This is such a weird comment.

Why do you think that "ethical vegans" like the "taste of plants" any more than anyone else? The whole point of being an ethical vegan/vegetarian is to not consume animals, not because you don't like the taste.

Health conscious folks would definitely choose these over hamburgers. Sure, they're not perfect from a health food point of view, but they're lower in sodium and saturated fat than your average hamburger patty. So from a health conscious point of view, it's a decent substitute.

Then there are the people who just want to reduce their meat consumption overall. Maybe they're not vegan or vegetarian, but they're trying to watch their saturated fat intake, or reduce their carbon impact, or they suffer from gout and are trying to reduce the amount of meat they eat to ease that.

Sometimes you just want to go out with your friends for a burger, and the Beyond patty can make a better substitute than a black bean or mushroom patty that used to be common.

And at most restaurants, I've never noticed a "premium" for it, it usually costs the same as a beef patty; it just provides another option, for the days I want to skip meat. I have, for a long time, done a low meat diet; I don't avoid it entirely, but I try not to eat it at every meal. It provides a nice alternative for that.

Is it a bit of a niche market? Sure. But, not every product needs to be for everyone.

> The core early adopters, the ethical vegans, who actually like the taste of plants are never going to make a lab made ultra processed salt bomb their daily driver

Why not? I think there's a false conflation of veganism and health food (and gluten-free, though that's not relevant in this discussion). I love burgers, and fried chicken, and crappy chicken nuggets, but I don't want more animals to have to suffer for my sake than is necessary. I disagree on how hyper-specific that niche is.

IMO the core problem is that meat is so heavily subsidized that it's hard for them to compete.

Based on my bubble, vegans, vegetarians, and meat eaters that do want to decrease their meat consumption.

At this point, in Germany at least, discounter brands like Lidl and Aldi have beaten Beyond Meat at their game though. They produce alternatives that taste as good or better, for significantly less money.

My vegetarian friends can now go to a restaurant (or better example yet, any event space like sports event or theme park, since having a veggie burger is pretty easy to check a box and satisfy dietary restrictions) and get any of the burger offerings on the menu with a beyond patty. Before that, the vegetarian option of only resort was often much more depressing and unsubstantial.

> lacks the [...] bioavailability of real animal protein

I never understood this argument: what's the problem with consuming proportionately more to make up for the reduction?

I'm not rushing to demand IV tylenol because its oral bioavailability is only 80%-90%, which is around the "loss" we're talking for plant vs animal protein on average. And the ultraprocessing should improve plant's profile here.

I'm like technically the exact demographic they should be chasing. Plant based eater who loves the taste of meat and just stopped eating it for ethical reasons. But like, I'm not gonna eat a heavily processed food often for the reasons stated above, and also it's just not great nutritionally compared to Seitan, which also actually just tasted better when prepared right. And it also doesn't stack up compared to high protein / extra firm tofu, which is incredible for cooking when frozen and then defrosted and cooked. And also made of soybeans, one of the cheapest food commodities in the world. So why would I pay 2x or 3x the amount of money for a drastically inferior product? Just when I want an exact burger replica, and once you are plant based for 3 or more years, you just don't really crave that anymore except as maybe a guilty pleasure once or twice a year.

So like, sure it's fine, but it is already in a tough competition with other plant based foods.

Personally I really fucking like meat but having done a couple of weeks in a slaughterhouse, I don't want to eat it. Gives me nightmares. Seriously.

This is a good filler product.

Veganism is a fake health conscious diet. You can eat whatever you like while simultaneously feeling superior about it. Oreos, chips, pizza, fries, candy, soda, etc. why not also highly processed burgers? I say this after having lived with vegans who literally ate vegan pizza every day.

Beyond Meat aren't unique, there are dozens of brands offering the same product. Tens of millions of people eat these type of products. Any (or most) burger-serving restaurant in Europe will have a Beyond Meat or equivalent on the menu. They're not always advertised as vegan (because of preparation and extras) but these fake burgers are very popular, for many reasons.

There's no reason ethical vegans wouldn't go for ultra-processed foods. Beyond Meat just isn't a great option, it's expensive and not good enough to justify it. The selling point for them seems to be that they taste more like meat than most meat substitutes but as someone who has been vegan for a while that doesn't matter to me (unless I'm trying to match a non-vegan recipe). I get Morningstar Farms products vastly more often than Beyond Meat ones. Beyond and Impossible are maybe like my 4th and 5th most bought meat imitation brands and it's not like those other brands are less salty or processed. Idk why I only ever hear non-vegans mention Beyond and Impossible.

being an ethical vegan does not mean you like the taste of plants (or, at least, that you don't miss the taste of meat). I'm veg and very much miss having access to meat.

