health" item so replacement with slop qua occasional treat is not q crazy concept. As another user has whined about, burger restaurants almost always offer some variant of it, and grocery chains carry it. Beyond Meat has competition now, cheaper too
You needed a product to help you do that? Were vegetables themselves unappealing?
Vegetables as a meat substitute were. I don't think it's wise to pretend meat unto itself is not appealing to many humans because it's different from vegetables, grains, and fruits.
Thanks for breaking that down.
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.
There’s very successful vegan lifters and athletes, though. It’s absolutely possible to thrive without meat and dairy products.
Did you try Tempeh? 20gr of protein / 150cal. It looks like a steak.
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.
The parent said "vegetarian meats" so I hope we can assume that's not meant to include tempeh and tofu (but rather things like TVP or mycoprotein products).
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 know tempeh is easily available in Indonesia, but how do you get it in bulk in the US?
All I see are tiny overpriced plastic packets.
I dunno. I track macros religiously with daily protein/fat/carb targets for weight lifting.
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.
Out of curiosity, how do you get 150g/day of full proteins?
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!
You are not a vegetarian
Plus whatever chemicals (yes, I will keep using this word, thank you) they put in it for texture, flavor, preservation, etc.
I'm not personally a vegetarian though I cook for vegetarians quite often and my reason for not using it more philosophical: if you're going to cook vegetarian, stop looking at what you can't use and start looking at what you can use.
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.
By “processes food hysteria stuff”, do you mean “the growing research consensus around ultra-processed foods”?
The bulk of the harm from ultra-processed foods was specifically from meats, with smaller contributions coming from sugary drinks and dairy desserts. It’s the pink slime, reconstituted McRib, and hot dogs that are causing the most significant health problems.
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.
The obesity crisis, and metabolic syndrome issues, has far more to do with sugary drinks and snacks made up of flour and oil devoid of fiber and protein. The risk attributed to processed meat is cancer, and CVD by extension of being meat and fatty, not BC its processed.
People don't really consume that much "processed meat" on the daily in the form of salami or w/e.
9/10 doctors recommend beyond meat can be part of a healthy diet.
"More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarettes!" https://tobacco.stanford.edu/cigarettes/doctors-smoking/more...
A stick of lard can be part of a healthy diet. Just like its meat equivalent, moderation matters.
A category that includes both twinkies and whey protein powder doesn't seem that useful.
The rule of thumb is that the ultra-processed food should not account for a too large part of your diet. The protein powder is usually taken as a supplement and in small quantities, as opposed to food like twinkies people can easily overeat on. But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
> But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week
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).
> But try to make protein powder 80% of your protein intake and see how you'll feel in a week.
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.
Okay, I genuinely thought that consuming as much protein powder as you describe would make person feel sick, you surprised me. To each his own. The fact remains, research suggests overdosing on protein supplements has potential health hazards.
"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]
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10761008/
Is that from the protein supplements themselves, or from consuming excessive protein in the first place? In other words if you ate the same amount but as steaks/eggs, would you feel the same symptoms?
40 g of protein per day is only 6.1 oz of chicken tenderloins (raw weight) per day which is very unlikely to cause the effect described in the paper ("hyperfiltration and increased urinary calcium excretion which can, in turn, lead to chronic kidney disease development").
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).
Doctors actually believe most people aren't getting sufficient protein these days, especially people 50+.
As with all things it depends on you. In general lots of protein can impact blood sugar. Whey protein without sufficient exercise can cause liver issues, so you shouldn’t go crazy with it unless you’re regularly monitored by a doctor. (Standard blood panels would detect an issue iirc)
Whey protein is definitely among the better options, but I once did what you described, and then switched to eating a large amount of chicken breasts.
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.
I’ve heard you can cut intake by a third if you switch from chicken breast to fish. Not cheap but you can get frozen tilapia cheap and tuna is safe if limited to once or twice a week. Part of the problem with whey is processing and potential contamination, but also dyes and flavorings, which may be why you felt better without it.
Yeah, plus it adds up to a lot of cacao since I bought the chocolate tubs from Costco.
And that’s assuming it contains (only) what the label says. Our caveman ancestors did not eat fillers.
> frozen chicken breasts
How do you make that taste good though
You cook them before eating.
I’ve also been consuming 120g daily (about 4 scoops) of whey protein powder for 2.5 months now and feel perfectly fine.
protein can shoot up your sugar levels too. Do hba1c tests after a month to make sure they are not
Do you think that the poster who used the phrase "processes food hysteria stuff" unprompted is intending to make a statement about the broadness or usefulness of the category.
That's how I interpreted it. I don't think it's enough to say a food is unhealthy simply because it's ultra-processed.
The problem is that it's not necessarily the case that ultra-processing that actually makes the food unhealthy. It's a good rule of thumb, but we shouldn't pretend that's actually how the world works. This piece summarizes the point quite nicely:
>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
As a skeptic, I think that they have defined too broad of an umbrella in the research, and so they're sweeping up huge swaths of people's diet under one label and then claiming it's bad.
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.
Soy protein isolate is considered ultra processed just like whey. The problem is people taking a technical term then using it in casual discussion, especially for something as complicated and diverse as diet and nutrition.
No, nothing to do with hysteria. We simply have not had access to the substance long enough to be able to accurately say what the long term effects on health are and I cannot help but to assume that there has been a lot of unnatural processing in-order to turn a small, green, pea into a patty which resembles beef.
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.
The more common term you're looking for is "ultra-processed food"
Which types of processing exactly is implied by that, and which are not?
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?
The term comes from the Nova classification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_classification
> Ultra-processed foods are operationally distinguishable from processed foods by the presence of food substances of no culinary use (varieties of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup, 'fruit juice concentrates', invert sugar, maltodextrin, dextrose and lactose; modified starches; modified oils such as hydrogenated or interesterified oils; and protein sources such as hydrolysed proteins, soya protein isolate, gluten, casein, whey protein and 'mechanically separated meat') or of additives with cosmetic functions (flavours, flavour enhancers, colours, emulsifiers, emulsifying salts, sweeteners, thickeners and anti-foaming, bulking, carbonating, foaming, gelling and glazing agents) in their list of ingredients.
They have a different definition of "no culinary use" than I do!
Earlier in the definition it uses the more conservative phrase "no or rare culinary use," which I think is more accurate. The point is just to attempt to categorize foods by processing levels in a way the public can understand.
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.
Thanks for linking that. Their rubric for ultra-processed is easy enough to grok that folks could use this at a grocery store. We're on a kick to remove "parameters" from tasks right now, so this definition is clearer than thoughts like "stick to the outside of the store."
Reducing the parameters on tasks, and eliminating tasks has been a huge win for us. Tranquility, and still results.
This is venturing off-topic, but can you expand on "eliminating tasks." Is eliminating a task like setting up auto bill pay, or getting rid of items that I don't want to clean?
I mean, the cattle itself is turning a green pea into beef through a highly complicated and expensive process. Call me a scientific reductionist but there's no reason you can't theoretically replicate that in a lab.
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.
There’s not much hysteria in that highly processed foods tend to give less satiety relative to both their calorie density and nutrient content (since your digestive process and signals don’t trip the same way they do with whole foods).
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.
Many vegetarian meat substitutes, including the Beyond Burger, contains methylcellulose. It is one of several emulsifiers both often associated with "ultra-processed foods", and known from several studies to affect the mucus lining the intestinal wall, increasing the risk for infection and suspected of increasing cancer risk.
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?
Processed food concerns are hysterical is a unique take
It is, mostly, hysteria. The problem is that we're just assuming processed foods are bad period, but even if you don't eat processed foods you can eat a very poor diet.
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.
There is ongoing research linking depression to ultra processed food consumption: https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/ultraprocessed-...
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...
These studies are legitimately worthless, and I'll explain why.
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.
