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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 b

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=5898 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.

null0ranje 1y ago
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?
- santoshalper 1y ago
  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.
  - joshjob42 1y ago
    I think the idea was actually that it would give people who like the taste/texture/experience of meat an option to skip meat, and lower the bar for people to eat a more plant based diet, not cater to vegetarians or vegans. I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but I think eating meat is morally terrible, I just can't be bothered to go through all the trouble to not eat or use animal products when they're everywhere, cheap, and taste fantastic. But I enjoy Impossible's products immensely, and follow the artificial meat and dairy field closely, and have been long a champion of these efforts so as to make it easy to not cause any harm to animals rather than it being a royal pain in the ass.
  - biztos 1y ago
    > 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.
    - anon84873628 1y ago
      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.
      - kuschku 1y ago
        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.
        anon84873628 1y ago
        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.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    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.
    - joseda-hg 1y ago
      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
- doctorpangloss 1y ago
  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.
- JeremyNT 1y ago
  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.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    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.
    - JeremyNT 1y ago
      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.
    - curiousgibbon 1y ago
      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.
- redwall_hp 1y ago
  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.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    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.
- rconti 1y ago
  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.
- alewi481 1y ago
  I’m a vegan. I don’t longer eat meat because I find industrial farming repugnant and environmentally problematic, not because I suddenly dislike the flavor. I grew up with meat on my plate and liked it. Now I use plant-based products to recreate the tastes and textures I remember while leaving behind the cruelty and waste. I also doubt many meat eaters are pausing to “celebrate the animal”. They’re just grabbing shrink-wrapped, shelf-stable convenience foods without much thought to how they got there.
mind-blight 1y ago
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.
Spooky23 1y ago
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.
coro_1 1y ago
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.
PaulHoule 1y ago
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 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.
- HDThoreaun 1y ago
  Quorn is awful. I pray to never be subjected to it again. Impossible is amazing in comparison.
hakfoo 1y ago
Existing veggie burgers were sort of trapped by trying to present themselves as "close enough to beef". You will be lapped by a more accurate replacement. It makes me think of Boca Burgers-- I used to enjoy one occasionally as a carnivore, but I wonder if they're still around with Beyond Meat and Impossible on the chain menus. If you're not going to emulate beef exactly, own that and sell a different experience. I'd love to see something more like "stuffing fritters"-- strongly seasoned meatless patties with different tastes and textures. Nobody would be fooled they're burgers, but nobody is claiming they are either. I could even see expanding the market beyond vegetarians by presenting them as a supplement for conventional burgers and chicken-patty sandwiches as a topping to add more flavour. That was always another problem with meatless products-- they didn't get a great anchor with the mass market (who wasn't looking for explicitly vegetarian) so they remained expensive, narrow-distribution specialty products. If the regular burger is $5.50 and the Beyond Meat is $7.50, it's an even harder sell to the mainstream consumer outside of buying one as a novelty once.

null0ranje 1y ago

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?

santoshalper 1y ago
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.
- joshjob42 1y ago
  I think the idea was actually that it would give people who like the taste/texture/experience of meat an option to skip meat, and lower the bar for people to eat a more plant based diet, not cater to vegetarians or vegans. I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but I think eating meat is morally terrible, I just can't be bothered to go through all the trouble to not eat or use animal products when they're everywhere, cheap, and taste fantastic. But I enjoy Impossible's products immensely, and follow the artificial meat and dairy field closely, and have been long a champion of these efforts so as to make it easy to not cause any harm to animals rather than it being a royal pain in the ass.
- biztos 1y ago
  > 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.
  - anon84873628 1y ago
    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.
    - kuschku 1y ago
      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.
      - anon84873628 1y ago
        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.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  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.
  - joseda-hg 1y ago
    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
doctorpangloss 1y ago
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.
JeremyNT 1y ago
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.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  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.
  - JeremyNT 1y ago
    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.
  - curiousgibbon 1y ago
    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.
redwall_hp 1y ago
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.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  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.
rconti 1y ago
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.
alewi481 1y ago
I’m a vegan. I don’t longer eat meat because I find industrial farming repugnant and environmentally problematic, not because I suddenly dislike the flavor. I grew up with meat on my plate and liked it. Now I use plant-based products to recreate the tastes and textures I remember while leaving behind the cruelty and waste. I also doubt many meat eaters are pausing to “celebrate the animal”. They’re just grabbing shrink-wrapped, shelf-stable convenience foods without much thought to how they got there.

mind-blight 1y ago

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.

Spooky23 1y ago

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.

coro_1 1y ago

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.

PaulHoule 1y ago

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 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.

HDThoreaun 1y ago
Quorn is awful. I pray to never be subjected to it again. Impossible is amazing in comparison.

hakfoo 1y ago

Existing veggie burgers were sort of trapped by trying to present themselves as "close enough to beef". You will be lapped by a more accurate replacement. It makes me think of Boca Burgers-- I used to enjoy one occasionally as a carnivore, but I wonder if they're still around with Beyond Meat and Impossible on the chain menus. If you're not going to emulate beef exactly, own that and sell a different experience. I'd love to see something more like "stuffing fritters"-- strongly seasoned meatless patties with different tastes and textures. Nobody would be fooled they're burgers, but nobody is claiming they are either. I could even see expanding the market beyond vegetarians by presenting them as a supplement for conventional burgers and chicken-patty sandwiches as a topping to add more flavour. That was always another problem with meatless products-- they didn't get a great anchor with the mass market (who wasn't looking for explicitly vegetarian) so they remained expensive, narrow-distribution specialty products. If the regular burger is $5.50 and the Beyond Meat is $7.50, it's an even harder sell to the mainstream consumer outside of buying one as a novelty once.