I'm an occasional buyer of their product, but the issue for me is just the versatility. It's really only a replacement for the most generic ways to prepare a burger/sausage. The moment you try to use the ground beef in, say, a chili recipe, it's a totally mis-matched flavor

How about these two niches:

1. non-vegans eating with vegans at a vegan restaurant, where eating there wasn't their choice (they were craving a burger), and so, being forced to order off this menu, will choose the most burger-like thing on the menu.

2. non-vegans eating with vegans at a non-vegan restaurant, where for whatever reason they feel the need to impress / not-offend the vegan by eating vegan food as well. (Think "first date" or "client meeting.")

I guess for people like me. I eat meat, and I eat burgers. I can't speak for Beyond Meat, but when at restaurants, the Impossible Burger often tastes better than the real beef (likely because the former is pre-seasoned).

There are plenty of meat eaters who want to eat these as a way to cut down their meat consumption. They don't want to become vegetarians, though.

There’s plenty of vegetarians due to ethical or cultural reasons that never acquired the taste for traditional plant based foods and are looking for a more substantial, protein heavy alternative.

Is it niche? Yes, but vegetarians were always niche.

While the late 2010s fixated on “protein” and “macros” - allowing products like Beyond or Soylent to shine.

Much of the health discourse around the 2020s has focused on quality of the ingredients and “processed foods”. So naturally Beyond is caught on the crossfire.

Is there a future where this stuff is proven to be better for you in the short and long term? I sure hope so. But there’s way too many unknowns right now and it’s expensive to boot.

their demo is vegans who want a burger, which is not a rare thing at all.

I feel like fast food is a pretty big market for stuff like this. Burger King in New Zealand has had plant based alternatives to the whopper and chicken burger on the menu for > 1 year now so it must be doing ok. I'm not even vegetarian and I get them sometimes, they're pretty good (especially the chicken one - they changed the recipe a while ago and it's now practically indistinguishable from the real chicken option, although that probably says more about their standard chicken than it does about the meat free option).

There's no premium for the plant based versions I don't think (or if there is it's small enough that I never noticed), and I think you're underestimating how many vegans/vegetarians still want junk food.

I actually like Beyond Meat patties, but I eat maybe a half-dozen "fake meat" burgers per year - that's not going to sustain a competitor when Americans eat an average of 3 beef burgers per week.

>I always wondered who their demographic was.

Wealthy hippies, vegans, and yuppies.

I agree with this. As a veggie, the texture, taste, smell, color of meat grosses me out. I don't want not-meat that appears to be meat.

I want not-meat that is definitely not meat.

Ethical vegans and vegetarians may like the taste of meat but be sworn off it because of their ethics. I see this so much in these discussions - if they don't like meat then why are they going for a subsitute? They love vegetables so should stick to vegetables.

Do people genuinely think that 'ethical' vegans and vegetarians are doing it because they don't like meat? Or genuinely not comprehend the idea of taking an ethical stance even if you actually like something?

For illustration, human baby could be the best tasting barbecue on the planet, but even if it was I would still think that murdering children for my dinner would be wrong and wouldn't do it. Ethical vegans and vegetarians feel similarly about eating meat, that it's (often) delicious but killing animals for food is wrong. Offering them a "meat without any of the suffering" option, in theory, has quite a large audience.

Plus as a meat-eater who had a vegetarian partner for a few years, things like impossible mince also made it easier for me to cook things we could both enjoy, and things like beyond/impossible made eating out a little easier in burger joints etc.

Thats the thing... Really really good vegetarian and vegan food tastes amazing and is filling. And unless you're intentionally picking around for meat or meat products, you're not going to notice.

A lot of Indian/Brahmin food is exactly that. Its insanely delicious.

And we have Beyond Meat and Impossible Meat(is that the name?). Both instead of going "vegetarian done well is superb" went to "sorry its a sad reminder of a hamburger". And thats a problem. Nobody wants to be reminded that this is $10/lb and real hamburger is $5/lb.

Ive also had problems with other 'meat substitues'. They're almost always plasticy or fake tasting, or chemically off.

Whereas my tofu saag is delicious. And no meet or cheese needed... Although my favorite is saag paneer (cheese). I stay away from the fake-almost-but-not-quite foods.

Maybe it's just me, but beyond has never tasted close to the original. Impossible does.

The fact that it doesn't taste close to the original and that it commands a price premium is why I ultimately gave up on it. Where I might use beyond, I can usually get a healthier option using ground turkey instead with a much more agreeable flavor and price.

But really, I've just focused on making more meatless dishes in general. Highlighting the flavor of legumes and mushrooms beats trying to fake the flavor of beef.

I never found it close enough, and it's expensive, and it's bad for you. So no thanks.