Not at all. We're in the post-truth era. Anything you dislike can be denied and dismissed, and nothing anyone says will convince you otherwise. There's no objective truth, just what you prefer and therefore insist must be.
Many people are clearly going overboard and using processed foods as an excuse for making the naturalistic fallacy. (Or maybe today we would say that processed foods are used as a "thought terminating cliche".)
Pea protein and coconut oil aren’t the greatest. Probably similar to meat.
It was more unhealthy in the past due to the sodium, saturated fat, and possibly some of the additives/preservatives. It was unhealthy enough that the company even changed to a new formula with avocado oil, which might be better, but I haven't looked into it.
It's not hysteria. Beyond Meat uses way too much processing in their food. They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.
What I mean is that clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed. All the correlations go away when you control for basic things like sugar and vegetable consumption. The whole idea that processed foods are bad for health is a hysteria.
Using the amount of processing - particularly processing that hasn't been studied - as a heuristic for health vs. unhealthy is pretty reasonable. We have lots of examples over the last 70 years of companies claiming a new processed food is better or safe, only for it to be harmful. And a lot of the changes seemed innocuous:
- 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
The problem of course is looking at foods in isolation vs as part of a diet.
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.
> clearly processed foods aren't harmful because they are processed
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.
Do you have some studies proving out that control for vegetables and sugar is all that is needed? I am skeptical that just controlling for those would eliminate the risks with other processing ingredients such as cured meats.
Edit: why disagree?
Well lumping packaged cookies and cured meats together is already part of the problem. The former is bad in excess because of the high calories and poor lipid profile. The latter because of colon cancer risk.
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.
The term is too vague. That’s different from “hysteria.”
Treating food with chemicals usually it's not good. Also you simply don't know what exactly are they doing.
Like ultra processed american bread is not so good comparing with european wholegrain sourdough bread.
Consider how broad the phrase “treating food with chemicals” is, and you’ll start to see the problem with this kind of thinking. The word “chemical” includes literally everything that food is made of.
Particularly pointless pedantry. We all know what they mean, and are to assume the best reading of what they're saying.
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.
It's not pointless pedantry at all, because whole foods are ALSO treated with chemicals.
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?
Processing by itself is not a bad thing. Everything is "chemicals" in some sense and what you mean in particular is not bad in general.
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.
“Chemicals” are overused as a term for sure, but there is a huge difference between what’s legal in America and Europe that brings a shred of truth to the previous statements.
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.
And there are a handful of chemicals banned in the US for health concerns that the EU is fine with.
Individual cases are interesting. For example, Wikipedia says this of E122:
> 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?
I hear they even process it with dihydrogen monoxide!
I'd rather apply hot dihydrogen monoxide to my dry lentils than use compound prepared by Beyond Meat.
I don’t understand the downvotes. Replacing foods that have been prepared in the same way for hundreds of years with foods treated with processes that have not yet been considered harmful is inherently risky. There are plenty of examples of unknown byproducts, isomers, and side effects that take years to flesh out.
I have noticed that Americans get wildly defensive about their bread, which is mostly objectively inferior, by far, to any decent European bread.
I don't know if it's reciting the pledge every day or the lack of experience on what good bread actually feels like; or if the health effects of eating US bread are just taken for granted because it's eaten daily, but American bread is bloody scary and should be recognized as such.
The 70s/80s want their insult back. You can buy any quality you want in the US, when willing to pay for it.
But we still have to listen to complaints that the only choices available are Wonder, Lipton, and Budweiser. Not true—literally for decades now.
> They literally have patented processes to alter protein structures.
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.
You mean peroxide? Not bleach?
Hydrogen peroxide is one of many bleaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peroxide-based_bleach
Hydrogen peroxide in particular is a common hair bleach, hence "peroxide blonde"
I mean, so do cows and chickens.
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).
> before wrapping in some cling film and pressing it into a patty
Why do you wrap it? Couldn't you also form the burger patty without the cling film?
It allows you to add some pressure to the patty while providing it a restricted space in which it can expand. By doing so the ingredients seem to form a much stronger bond (from my experience). I used to do the same with beef when I ate it.
Also, rolling it into a ball and then wrapping before flattening gives a much better shape to the resulting patty
Pretty common thing to do to help limit cleanup and help shape the patties (regardless of what they're made of).
If you'd rather avoid the single-use-ish plastic, then wax paper usually works as well.
> 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
Sounds like processing to me
Cool, we have a semantics issue. Processing can mean "any change to a food item" such as chopping, cooking, etc. In these kinds of conversations, it's often used as "significant alterations that are not possible or common outside of a food lab". E.g. I can do cured meats, or add corn starch to a soup at home. I'm not going to make partially hydrogenated oils or pink slime for chicken nuggets.
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
Enjoy your home-made herbs and spices instead of dangerous lab-made drugs, I guess
Is this really a problem with Beyond Meat or a problem with our policies not correctly pricing meat due to not caring about the environment or animal welfare?
It's the same policy whether it's real meat patties or beyond meat, because beyond beef has the same main ingredient as the feed for the cattle: soybeans.
How much soy does it take to raise 1kg of beef compared with producing 1kg of beyond meat?
Why does that matter? US ag subsidies are for crops. They effect cow prices the same as they effect beyond prices. Beyond is more expensive because it doesnt have enough competition.
Beyond Beef derives its protein from peas, and explicitly advertises "no soy".
A lot of people would say it is a problem with making the entire population pay for the moral preferences of a few.
"The entire population" doesn’t want to eat only beef and drink milk, however those are way more subsidized than other food. The real winners are food mega corps and a few rich farmers.
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.
While the entire population externalises the negative effects of their diet on the rest of the world. If you’d sit alone on that branch you’re sawing off, I’d say good riddance! But unfortunately, you’re destroying this marvellous spaceship we all depend on, just for a little convenience.
True. People would have said the same in defence of colonialism, slavery, genocide etc.
Generations later it's easy to look back and say "of course that stuff was bad, I would have fought against it too".
The market decides the price. We don’t need politicians and biased scientists moralizing about what we can and can’t do and what we should care about.
That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those 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.
> That’s not really how the world works. Most governments already massively subsidises their agricultural sectors to create some desired eating habits in their population. The market just adjusts prices around those subsidies.
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.
https://usafacts.org/articles/federal-farm-subsidies-what-da...
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.
Farm subsidies primarily happen because farmers vote. And you haven’t shown any evidence that farm subsidies privilege beef over potatoes.
The market decides the price, but politics decide the constraints of the market. Agriculture in particular is heavily involved with the government, because agriculture is very risky, and needs large investments. The government already decides what we care about, and is already pretty corrupt because of the "market" powers - the different lobbies - influence it.
A freer market doesn't solve these issues, just exacerbates it. A stronger, more independent, more democratic government would ease these problems.
If you choose not to eat meat because you disagree with eating animals, why would you want to eat fake dead animal?
Besides the reasons of sheer taste, another good reason is culture. Meaning, the preexisting meat-eating culture at a place. One of the reasons why vegan / vegetarian / etc options are often lacking is because there is no longstanding culture of eating those dishes at that certain place, and so, a vegan dish will likely come from a meat dish, minus the meat. But that dish is created around the meat, so without the meat, it will be lacking, like taking the patty out of a burger, or taking the meatballs out of the spaghetti with meatballs.
So, a quick solution is to create a substitute to the missing thing. That way, the culture problem is immediately solved, as the alternative dish will the be the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted. As a bonus, it will be very similar to the existing, accepted culture, so the participant doesn't become an outsider. Also, for many, it's easier to adopt, than changing the culture entirely.
My experience has been that nobody gives a shit if you go to a restaurant in a group and order an explicitly vegetarian meal that isn't trying to emulate meat patties etc.
But they do care if you're trying to drag the entire friend group to a vegetarian restaurant.
