Not!
The plant-based meat company has reported falling sales and dwindling cash.
The end was always inevitable for Beyond Meat, because being an innovator does not mean having a moat to protect your business. The pioneering company arguably created the category of plant-based meat that acts like actual meat.
That’s clever, but it’s not a defensible business. Once Beyond Meat BYND created the category, it was inevitable that the product would become commoditized.
Full article, HERE from The Street.
While it is ‘supposedly’ more healthy, it’s interesting to note that not a single comment was made about the ‘taste’ of Beyond Meat.
No one that ‘I’ have ever talked to said they actually liked it! The other thing I’ve heard, is that it’s greasy, by comparison.
FWIW, I personally have never tried any of it. I know I’m a dinosaur, but I like my ‘meat’ to be actual MEAT! Or chicken, or pork. Not some conglomeration of…something…
And that something is not patentable, so anybody can (and has) jumped into that pool. As the pool gets more crowded, IMHO, there isn’t enough of a customer base to support the additional players. That means somebody is gonna lose. In this case, it looks like Beyond Meat is the sacrificial lamb in this case, since they threw a LOT of $$$ at cornering the market early, rather than the long term projections (which they didn’t meet for growth either)… Too many rose colored glasses?
I don’t know.
But with it seems like many things flipping back and forth being ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for us, who knows what the future holds???
What say you?
For some reason, the song “The Circle of Life” popped into my pre-caffeinated head. I supposed fake meat would be okay in certain constrained environments. Like the ISS or in a desert without refrigeration a zillion miles from a food market. C-rats and MREs are palatable but appeal less than a properly-cooked hunk of dead animal.
Anyone know how the “ecological damage footprint” of fake meat compares with the same size of grilled moo-cow?
As for taste, cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For said “Tofu Pups: enough mustard and you can’t taste the difference!”
Robert is on track. I figure with enough ketchup,cardboard might be palatable. I wonder why folks think they can improve on the process that cows use for plant based tasty meat? It’s the best!
Being a normal-ish and typical-ish human, I do eat meat. This makes that whole category rather silly to me under the circumstances. Hey, if enough people like that stuff to make a market for it, I hope they enjoy. To me, it is attractive as Bella Abzug.
Whenever I am confronted by someone trying persuade me to eat only plants. I think about the short story in the Man-Kzin universe “Two Kinds of Teeth.”
If meat ain’t on the menu, why do we have a partially carnivore mouth ?
Nutrition “science” is garbage. It’s a bunch of people trying to gain grants and make a name for themselves by making “unexpectedly” claims based on tenuous “links” and couching all their “conclusions” in a cushion of “may” and “might” and “possibly”.
When you see some big story about how broccoli causes cancer or something, don’t rely on the headline, read the article. I guarantee you it will full of “may” and “possibly” and “might be linked”.
Scientists get grants by getting papers published and getting name recognition. They get papers published and get name recognition by making bold claims about unexpected discoveries and results, not by saying “my study was inconclusive and I can’t point a finger at any particular cause for this [disease/condition/inconvenience].”
They throw crap against the wall to see what will stick and then claim it’s some great discovery:
The entire “nutrition science” industry is corrupt and untrustworthy.
So…I follow the traditions of my parents and grandparents…who grew most of their own food themselves: I eat natural foods as much as possible, avoid processed foods when I can, and otherwise eat what I like.
I control my weight by working hard, which burns off calories, and being careful not to over-eat…the same way they did.
Exactly. Food oils and greases came into the forefront in the US because we needed actual meat oils and greases and fats in order to make explosives during WWII. After WWII the companies that made fake butter and seed oils were looking at going out of business so they ‘commissioned’ studies showing that plant oils and greases and fats are ‘good for you.’
The beef industry successfully lobbied against the horse meat industry after WWII.
The fake milk people successfully got actual real animal milk listed as ‘bad food’ so now we have vegan-slop that people say is better than milk. Yeah, sure.