It was close enough for me and I do acknowledge the cruelty and abstain from many kinds of meat. I was super excited when I tried it first. But after about a year of being part of my regular diet it started being disgusting unfortunately. Now I can only eat it once a in a while.

> as good as a fast-food hamburger

But at a much higher price? The value is not really there IMO.

From their performance it seems like the intersection of (cares about animals | methane emissions) & doesn't mind health effects & less price sensitive & must eat hamburger-likes is too small.

Interesting point on cognitive dissonance though. I think it's possible to draw a rational tradeoff between acceptable amount of (externalised) cruelty and personal benefits of eating meat - no cognitive dissonance needed.

> how about I go for the cruelty-free version.

They should just use that as a label: https://xkcd.com/641/

Would you like the cruel or cruelty-free patty?

>And it is close-enough -- it's at least as good as a fast-food hamburger.

It's not, though. Vegans that I know always proselytize about how "you can't even tell the difference" but I can tell the difference.

I don't understand the weird vegan obsession with eating fake food. Edible oil product "vegan cheese" and other junk.

If you want to eat meat, eat it. If you don't, don't. You do you, but don't try to sell me on disgusting fake food.

So you'd rather people poison and destroy their own health just so that animals would not need to be killed?

Imagine telling a parent "yeah, it's ok if your kid gets very ill and has chronic diseases, but hey, the chickens will live!"

I'm in a similar boat and have to give up cheese since it's part of the chain. It's a bummer, I'm pretty addicted to it, and plant-based cheese is just nothing compared to a good young cheese

I tell myself that in the long-term the pros outweigh the con, if you value being on the right side of morality

Yup, the product is fine, but there's a reason all the other brands in the freezer aisle aren't raising hundreds of millions of dollars at 100x multiples. Burgers don't scale like smartphone apps.

Here's a comparison - Tyson Foods, best known for their frozen meat, had a revenue of $54.44 billion last year. Their current market cap is $21.77 billion.

Beyond Meat reported an annual revenue of $87.9 million in their 2018 S-1, and post-IPO reached a peak market cap of $14.1 billion.

See the issue with these numbers?

The way the market has moved away from valuing "just a good product" (and, by extension, "just a good service", "just a good business", and "just a good employee") is one of the factors destroying life as the developed world has known it for 80 years.

I have the opposite reaction. Beyond Meat is not a good product. It tastes gross.

It's not as good as the meat it's comparing itself against, and it's not as good as the vegetarian options also available in the store, and it's more expensive than either.

Anytime can "be the moment" for plant-based meat if the product technology was there, but it's not.

I know that there's a lot of reasons for this, but at least in my area, the Beyond Meat products are considerably more expensive than actual animal meat.

I'm sure that's due to depressing subsidies or economies of scale, but regardless of the reason it's kind of hard for me to justify buying something that will taste like a "not-quite-as-good-as-the-thing-half-the-price" burger.

They are pretty good, don't get me wrong, it's just something that I have trouble purchasing.

As a vegetarian that regularly uses plant-based substitutes: I'm super reluctant to believe a market for a product like Beyond ever existed. Between Beyond and Impossible they've got this weird chimera market, especially the latter, with their too-realistic product. If meaters cared they'd switch, there wasn't really a whole lot of fence sitting I don't think—not in reality. I think people were pretty well committed. I also think the sympathetic market of vegetarians and vegans didn't find the premise of these too-realistic products especially thrilling. And I don't think that's a huge market in the first place, at least not in a large portion of the US.

Then you factor in the costs and it's Beyond insanity.

And frankly I don't know if Beyond was doing anything legitimately novel. Impossible was over-engineering their burger to the extent that I wouldn't eat one from any restaurant because I couldn't tell whether it was be'f or beef. Beyond just seemed to be nu-gardein which I'll grant you—it's a Monsanto subsidiary—but the product is palettable, consistent, and available almost universally and has been as long as I've been on the diet, 12 years.

100%, a product can't be just good and succeed now. Market's expect something to be "the next thing" or become a failure.

Also, price is always going to be an issue. The US spends billions and billions of dollars supporting the meat industry. The fact meat is cheap is a political choice, which makes direct plant based substitutes a tough financial proposition.

I can think of reasons they would need to diversify or collapse that relate to regulatory capture of the FDA by the current U.S. administration. Better some business that maintains continuity through hostile times than to collapse and see their future evaporate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZgfTarNxdY

Yeah exactly that. It's just pretty damn good. It's just not universe changing.

Hope this doesn't kill them.

High-protein everything is riding the wave of GLP-1 popularity right now. Doctors are begging people on that class of drugs to chase protein targets more similar to what might have previously been reserved for heavy weightlifters just to prevent muscle wasting.

As a result, the entire packaged food industry is pumping up protein numbers and marketing it as the primary attribute of the food (where they might have previously marketed low fat or low sugar or whatever else in the past).