In university, a group of friends once decided on heading out to dim sum for a celebration; one of them was Jewish, and ended up basically becoming a vegetarian for a day (since pork is all over the place in that cuisine). It was a source of lighthearted amusement for all and everyone was fully accommodating.
North American food culture doesn't depend on familiarity ("the same dish, just with the questionable thing substituted") at all. If anything, being a picky eater is discouraged and a sense of culinary adventure is praised. The service at QSRs has gotten slower in part because of pressure to reconfigure their basic ingredients into new, unfamiliar recipes. (Taco Bell is basically dedicated to this craft — and the greasy ground-beef slop doesn't even really look that different from the black bean slop anyway.)
Which is to say, it's not the meat eaters trying to impose culture on others. Vegetarians and vegans in my experience demonstrate an entirely unjustified persecution complex — the "they'll tell you" stereotype arises from the fact that people simply wouldn't care if it weren't explicitly brought up. That Simpson's episode with Lisa attempting vegetarianism was amusing, but also portrayed a world entirely alien to me.
Yes, North Americans eat a fair bit of meat on average. That's not at all the same thing as the dishes being "created around" the meat. We don't say "meatballs and spaghetti" (I even started automatically typing it the normal way around); substituting the meatballs for ground meat in the sauce is as natural as substituting a different shape of pasta.
Whole pieces of meat have a particular cachet, but this is because it's harder to hide a quality issue this way. Making a patty is missing the point. A hamburger is simply not highbrow cuisine. It's one culturally-established recipe, out of many, which is preferred in the context where it is mainly for convenience as finger food.
The proper vegetarian equivalent to a burger is a vegetarian wrap. (Or veggies on a bun, if the "bun form factor" is contextually important.) The proper vegetarian equivalent to a fancy meal with whole cuts of grilled meat is a fancy meal with artfully plated grilled vegetables.
Same way that I disagree with shooting people, but I can enjoy doing so in video games
Why do so many people ask this question about burgers? It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.
> It's a fried patty. Even for the meat kind, there's essentially no resemblance to the original animal.
Sure, but I would say that means vegetarian cuisine has less reason to emulate the form. It's entirely arbitrary. The point of eating a burger is that it's yet another convenient way of getting meat on a bun. (cf. fast-food places describing them as "sandwiches".) The social ritual of eating burgers with friends isn't about seeing the patty extend past the edges of the bun and thinking about the cow. It's about everyone holding something they'll enjoy eating, conveniently wrapped and portable, and chowing down. The burger is recognizable as a "burger" (as distinct from a wrap or a traditional sandwich) from the bun before it's recognizable from the contents. (Which is part of why the marketplace had no problem accepting chicken burgers.)
So anything that holds the vegetables together and keeps them inside a bun ought to work just fine. If our prospective new vegetarian wants the burger filling to taste like (or match texture etc.) a beef patty, that's a personal issue.
Food is not just food: it's culture.
These replacements have value because sometimes you want the thing that gives you that nostalgia kick or whatever specific feeling you associate with food. Old school plant based replacements don't always feel right for this.
This is a really important point that I think a lot of people who aren't vegan don't get. There might be an understanding that food is culture (lets order chinese, or italian), but realizing that's not a culture you experience but a culture you live.
The first thing many new vegans ask is "what do I eat now?" The replacement food comes first, and beyond hits the mark a lot more than seitan does because we don't culturally eat seitan.
And even more so, I think beyond has made it so an entire generation realized they could go vegan. A black bean burger just never hit the same way.
Have you never enjoyed a burger and a beer with your friends? Or is that you fail to see the social component of eating?
Doesn't seem relevant. There's a decent amount of veggie/vegan options these days without using fake meat.
Fake meat isn't really a product for vegetarians/vegans. It's is a product aimed at creating vegetarians/vegans, and that's going to be much harder.
I always feel like people are being intentionally obtuse when making these arguments. I'm vegan and know many vegans who enjoy beyond meat. We didn't go vegan because we didn't like the taste of things which were traditionally derived from animal flesh, and it's nice to be able to enjoy effectively the same foods without the animal exploitation.
That is probably coming from someone that eats meat.
> Fake meat isn't really a product for vegetarians/vegans
This is just flat-out wrong.
I became vegetarian early in life mostly because of the industrialisation of meat production, and the treatment of animals within that system, and the perception that it's just an incredibly unhealthy production line (e.g. steroid use in livestock, etc)
I recall enjoying meat flavours, so I'd be tempted to try this fake meat for occasional, one-off enjoyment.
And I say one-off as my experience says there are enough flavours and alternatives out there such that a replacement like this isn't really needed at all. That might be the real market issue for Beyond Meat (in my life, anyway).
This is a non sequitur, but I don't know. I don't. I think the reason is people aren't used to eating plants and find the tastes and textures disagreeable. It's a taste that can be acquired at any time, though. I stopped eating meat for ethical reasons, but I'd only go back if I was literally starving. Vegetables taste so much better, but you need a cuisine that does vegetables properly, like Indian or Mexican. Trying to do a bland cuisine like American or British without meat isn't going to be a good time.
Why do you fucking think? Because it's tasty. You can disagree with the ethics of how we make animals suffer because they taste nice and still think they taste nice.
All in all, despite the fact that it is not real meat, nothing proves that Beyond Meat production is better for the planet. If you factor production materials, energy,... Not sure what it gives.
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
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.
> I could buy a free range, organic and grass fed beef burger for the price of their ultra processed burger.
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.
I think that for this exact reason Beyond Meat (or other alternatives) need a similar boost, in order to be financially competitive as well.
It’d probably be a better idea to stop the agriculture subsidies and let everyone compete and innovate on a level playing field.
Agriculture is very risky, and needs large investments, and has low margins, so it's a good candidate for subsidies and other such government measures, like insurance. And the people need to eat, so it's essential as well.
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.
Aren't they massively subsidized already? It's soybeans, after all.
I checked out one resource, and they say that there it's "pea protein isolate" mostly.
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.
Most soybeans are fed to animals and only a tiny amount of soybean calories are converted into meat. So a soybean subsidy scales better in the meat industry and makes their product disproportionally cheaper.
and unfortunatly cows raised on soybeans yields trash quality meat with high amounts of omega 6 vs 3.
I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted. It’s a good national policy.
Keeping groceries cheap is politically important. It's the bread in bread and circus.
That's a political decision that needs to be applied to the alternative protein industry. However, given the current political climate and the acceptance of disinformation, that's going to be challenging.
Indeed, and indeed.
So the biggest problem here is that Beyond Meat has a huge debt due in just 2 years:
To put the "$1B" number into the context, Beyond Meat sold $300M worth of plant-based meats last year, and made a net operating loss of $156M. Their total assets are $600M, and the market capitalization is only $260M as of today.If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
And this as well:
> 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.)
> 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.
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.
I would guess the primary target market is ex meat eaters that are trying to go vegetarian but have been raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat. I am in this group. I agree it’s not a very large market for the reasons you stated above. However, maybe BM hoped they could grow that market, I.e. convince more meat eaters to give it up for ethical reasons.
I am in a similar group; the mostly-vegetarian. Chicken when I don't have a real choice, red meat at a wedding like once a year or something.
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.
Same. Chicken, eggs, and yogurt are the only animal products I consume regularly.
Why would it have to only be ex-meat eaters? It may be just my (admittedly biased) opinion, but I think that Big Meat has managed to turn meat-eating into a quasi-religion — almost like football. I also try to not shy away from knowing where my food comes from, and how it was processed and produced; if you know about the cruel and unsanitary living conditions for cattle, the underpaid and overworked labor that helps process it, and the deforestation and water needed in order to produce it... you then find the meat does not go down as easy anymore.
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.