Cholesterol wasn’t a problem, then some people commissioned a study to ‘prove’ that cholesterol was bad for you and suddenly all sorts of new ‘foods’ appeared. And now we know that it’s not cholesterol that’s the issue but genetics. Yet people blindly believe that cholesterol is bad for you.
People have been told that meat is bad-think and they should eat more veggies and fake food. Because of this the rates of diabetes and thyroid diseases have risen rapidly. How do you treat diabetes without drugs? Eat more meat. How do you treat low thyroid hormone levels? Eat more meat. Funny that soy actually increases the chance of diabetes and low thyroid. Hmmm…
Never tasted it and have no interest ingesting some chemical stew.
I tasted the Burger King Impossible (meat free) Burger and was not impressed. Same calories as the standard Whopper. Less cholesterol but higher sodium. And at least one dollar more in cost (about 16%). I fail to see the benefit but gives the vegan a feeling they are eating a real burger. Their $$ – their choice.
Not a regular at BurgerKing, I didnt know the “impossible burger” was plant based. When they first came out, I saw they were on sale and grabbed a couple for a quick dinner for wife and self. I dont remember what gave it away taste or texture but it wasnt bad..
A friend used to be in the banking industry. He was a low level business loans account evaluator. In other words, the loan application came to him and he looked it over to see if they had an actual business plan, with research, projections, costs, etc. He was stunned at the number of people who walked in the door of the bank to ask for money whose complete business plan was “I’ve always wanted to…”. He’d ask them questions about market surveys, about suppliers, about overhead costs, and they had no idea. He didn’t last long enough to become higher up because he hated the job.
Seen it in the local grocery, never purchased it. Although I understand how a lot of people would buy and eat it, given how upside down and backwards some groups of society are. Anything is better than this garbage. Cue the music from the Monty Python spam skit.
Madison, Wisconsin’s 2010 Brat Fest consumed over 209,000 real brats and almost 11,000 veggie brats. After several years of gorging ourselves annually, I and some weight-conscious friends decided to try the veggie Boca Brats. They were delicious!
A few years later, Boca Brats were out of production and the grain-based replacement was inedible. BLECH! I’m sure vegans liked it because they like to suffer.
I hadn’t thought about it, but now that I do it isn’t surprising.
The overhead a highly public company requires needs either something special or very high volume commodity sales to support it – they had neither.
As I understand it, there are several much smaller decent quality companies in the same segment who don’t have the overhead costs, thereby being more competitive.
It really started dropping in sales when Bill Gates became part of it. I don’t know, a depopulationist agenda and food somehow don’t market well.
I always was suspicious of ‘not real meat.’
And the idea of eating chemical laced fake meat in order to combat chemical laced real meat never sat well with me.
And one of the big ‘fake meat’ companies sells under the name “Morningstar.” Yeah, they’re literally telling you they are the Devil’s handiwork.
All- Good points! Sailor/Beans- THAT is it in a nutshell. Always do your research beyond the abstract! That’s where you find the ‘rest of the story’, as they say…
Steve- I was not aware of that…interesting!
Just saw another Gates backed not food, fake butter:
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/butter-carbon-bill-gates-batavia-illinois/
There MAY be a niche market with activity over portions of the year when the various Catholics (Roman, Orthodox) and other religions require their adherents to abstain from real meats. During those days a product such as this is still fake but far more satisfying than salad and fried tofu cubes, tempeh, seitan, or other blatantly vegan compost-on-a-plate. But that market volume is limited and seasonal. I don’t know of any religion so far that has expanded its meat restrictions to encompass the plant-based substitutes on the grounds that the point of the fast is centered on reducing one’s level of taste intensity or satisfaction as an exercise against personal hedonistic tendencies.
But they could eat real fish.
I never understood why.
Ed:
Deprivation is good for the soul. Or something.
IIRC, the no-meat friday is no more.
Now I’m hungry…
Cranston- Thanks, I didn’t think about ‘that’ approach.
Ed- Me neither… strangely enough, we went and had catfish last night! GOOD supper!!!