So, saturated market... but certainly one people are investing in now.

I love investing based on feels, rather than DD

They only seem expensive, since the meaty alternatives are higly subsidized.

Costco and similar do have them at a decent price, currently see them 20$ for 10. I think most people just look at the 2 packs, which are more expensive.

As a rare non-ideological vegetarian (I just really don't like the taste) you've got the market for this completely backwards. Beyond meat is for ideological vegetarians and vegans who like the taste. Non-ideological ones who would really prefer not to have a meat substitute.

At something like 6% of the world the market the population of ideological vegetarians and vegans is huge. With another handful of percent who are ideologically opposed to eating meat on certain days but not entirely vegetarian.

PS. Your claim that "most people are not ideologic with their food"... Not all food ideology is related to vegetarianism so it's not terribly relevant but I think this claim is just wrong. Islam + Hinduisim + Buddhism make up nearly half the world and all have pretty strong religious ideological beliefs about food, and a non-trivial fraction of the quarter of the world that is christian has at least a few scruples like avoiding meat during lent. And that's just people preaching religious beliefs not less documented ideologies like believing real men eat their steak raw or whatever.

> Lets be real: unless fake-meat products become at least the same price as equivalent meat options what's the point?

If you were to make fake plant-based products that were (a) noticeably healthier than meat, and (b) indistinguishable from meat taste-wise (or better-tasting), I'm quite confident a lot of people would pay a premium for that.

The problem is the current products just don't deliver that. All they deliver is eco-friendliness at a premium, at which point they're basically offering something more akin to the optional climate fee on flight tickets.

I'm not sure how well it would integrate into a cohesive unit. Veggie meat is pretty weird stuff in terms of cooking with it. It doesn't really want to form cohesive paddies. It is almost like feta cheese where there is a tendency for it to break down into smaller and smaller pieces the more you work it.

Also really hard to cook with imo compared to meat. Meat is nice to cook with from all the fat in there. It just renders out perfectly and also separates it from the pan. You get some nice carmelization, maillard reactions, all the nice stuff going on.

The fake meat is like a sponge for grease on the other hand. Nothing renders out. Stuff gets sucked in. It is like being on the opposite side of the osmosis reaction going on here. And boy do you need grease to cook with this stuff. Otherwise it just fuses to the pan like nothing, and again crumbles apart getting it off. It pretty much needs to be pan fried and soaks up a ton of grease after. You therefore can't trust nutrition guidelines because of the grease requirement to get anything out of this stuff. I bet if you air fried it, it would be absurdly dry.

I mean if we were really concerned with lowering animal suffering we would be changing farming practices. Factory farming is only saving a small amount of the cost of beef over more traditional style cattle farming.

Nothing against mixing beef with plants and the like, but there are far easier ways to improve the welfare of cattle that only costs pennies.

In the UK there's a meme that Richmond's plant-based sausages taste better than their "meat" sausages because they already had years of experience making sausages with no meat in them. "Meme" in the sense of "funny because it's true", even many meat-eaters agree. In processed food so much of the "meat" product is already pork eyeballs and chicken anuses that there's zero difference in substituting it with something that doesn't count as "meat" but with a similar texture.

> I never understood these engineered ultra processed meat imitation products, they are not healthy - period.

People don't eat burgers for health reasons.

> There's already healthy and delicious cuisines that have developed over thousands of years (Indian, Nepalese, I'm sure many others).

Why eat ice cream when chicken is healthier?

You're comparing apples and oranges. Yes, there are plenty of delicious vegetarian foods, but you can't just substitute one for the other. If you're craving eggplants, replacing it with lentils will not satisfy you.

Is animal meat healthy? In small amounts (10% less caloric intake) disease correlation does not increase, but higher then 10%, disease rates see a direct correlatory increase.

The plant meats are healthier than the animal meats.

They are for vegetarians who want something that tastes similar to a burger.

You can make thousands of absolutely delicious vegetable dishes. You can adapt another few thousands by replacing the meat with veggies. Why the obsession about ultraprocessed "meat substitutes"?

Low-protein Indian diets are not healthy. The food certainly tastes good, but let's be real, there's a reason heart disease and diabetes in the subcontinent are stratospheric.

I really like a good burger, but am somewhat sympathetic to the arguments put forwards about the meat industry and it's impacts.

What's to not understand?

100% of all people alive right now eat plant based food every day.

Proprietary food.. that you can only buy from a single company are all doomed? Might I offer an example that, under some definitions, has not failed despite that strategy. The McRib.

I was going to offer the twinkie but I guess hostess declared bankruptcy, so maybe you're right.

> Proprietary food, that you can only buy from one company

Huh? Isn't that most of it, except for basic grocery ingredients?