I totally agree with your strong feelings on the meat industry. The reason I said the main market is ex meat eaters is because if you’re still eating meat then any craving for the taste/texture/smell of meat is at least getting partially satisfied by the meat you’re still eating. There’s definitely some market for people just trying to cut down on meat though, and that’s great too.
Thanks for steelmanning my argument.
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.
"raised to enjoy the taste/texture of meat"
Humans have evolved to enjoy the taste/texture/smell of cooked meat
If you speak with vegetarians/vegans who have been raised that way and never eaten meat you will find many that are repulsed by it. Nurture seems to be able to override nature here and, as far as I’m aware, there’s no strong evidence that we’re born with an inherent taste for meat, we’re just born with bodies that need certain nutrients that are easily obtained from meat but can be found elsewhere.
Yeah, their comment gave me a chuckle. lol
Yeah. HN doesn't really have a sense of humour, which I used to find frustrating, but which (having now spent a lot more time on other forums, like Reddit), I fully appreciate the wisdom of.
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.
I think the company was a bet that if you make a good enough meat substitute, then meat eaters will switch to it (sometimes), and that's a huge total addressable market. I would say that bet has not come off. But that's hindsight - the whole point of startups is to take bets.
I think you're right: that was definitely the bet, but it really should have entered their heads that being more expensive than actual meat[0] would guarantee the bet wouldn't pay off.
[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.
> If they could magically become profitable at 10% profit margin, it would take 20+ years to repay the debt. It's hopeless.
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.
> Why is that hopeless?
because you can’t take 20 years to pay off debt that is due in 2 years.
Refinancing, but whoever lends them the money will take a long hard look at the rest of their finances and decide to pass.
The article mentions this as an agreement between the bondholders and shareholders, I believe, who are both mutually incentivized to come to agreement. If I understood correctly the bondholders agree to a future convertible note of some sort.
> Why is that hopeless? Maybe I'm too green or optimistic but that just requires long-term planning.
They don't have 20 years to pay it off. Debt is due in 2 years
That's got to be an incredible expenditure then. Considering their pricing compared to the better store brand alternatives, while not lacking any scale disadvantages, I expect high margins on the products themselves.
The impossible to pay debt just means the company goes bankrupt and new owners can keep operating it without the debt.
That they lose 45 cents from every dollar of sales is the killer.
They need to announce that they are working on lab grown meat and expect to be shipping 10 million patties a month by the end of the year. Then at the end of year say you have a new formula that will halve costs and will be shipping 15 million a month by mid 2026. Rinse and repeat. Just like Tesla.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
It seems clear that the purpose of your comment is to "drag" an unrelated company.
Debt can always be restructured.
> If they could magically ... it would take 20+ years ...
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.
The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that. I rather see more and more friends and people avoid eating meat or reduce their consumption drastically. Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.
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.
> The hidden message of the title: Plant based alternatives may not succeed.
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.
Often I think it's largely based on the types of food people grew up with. Meat and potato diets seem to struggle with reducing the meat part of their diet. People often try to eat the same stuff but substitute meat with bad imitations of meat. In other places, as an example, Indian food has plenty of choices without meat and is delicious.
Maybe they went with burgers because it's low effort: everything else is the same (bun, salad, fries). Just replace the patty, which still goes through the same process.
Again, missing the opportunity that vegetarian/vegan food can be healthier, not just removing of animal cruelty and death.
>They're trying to sell a very expensive mechanical horse. Just give people a car.
I love this analogy.
> Many buy plant based alternatives to milk as well. Twenty years ago only a few people would ask for oat/soy milk when ordering a coffee. But these days many do.
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).
As a meat eater trying to casually reduce my meat consumption, I find myself buying more tofu, lentils and beans, rather than processed meat-like substitutes. I think that is the issue. People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.
> People who want to eat meat will just eat actual meat, and people who don't want to eat meat will not feel compelled to eat a meat lookalike.
This is an extremely strong generalization that is obviously not true in many cases.
It doesn't have to be true of everyone to be an entirely plausible hypothesis for why highly-processed mock-meat alternatives are struggling.
Beyond Meat is industrial plant-based protein. The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants. That means their market is is poor and lower middle-class folks—hence the distribution through fast food and mid-grade grocery channels.
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...
> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.
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.
> I can get a 4 lb. bag of split yellow peas for $6 CAD locally without even trying to look for a sale
Not as tasty as meat or garden-fresh vegetables.
Says you. My split pea soup is awesome.
> The wealthy and upper middle class can afford real plants.
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.
> don’t understand this take on what (is / should be) a premium brand
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.
The market must be very different in the US. In the UK, Beyond Meat is the most expensive meat free option in my local supermarket, other than one type of fake steak. There are some other premium brands at slightly lower prices, then cheaper brands, and finally supermarket own brands.
> Beyond Meat is the most expensive meat free option in my local supermarket
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.
> Globally? Sure. In developed countries, of course not.
Not even the poor immigrants from countries with those food cultures? Really?
More like "hyper-processed plant-based faux-meat may not succeed".
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.
There are lots of high end vegetarian restaurants in Beijing that focus on fake meat. Pure Lotus is a famous one, that goes over the top on everything. I don’t really get the appeal, I would rather have more vegetarian-honest dishes at a veg place (I’m not a vegetarian)
And worse: really expensive compared to other brands or store brands. This is my issue with Beyond.
Beyond meat burgers taste like flavored plastic grounds, so until these plant based alternatives can close the taste gap its not going to go anywhere. And they have had years to make it taste better, so I suspect theres something fundamental that makes it very difficult.
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 texture and mouth feel isn't right either.
can't help but feel like including "plastic" here is just hysteria, I eat them regularly and it's certainly not accurate
Yeah i’m a meat eater just trying to avoid cholesterol (it has 0) and it’s a great alternative.
The real issue is that it’s not stocked in many supermarkets in the USA. Whole foods for example doesn’t sell it.
That says a lot about the public
Food is one of the joys in life that people can enjoy no matter where they are on the socioeconomic spectrum.
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.
Relatively cheap, it feels like fast food now has more emphasis on convenience/consistency and less on price/value (in my experience in the US midwest).
Value menu still exists
Agree. As a side note McDonalds veggie nuggets are from behind meat and they rank equally to the chickens one one the taste and processing scales.
The regular nuggets are from behind meat. The veggie ones are from Beyond Meat.
(Yes, this is a "nuggets are made from butt meat" joke on a typo.)
> they rank equally to the chickens one one the taste and processing scales.
What does that even mean?
I wasn't clear by grouping a subjective and a (supposed) objective opinion. I 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_...
The mcdonalds/wendys/etc nuggets are junk, injection molded meat paste in 4 shapes. You have to go to popeyes or chic fil a to get actual chicken nuggets.
Enjoyment and beneficial two different concepts that often get mashed together. Excessive amounts of sugar and salt are often added to food to make it "taste" good and become "enjoyable".
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.
The biggest issue to me is that beyond and impossible aren’t just making replacements that are worse than meat, they are making things that are worse than the alternatives we already had.
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.
Actually, we'd expect better health outcomes on a plant-based meat patty than real meat: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32780794/
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.
Delicious vegetarian food is already a thing, and doesn't require new technology, and it's not necessary to completely eliminate meat-eating to significantly reduce your ethical-harm footprint. It's a matter of changing food culture. Once you adapt to an omnivore diet that contains tasty meals from both meat and non-meat cuisine, it's actually quite easy to reduce your meat intake further.
I was raised as a meat eater and ate it for 30 years. I’ve been vegetarian for about a decade for ethical reasons that I do believe are incompatible with eating any meat. I consider myself a good cook and make vegetarian/vegan meals for my family every night. However: I will never stop thinking that the taste of chicken, pork, beef and lamb are desirable. The conditioning is too strong. Sticking with vegetarianism is still an act of willpower for me. This is why I like meat alternatives.
> Plant based alternatives may not succeed. I don’t believe that.
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.
Soy and oat milk is also incredibly expensive compared to cow for what it is. Same for most supermarket tofu in the West. The cheapest own-brand tofu in Tesco is the same as the beef mince (£6.50/kg).
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.
In the Netherlands it's dirt cheap in all supermarkets. 550g package, so 500g of tofu is €3.72/kg, soy milk is €0.80/l.
Perhaps there isn’t much demand in your Tesco. Store brand (organic) soy milk is 0.9€ here in Paris which is cheaper than the organic cow alternative - which is subsidized btw.
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.
> I've always seen people buying "meat replacements" as kind of lazy
Pretty harsh to expect people to throw away their entire food culture just to cut down on meat consumption.
Also why does everything need to come with a snide remark?
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.
Well, that is probably just some kind of perception bias.
Of course vegans or vegetarians have more vegan or vegetarian friends.
If it helps you, I know hardly anyone who eats plant base meat.
I think it’s largely a cultural problem though. Good tasting alternatives to meat and vegetarian dishes have existed in other cultures for a long time. But Western cultures, you immediately try and find a facsimile that needs a start up to produce rather than just cook something else.
Same thing with coffee. Just drink black coffee? Nope, let’s work out how to convert nut juice into something that froths using emulsifiers!
I think the article is more about one company that over-expanded and now has massive debt and no chance of repaying it.
It is sustainable.
It is. Just not at the rate we consume it.
Everything comes down to world population, which has quadrupled in a century, making the previously-sustainable now unsustainable.
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.
> Everything comes down to world population
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.
When we look at the places that have experienced degrowth in this country such as the midwestern cities, it is hard to argue today that the effects were truly all that bad. They still have all the services, institutions, and plenty of the entertainment options you'd expect. Major hospitals and universities. They aren't full of derelict homes either, those have been all more or less razed by now.
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.
HN Bio: FinTech + Space + B2C angel & seed investor. Jackson Hole local; frequently in New York and the Bay Area.
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.
> why degrowth looks extreme to you
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.
Is it? Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth. Even if it isn’t us, there will be a last generation that enjoys growth as the motor of wealth. At some point, resources will deplete and the standard of living will decrease as a consequence. This is logically inevitable. Everyone just pretends this can go on and on without stopping, but that’s wrong.
> Even the most simple person should understand that a closed system with finite resources won’t sustain infinite growth
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.
Degrowth is inevitable.
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.
> This is nonsense. The consumptive, energy and material intensity of GDP, as well as GDP/capita, have varied greatly across time and countries.
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.
> So is growth at any cost
Yes. It is. We deeply regulate growth in every economy.
Your word, plausible
Beans dude. Beans are absolutely delicious. They grow in the ground by accident. A good bean burger is way more appetizing than a biosludge patty. Unfortunately nobody is getting rich selling beans. But they are all we need here
Chock full of nutrients and protein too!
It’s interesting that alternative meat consumption in the U.S. is struggling but taking off in Europe.
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.
Here in hill country Texas, even Walmart sells MorningStar corn dogs. H-E-B carries most of the Impossible line including meatballs. I made some dirty rice with the IF ground "beef" and it was awesome. There's almost no oil in it, browning onions and peppers required adding some avocado oil (never use olive oil for high temperature cooking).
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.
> never use olive oil for high temperature cooking
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...
350 degrees is not high temperature cooking. Stir fry for instance is 500+ degrees and even higher
All this in F of course
> vegan parm
Have you tried nutritional yeast? I use it everywhere I’d put parm. The taste is a bit different but as much delicious.
> When vegan parm and swiss cheese get as good as the real stuff, then I'd go vegan.
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.
Can you say more? I've got milk allergies and I might want to try making this just for me.
You can make vegan cheeses with nut milk.
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”
Sorry, I wanted to know about the egg cheese
> There's almost no oil in the ground beef, so adding some avocado oil while browning onions and peppers was required.
Their sausage works well for that, no added oil needed.
Part of their financial woes might come from them paying for shelf space at retailers and/or making sale guarantees. A grocery chain will gladly carry a poorly performing product if the manufacturer is paying them to do so.
I live in the US and it's normalized here as well. Not sure where you lived but there's ample variety of dairy alternatives that are offered at grocery stores, coffee shops, etc.
It's not all of the UK, you get asked in London, not in the countryside. Same in the Netherlands, you get asked in Amsterdam but not much outside.
I guess San Francisco also has much more oatmilk latte's than rural villages
Obviously it depends on the venue. We visited many coffee shops on our recent trip through the Baltics and then across Ireland, and were always asked which of 6 "milk" options we wanted.
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.
It’s very normalized in any of the medium to large cities in the Netherlands.
(take “medium to large” with a grain of salt given that means population of 100k)
I don't know I've been in Bristol and Cornwall last week and was always asked. I guess you can extend that to anywhere they might reasonably expect a Londoner to turn up.
It's more about the density of hipsters than Londoners per se. Lots of Londoners go to Canvey Island for a holiday, but you probably won't get oat milk there, because it's not that kind of Londoner. Bristol and the West Country are crawling with their own local hipsters.
(actually, you probably will oat milk on Canvey, it really is everywhere now)
> Bristol and the West Country are crawling with their own local hipsters.
So it isn't only London then?
I feel like most coffee shops here in California always ask what type of milk you want, too.
What part of the UK does this happen in? I've never been asked this. I can only assume you're in London?
As a counter, I cant remember the last time I wasn't asked what milk I'd prefer. In fact, I now prefer oat milk in coffee to regular milk
Woops, sorry, yes, this is in London.
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...
> 35% of UK households purchased plant-based milk at least once during 2023
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.
Having lived in both the US and Europe, I have to imagine at least some of that comes down to cost. In Europe, the plant based alternatives (at least where I lived) were actually cheaper, and meaningfully so.
Also, they taste better? I have been a vegetarian since 1999. Even in the small village I lived with my parents, the local supermarket had a meat replacement section. Later I moved to a larger city and the product selection at supermarkets is very large and nice. A few years ago, supermarkets also started carrying Beyond Meat products. We tried them a few times, but they taste absolutely horrible compared to local offerings that have been developed for decades now.
In my neck of the woods you can easily find plant-based alternatives, but I've found that the best ones are those that don't try too hard to mimic meat.
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.
Interesting, in Britain it's completely the opposite. Alternative milk is way more expensive.
This is only true if you buy the chilled branded stuff, most of the big supermarkets sell generic soy, oat, almond, coconut for £1/litre
Here in Korea where soy milk has been a staple forever, its price has more than doubled over the last 5 years, now ~$1.4/L. Still cheaper than milk currently at ~$1.7/L, but it used to be twice as cheap as milk.
Same in Germany (~1€/l for milk, 2€/l for pretty much all milk replacements.
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
Lidl has oat/soy milk for 99 cents, and the NoMilk clones for 1,50. In fact, Lidl had a respectable replacement line up now. If you only buy Alpro Milk then yeah, it's gonna be more expensive, but prices have come down tremendously, especially once the discounters hopped on that train.
Yesterday I bought some oat-based milk-like at Aldi for 90c/l (regular price). It's labeled "oat drink", so might not substitute milk. The (literal) "almost milk" product is listed online for 1,09€/l. They also had options based on other stuff for a similar price.
First time I noticed them there, but mind I don't go to Aldi that often.
> [profit margin]
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.
Some high street chains already make some of their products with plant-based milk by default. I was shocked to hear the cow milk being an "option".
I posted before: I care more about the nutritional content being close to meat than the look and taste; specifically, similar macro-nutrient ratios and whatever micro-nutrients are rare outside of meat.
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 remember when veggie burgers first came out and they actually featured veggies and tried to taste like veggies instead of psuedo-meat patties. They were so good! Then everything tried to just clone meat, poorly, in taste and texture and they were so much worse. But those first ones that really tasted like veggies were delish.
Are you a vegetarian? I'm not, and really enjoy a good black bean patty. But when I crave a juicy beef hamburger, I have one. Vegetarians might prefer to satisfy cravings with something closer to their childhood memories than a black bean patty.
Unless they have some rare condition that doesn't allow them to eat meat, they can satisfy the cravings by having the odd burger. It won't kill them.
I honestly don't understand the vegetarian who constantly craves meat.
It will kill another living thing though. It's not that hard to understand - you know it tastes good but don't want to cause direct suffering.
The burger is already in the store. The way the food industry works they'd probably kill the same number of cows every year to preserve the size of their asset (the farm/heads of cattle) and get a subsidy from government for the crop loss that didn't sell.
I remember the veggie burgers they're talking about and they weren't black bean patties. The one I remember had potato with peas in it... god, it was delicious
It sounds like your describing aloo tikki. It's really delicious and sometimes used as a vegetarian burger patty.
The thing with vegetarians is they tend to lose their sense of taste and smell for meat. Many vegetarians actually find the smell of cooked meat pretty revolting/nauseating since they are no longer primed for it. Anecdotally I know a vegetarian who hates one of these patties, I can't remember if it was the beyond product or the impossible burger, specifically because they tried and make it a little bit more "bloody" like a meat patty which made it disgusting to them.
I'm glad that people have the option of those if they like them. Personally, I find the veggie patties to be awful in both taste and especially texture. I was thrilled when there started being options other than the pervasive gardenburgers.
Both exist. Portabello burgers are great too. There's nothing wrong with choice.
Portabello pizzas are also great. It's not the same as a wheat crust pizza but great in its own way.
hmm.. you would buy it but aren't?
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.
I thought sodium was really bad for you though
The beef patty numbers are solely raw beef, they do not include the seasoning required to make it taste like a hamburger.
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.
>they do not include the seasoning required to make it taste like a hamburger.
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.
Zero sodium also kills you because you need electrolytes to live. Like almost literally every complex system, there is a zone of moderation/goodness/health.
It actually nearly killed my wife’s grandmother. Until some doctor realized she avoided salt like the plague, gave her some and she made a miraculous discovery.
*recovery.
Salt is only bad for you if you don't drink water.
These meat substitutes are UPF and that’s what you should care about more than nutritional content.
OK, we need to pick something apart here, because I see this a lot and it's annoying.
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.
>UPF is not inherently bad. Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you.
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.
These meat substitutes use the bad kind on the NOVA scale. Gums and binders.
I am current reading the book you mentioned which is why I made this comment.
Regular pasta, bread, and yoghurt are processed, not ultraproccessed.
(the shelf-stable varieties are often ultraprocessed though, and are less healthy than the non ultra-processed ones)
> Some UPFs (Pasta, wholemeal bread, baked beans, probiotic yoghurts, wheat biscuit cereals), are actually good for you
But the less processed the better. And eating something else is probably better still.
Does it worry you at all that meat is ultimately made of whatever food the animal eats and processed into a litany of chemicals?
I feel the UPF "debate" is just an appeal to nature, and calorie/nutrient density should be what we fixate on.
> Does it worry you at all that meat is ultimately made of whatever food the animal eats and processed into a litany of chemicals?
As much as the same can be said about plants.
I think the UPF debate just comes down to "things I want to be healthy are not UPF, and things I want to be unhealthy I call UPF."
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.
[flagged]
Please don't comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to.
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.
go fuck yourself
Many (most?) plant based meat substitutes contain methyl cellulose. There are studies like [1] that seem to connect it to intestinal inflammation.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5410598/
"UPF"?
"Ultra Processed Food" - I suspect? I disagree, IMO. It feels like a oversimplification, it's a sometimes useful rule of thumb that works in some cases, but not in others. Definitely not the end all be all of nutrition.
BM is getting rarer on the shelves in Austria. When it first showed up, it was something special, but now there are heaps of great other alternative meats, often cheaper and made here. I guess BM is struggling because of increased competition. During my 20 years of plant based dieat it has never been easier to find fancy plant based things.
Yeah, there is a camp of people who see headlines like this and (giddily) think it spells the demise of plant-based alternatives, probably because since they don't shop plant-based products, their mental concept is stuck 15 years ago where BM was new and experimental, so now they think "heh, not surprised that flopped and we can move on".
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.
This is too bad. Beyond and Impossible opened up the door to me gradually becoming vegan. It was similar enough to real meat that I didn’t miss meat anymore, and from there I found other substitutions which were healthier. Without them I’m sure I never would have started a plant-based diet.
Deciding to abandon meat is a lot like quitting cigarettes. Sometimes you need a long time to ease off, some artificial/processed replacement (e.g. nicotine patches), it won't feel the same or "good enough", there's a lot of psychological struggle, even your body just demands its shot. It can take a lot of dedicated effort.
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.
What have you substituted cheese with? It's one of my favorite foods but no substitute has come close to it
What kind of cheese? If you want something strong like blue cheese you can try fermented tofu
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.
Sad truth is there isn’t a real substitute. You just eat it less and desire it less over time.
Unrelated to cheese but MyBacon is fantastic if you can get it near you.
Violife is probably the best for shredded (mozzarella/cheddar) but its still not great.
I really like Field Roast Chao slices for things like burgers or sandwiches.
I replaced it with insatiable yearning. It's not as good, but it's all I've got.
Including Miyoko's? https://www.miyokos.com/products/fresh-plant-milk-mozzarella...
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
I love Miyoko's products, their oat butter is amazing, I use it daily.
> It's one of my favorite foods but no substitute has come close to it
Why do you want to? Lactovegetarianism is far more precedented than veganism.
Cheese uses lots and lots of milk. There are questions of ethics (the treatment of dairy cows is often less than stellar) and carbon footprint (cheese is worse than pork, for example.)
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.
> cheese is worse than pork, for example
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.
You are definitely from a culture that doesn't guzzle cheese like Americans. So out of curiosity I went to your comment history and your previous comment was "Here in Korea".
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.
You can split the difference by shelling out for high quality grass fed cheeses only on occasion. In terms of treatment it seems to me cows suffer far less than chickens and pigs.
https://kite-hill.com/products/chives-cream-cheese is a great option for bagels. I prefer it to normal cream cheese.
Vegan cheese is made from cashews. If you’re in the Bay Area try Arizmendi’s vegan pizza. Surprisingly good.
What is the ecological impact of cashew farming? If it's anything like almonds you're not doing the planet any favors.
I looked them up and I couldn't find any indication that they regularly offer vegan pizzas.
https://arizmendilakeshore.com/menu/
Search for "vegan" ... sorry I didn't specify which location.
In case anyone else reads this later, i found one location that does vegan pizzas, Arizmendi Bakery (Lakeshore)
They have at least six locations, and not all of them do the vegan thing
Sorry, I should have specified that. The Lakeshore one is the one I go to.
Nutritional yeast has cheese like flavor.
There are 1000s of varieties of cheese and most don't taste like nutritional yeast.
I've been vegetarian for about 8 years and won't buy them and try to avoid them in restaurants because they're too meat-like. Unfortunately they've made good non-fake meat vegetarian burgers (black bean, wild rice, etc) harder to find.
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'll echo what some of the other commenters have stated:
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.
If you care about the ethical reasons for plant-based meat, you should look at the companies business practices behind the scenes when they think no one is paying attention - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1927531529883762920
Kind of wild how they're treating creators.
You shouldn't take it so personally that they're suing you. They're obligated to try to defend their copyright if they want to be able to continue using it.
I'm not a vegetarian and I buy them exactly because they're meat-like.
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.
Because after 8 years the idea of eating meat has no remaining appeal and is switching more to mild revulsion. Why would I order a substitute that is a close copy of that?
I'll still get them if there's literally no other vegetarian option on the menu, but that's rare.
There’s no way to say this without sounding like an asshole but perhaps in 8 years your memory of what meat is like has drifted. I only say that because the rest of us wish the fake stuff was remotely comparable in taste and texture.
Both can be true. I think they try desperately to be meat, and they fail miserably.
I both remember the taste of meat and wish meat alternatives would taste like it, and I think Impossible and Beyond are both very successful at that.
For me, it's an uncanny valley thing. It's close, but missing something small and intangible which leaves me ruminating on the "fakeness."
If you didn't like that, the CEO of impossible foods is now proposing a 50/50 burger (50% fake meat, 50% meat) - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1936183159491584134
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/impossible-foods-growth-...
Sounds mad but it could work.
People seem inclined to buy hybrids over full EVs which is a comparable situation.
> You know that thing you don't eat, don't like, and don't have cravings for anymore?
That is not everyone's experience with being vegetarian.
I've been vegetarian for a long time and I still think Beyond burgers are great. I have a pack of them from Costco in the freezer. I like black bean burgers, too, but Beyond burgers taste like my (distant) memory of a "normal" burger.
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.
Was a vegetarian for about 8 years and now a pescatarian. We practically always have some Beyond products in our house and will order them at restaurants. Losing Beyond products would be a huge bummer.
Why do you assume people will stop consuming them after a few years? I think most people enjoy the taste of meat but are concerned about the environmental implications of consuming meat.
I would replace all animal products if they tasted like the real thing. I'm sorry but tofu is not cheese
> I think most people enjoy the taste of meat but are concerned about the environmental implications of consuming meat.
I don't think most people think about the environmental implications of consuming meat even remotely
Indeed. I've been vegan for nearly 5 years, and I still miss meat. Beyond and Impossible make being vegan tolerable for me.
Do you care about the ethical implications of the business practices of the brands you're supporting?
https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1927531529883762920
I'm just the opposite.
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.
Maybe they should simply stop fighting against survival.
I know this is about Beyond but I figure the audience that would care about this article would be interested in looking at Juicy Marbles: https://juicymarbles.com/collections/all-products
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
Juicy Marbles is legitimately the best plant-based replacement if you're interesting in smoking/BBQ'ing on a grill. I use them for pot-lucks with people.
Top two ingredients: engineered soy and sunflower oil. Yummy.
Ingredients make it look like engineered soy. Is there a secret sauce to making it better than meat for someone who doesn’t have that level of ethical granularity?
As a vegetarian, the problem with Beyond Meat (and other such products) is that they're too close to the original. I'm a vegetarian; I don't want to eat meat. If what I'm eating tastes too close to meat, I begin doubting it. It has happened several times in the past where I've been served (real) meat when I explicitly asked for a non-meat version (e.g. "beef burrito" instead of "bean burrito", etc.)
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 think this will vary largely based on individual opinion. Many vegetarians will feel the same way as you of course.
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.
As a vegan, hard disagree. I prefer impossible because it tastes even more like meat.
I love vegetables and grains too. Tofu and lentils etc. are delicious but sometimes I just want a burger.
My experience with Beyond (~4 years ago), was that it wasn't as good as Impossible. Impossible seemed like meat, Beyond seemed like nuts mashed into paste.
Yeah, I never understood the hype for Beyond's products. They must have just had great marketing or something because their meat barely tasted any better than any other frozen veggie burger.
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.
Beyond has other products that are decent.
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.
It's insane to me that they're struggling despite the burgers being more expensive than actual meat in my supermarket.
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.
Whether they taste nice is debatable. They had an odd aftertaste for me. I would much rather have a good mushroom or black bean burger. They taste better to me, are cheaper, and probably more healthy.
Hate these burgers. As a dairy-loving vegetarian, first the vegans came along and ruined everything by evicting most of the tasty options from restaurants, and then the meat eaters somehow wanted vegan food that tasted of animals and that became the default option on many menus. Vegetarians (who I grant you are difficult to pity as the centrists of the food world) got utterly screwed.
If you’re consuming lots of dairy, and became vegetarian to avoid animal suffering, you can just as well eat meat. Not much of a difference ethically.
That's cool. But "avoiding animal suffering" isn't the only reason people stop eating meat.
Sometimes the reason is as simple as: I just think meat is gross. No judgment on anyone else who eats it.
I added the if because of that. A lot of people aren’t aware what cows and chickens go through in industrial farming.
If the supposed tastier option is black bean burgers, can't say I agree, and I eat black beans all the time.
I kinda think beyond meat is for ppl who care about taste. You can fake meat taste and texture much cheaper.
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.
Boy, the C-suite that sold in the 2019-2021 peak at $150 a share knew what they were doing.
It’s always been awful IMO. Tastes like sawdust with a congealed vegetable oil binder and chemical flavorings that approximate meat. A straight up bean burger is better and far less processed.
Its way better than a bean burger IMHO. As a vegan, what I like most about Beyond burgers are that they are consistent, and pretty amazing at not being awful. If I'm in a random restaurant with a few token vegan options, the last thing I want to do is take a chance on some potentially terrible homemade bean or chickpea burger. If they have Beyond or Impossible, I know exactly what I'm getting.
Absolutely better than the crappy black bean or chickpea patties you'd get at most burger joints. I'd much rather have Beyond or Impossible at a cookout as well.
Yes, you know exactly what you're getting: processed garbage.
Our local drive in movie theater (remember those) offers various meal options including burgers, and I've taken to ordering the Impossible there because somehow several times in their beef burgers I've gotten significant bone chunks, to the extent that I was surprised I didn't break a tooth on them.
Right! Beyond awful
It could have to do with how they're prepped. Even the real thing can taste like sawdust and grill marks if done incorrectly. I'm personally biased towards veggie burgers and prefer them over the real thing but in the last year, I've been to multiple cookouts where both "burger dudes" and kids have chosen beyond over meat.
I agree that the level of process is questionable but, if done well, I don't think it lacks in flavor.
I bought one of these by mistake during the pandemic and immediately gagged trying to eat it. Then checked the label and realized what I had bought wasn't what I thought it was.
I think the problem is that crappy supermarket meat is really cheap, and most people don't seem to care about the quality of the meat. For those people, it's hard to justify buying a more expensive product that's not even meat.
I wonder if reducing the price (without selling at a loss) would increase sales enough to offset the lower revenue
The crappy supermarket meat is actually incredibly nutritious it just has dubious ethics for an apparently vanishingly small market segment.
But it tastes disgusting, it's one of those things where you actually get what you pay
What makes supermarket meat crappy?
Bad cuts, like pork loins that are not fatty.
Loin is usually pretty lean. If you want fatty then shoulder or belly are a better bet.
There is no crappy meat, just meat that isn't prepared well.
There's crappy meat. Have you ever had cheap salmon sashimi? It's completely flavorless, with a rubbery, watery mouthfeel. Conversely have you had expensive salmon sashimi? A delicate umami flavor with a mouthfeel of liquified butter. It's not preparation. They're not the same fish.
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.
I was thinking about beef when I wrote this, and specifically cuts of beef you would commonly see at a supermarket.
Part of the reason that cheap meat is cheap is because it's a byproduct of producing nice meat. Chicken thighs are cheap because the chicken seller makes money on breasts. Round is cheap because the cow is paid for with the revenue from brisket and ribeye etc.
The meat alternatives are a product by itself, and they have to justify their whole supply chain. That's tough.
Im not surprised. It doesn’t really fit anywhere.
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.
Over here, beyond meat is simply more expensive than just buying meat. On top of that, it feels like you eat pure ultra processed product magic chemistry and thats not good. So who exactly is the target audience for that? I'd totally buy it, if it competes with meat prices by being cheaper and if there wasn't so much effort into trying to look like meat and taste like meat, which goes against the entire premise.
My vegetarian wife won't touch the stuff, or any meat substitute. It's too much like meat.
I always believed these things are like nicotine patches/chewables/etc.
That's not the right way to look at it.
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.
I recently travelled the US (California, Arizona, Utah, Ohio), I found it really hard to find vegan options. Some restaurants that used to sell vegan burgers or vegan options have stopped (McDonalds, Applebees) - because not enough people ordered them. Some restaurants that have Beyond Meat burger patties as on option "don't have any in stock" - probably for the same reason.
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.
Beyond is hard to buy in supermarkets too. Whole Foods doesn't stock it at all and many others never have it in store even if the chain does technically stock it online. I just want it because it's 0 cholesterol and tastes the same as meat to me.
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.
One of the things I've noticed about shopping carefully at the local supermarket (Albertsons, in Oregon) is that they very often use beef as a 'loss leader' to get people to shop there, so beef is often cheaper than it 'should' be, and especially so if more of the externalities involved in the production of beef were included in the price.
I like beef, but the price probably makes it harder to compete with.
Ground beef needs to move quickly, and you've got to sell some to go with the nicer cuts of meat, so it makes sense to sell at low or negative margins.
Other faux-meat companies like Impossible seem to be doing better. Maybe Beyond's product is inferior? Personally, I don't choose it over Impossible.
Impossible is good enough that - in the right context, if you squint real hard - you'd be hard-pressed to distinguish it from the real deal. Beyond just isn't there, it still comes off as a weird faux meat.
The article says that impossible food has gone down 50% (the stock price)
Note that Impossible, unlike Beyond, isn't publicly traded, so the only time anyone knows for sure what it's worth is right after it raises capital. It sounded like the 50% thing was some kind of internal projection.
beyond meat is people!
That's good news, fake products need to die. We already have real meat and real vegetables, and both are wonderful things.
We don't need this idiot fad of eating one of them while conving us that we are eating the other.
Wish their products had less fat in them. They're tasty, but nutritionally they're a whole lot of canola oil.
Their newest release uses avocado oil, fwiw: https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/products/beyond-beef/ground...
Is anyone really pretending these are healthier than a grass-fed beef patty? Or cooked vegetables?
The health pitch on these products has always struck me as incredibly weird.
Yes. Meat consumption is not exactly healthy. It's absolutely plausible that replacing it with something like this is a net plus.
That "grass-fed beef" is like a healthy standout is an unsubstantiated myth.
> It's absolutely plausible that replacing it with something like this is a net plus
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].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8728510/
> Plausible. But both unproven and unlikely.
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.
Meat consumption being linked to adverse health effects isn’t disputed. Replacing meat with Beyond Meat being a healthy choice is.
Not a customer but it’s a shame it’s not working out for them. I’m sure they have people who would enjoy it but the feedback I’ve heard was mostly negative with respect to quality of ingredients and the like.
At this stage if they scaled back would they stand a chance to survive? Or do they owe too much money?
They owe way too much. The article actually touches on this - they have such little hope of paying back their debt that they are leaning into this so that they can get better renegotiation terms with bond holders
I am all for eating more vegetables. But putting ultra processed mashed up shit to replace the real thing just sounds like an avenue for disaster health wise.
It is, and people seem to ascribe some implicit goodness to these companies because they’re seen as providing an alternative to an implicitly evil industry and degenerate dietary choice. Truth is, they’re running the same game, just with a less wholesome food product.
i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat.
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.
> i cannot understand the urge to compete with the pig or cow or chicken (especially) for meat production. they are so good at turning feed into meat.
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.
Not surprised. Expensive, taste like shit. Nice Asian vegetarian food exist. A always seemed like stupid amount of resources a d effort to cater to burger markets.
I feel like I'm the ideal customer for Beyond Meat and its competitors. I am not price sensitive, I don't mind the idea of plant based meat products, and I am willing to try new things. My biggest reasons for not buying Beyond Meat are that I:
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.
Impossible has Impossible Bowls, which sounds like something that would be what you're looking for. They are available at Walmart https://impossiblefoods.com/media/news-releases/impossible-f...
For your own health, I implore you to explore even the most basic of cooking.
I do cook, I didn't say that I don't. My point is that if I'm going to pay a premium for a main ingredient and go through the effort of cooking it, I do not want it to be mediocre at best. Beyond Meat, imo, just isn't a more pleasing option, and the only reasons that I can see to choose it are:
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.
Glad to see that people are still able to think for themselves. Nobody wants to eat this toxic sludge!
How is their competitor Impossible Foods doing? It's a private company, so we can't as easily look at stock prices.
Not great - https://x.com/joelrunyon/status/1931091407294312956
You seem to be single-purpose posting to promote your legal case.
Is the information wrong?
Last I looked, there was an awful lot of saturated fat in their burgers. I tended to order something other than a veggie burger when their was the only one on the menu.
USDA 80/20 ground beef has 7.7g per 113g [0], 90/10 has 5g [1], Beyond Meat has 2g [2], and Impossible has 6g [3].
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...
They're charging more than beef for something that is just as unhealthy. It's amazing they lasted this long.
Any employees here, sorry what morale must be like at work (I’d guess) & hope you get great offers elsewhere!
So if I buy their very cheap convertible bond, they either repay it (they won't) or they give me lots of equity?
Or you take a hair cut if the majority of bond holders agree.
Vegetarians and Vegans turn out to prefer less UPF dominant protein in their diet?
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.
Plant-based protein will not succeed as long as government subsidize meat production.
Here's a really good vegan burger recipe: caramelise about three large red onions with garlic, salt, pepper and olive oil. Drain a tin of red kidney beans, keep the liquid, mash together with fried onions, add about 100g of breadcrumbs, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, chilli powder, and a pinch of allspice. Add aquafaba or breadcrumbs to adjust consistency. Press into round shapes. Fry (about six minutes).
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.
This is a poster child of ZIRP one step away from Juicero.
I absolutely love beef. A good ribeye steak, or some smoked brisket are two of my favorite foods. I was intrigued by the claims these meat alternative companies were making, so naturally I tried them all. It's not surprising to me that they are struggling. I could barely swallow their products. I think it was a mistake to compare these to one of the greatest foods on the planet. It set the expectation was too high.
When Impossible was new and only available in burger format at a small number of partner restaurants, I ventured out to SF to try two of them. I concluded that it can make for a genuinely convincing substitute, but the key is preparing it with a sleight of hand to misdirect from the noticeable imitation texture and flavor. Those early burgers were made with thin patties, with flavorful burger sauces and toppings.
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.
They work well enough as a replacement in a fast food burger or in a dish where the meat itself isn't really the star player. Using their ground meat alternatives in a hamburger helper is totally fine.
We're not at the point where high quality meat can be replaced, but that doesn't mean the product is worthless.
everybody mostly discusses real vs. imitation/vegan, yet i think it has nothing to do with the current BYND situation.
"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.
> one of the greatest foods on the planet
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.
good get rid of this garbo, give me a cow plz moo
The Beyond Meat story for me is a boon since its IPO. I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally.
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.
> I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally.
How did you decide when the rally was over?
The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
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.
> The FDA already allows far too much salt and preservatives in US food supplies and this fake meat stuff is an absurd amount of salt that will 100% give you a heart attack very very early if you eat it regularly.
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.
Headline here is not true; in fact:
> 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.
What I would like to see in a fake meat is a product engineered to have lower level of histidine, since there is evidence that gut microorganism processing of histidine creates a chemical that causes atherosclerosis.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44595008
That's disappointing, they've done a great job making plant meat ubiquitous and took away some of the hippy aura that has kept many people from trying plant-based meat alternatives. I really hope they can turn it around, both selfishly as a happy customer, as well as for the planet.
I don’t eat meat but enjoy their products at least once a week, sometimes more. Very tasty, available nearly everywhere.
I don’t care about the nutrition/health of it at all.
Hope they can turn things around!
Just another processed food product, good riddance.