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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1540 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 3, 2024

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Small scale future predictions, anyone?

I predict that ‘impossible burger/soyrizo’ type stuff will get pulled from shelves as a normal product(maybe available in niche markets), but that the meat substitutes will become major ingredients in chicken nuggets and burritos and the like up until the level where governments won’t allow it to be labeled as meat.

This is anecdotal but having worked in a couple of kitchens I've been surprised at how well veggie burgers sell. I've never tried them myself but apparently they taste pretty good.

Veggie burgers, and the slightly more specific black bean burger, are fantastic little bites that give you protein without making you feel as heavy or full as a normal burger. Im not even a vegetarian and i love the things. Take a frozen veggie or black bean patty- throw it in the microwave for two minutes, then into a tortilla with some hummus, feta, and your choice of chopped veggies and you have a healthy high protein big snack or light meal that wont bloat you up. My go-to for busy evenings.

I think they succeed because they're not trying to be a meat substitute, they're something else delicious.

you have a healthy high protein snack or light meal.

I can kind of squint an agree with you, but only just barely.

Black bean burgers are mostly carbs. They're above average in protein, but I wouldn't say they're high (especially not when compared to animal proteins). And they're low in fat.

Every human needs some mix of carbs, protein, and fat to survive and feel good. The zero carber types are as wrong as the zero/low fat types are as wrong as the vegans (low protein. Close to impossible to get necessary protein on a strict Vegan diet).

I worry that a lot of people aren't actually checking the nutrition facts of black bean / veggie burgers and thinking that they are somehow nutritionally identical to actual meat. They aren't and eating a lot of them would create the kind of hyper carbohydrate nutrition profile that can lead to one of many metabolic syndromes.

I find the food industry in the U.S. to be one of the more cynical industries out there. At their core, they're just going to sell what people want, which is mostly junk that our lizard brains haven't learned to not like yet. But the cynicism comes in in how they constantly find new ways to re-package the same basic slip into various "healthy" versions - aided and abetted by the nutritional-fad-diet industrial complex. Off hand, I can remember Adkins, Keto, Carnivore, and the 20+ year "low fat" diets.

I read the labels of coconut and almond "milk" recently, and realized they're literally just flavored carb-water. At least soy milk has a bit of protein in it.

Hmm, now that you point it out i didnt realize how bad the macros are on black bean burgers specifically, like you say its majority carbohydrates. Well, good to know.

My usual choice of veggie burgers includes lots of nuts in the make-up, so its a pretty much even 33% carbs/fat/protein calorie distribution, for about 125 calories total, im pretty happy with that mix for my normal eating habits. Add 1 tablespoon of hummus, maybe twice that in feta with some chopped veggies in a whole wheat or spinnach tortilla overall works quite well, dont have the exact macros to hand but i did calculate them and was very satisfied with the results.

They are really good with bacon & cheese especially -- but yeah, I will actually eat those black bean ones if we have some leftover.

A lot of these (especially Beyond Burger) were very much hyperdunbarist financial basket cases, selling at losses in the hopes of scaling up to break even. It's not surprising to find the balloon deflating for them. On the up side, this probably works as an argument against their use as 'fillers', even without a DeSantis-style intervention or shocked consumer outrage. If they cost too much to sell at a small premium against meat, they're not going to sell under it. On the downside, that's only true until someone decides to change reality: methane, waste disposal, and land taxes on meat-raising businesses have long been a popular pressure tactic.

There's a handful of fake meats that aren't that bad -- there's a lot you can do with crumbled or hard-pressed tofu, especially if you're more interested in being good than being similar -- though I don't know how bad their business case is. Napkin math says comparable or slightly under, but that's making a lot of assumptions about labor costs.

I’d been under the impression that the high costs were mostly due to recouping R&D costs and that as the financials for selling to vegans clarify as quite bad, it will be entirely possible for liquidators to sell to Nathan’s hot dogs or whatever as a below market filler.

I was under the impression Beyond specifically was selling at loss as measured by manufacturing and shipping costs, even leaving out R&D:

"Beyond Meat’s gross margins turned negative: it actually cost Beyond Meat more money just to manufacture and ship its products than it could sell those products for."

There's some that's assets munged into gross margin calculations because of how inventories are defined, but not that much. If and when they go bankrupt, whatever stock they have might get liquidated, but unless a lot of their cost on margin is downstream of spoilage and packaging, I can't see a business case to keep using the recipe, and without expensive bits of the recipe you're mostly looking at a bunch of the stuff that's long been used as filler.

What's your reasoning for the ‘impossible burger/soyrizo’ getting pulled? Are they not selling?

Yeah last I checked Beyond Burgers was near bankruptcy.

The problem is there is no market for these foods.

They taste bad, they are expensive, and they are unhealthy. Who is the imagined customer for this product?

I was genuinely curious, not because I'm interested in going full vegetarian, but because I thought it's an interesting thing to try. But I didn't like the taste at all, so I gave up on the thing.

So historically the key to mass-marketing a meat alternative, at least in the US, has been Catholics in lent. That's why you see fast food fish sandwiches/fried fish baskets advertised heavily in February and March(Here's an article on lent in fast food business planning: https://www.mashed.com/441836/why-lent-is-big-business-for-long-john-silvers/). And beyond burgers could easily have chosen to do this, they just didn't. Instead it seems like they legitimately thought there were lots of people who could be convinced to go vegetarian by marketing, and this turned out not to be the case. In other words they were high on their own supply.

I think oatly has a similar issue but manages to at least make enough sales to stay in business off of the lactose intolerant.

I drink a gallon of dairy milk a week and nearly always have oat milk in the pantry for coffee when I run out of milk. I prefer dairy, but I'm fine with oat or almond, and I can't not have milk on hand.

Plant based milks are fairly popular and much more successful than meat alternatives.

https://foodinstitute.com/focus/deep-dive-the-state-of-alternative-milk/.

According to the National Consumer Panel, 41% of U.S. households purchased plant-based milk in 2022, with a repeat purchase rate of 76%.

Many people especially in my experience (non vegans, non lactose intolerants) prefer plant milk in coffee over dairy.

Makes sense. I tried meat-based milk and didn't like it at all.

meat-based milk

It's fucking milk

They're not that much more expensive where I am than the meat equivalents, and i find the taste for a lot of dishes is pretty good, and don't care about the healthiness of my food. So I could easily see new vegetarians (who still want their sausage rolls and cottage pies) going for it.

Institutions facing internal pressure from vegan activists demanding "mandatory meatless Mondays" and the like (plus external threats from Climate Social Responsibility Rating Agencies that suddenly seem to have control over literally everything).
I linked an activist plan for banning meat recently, and they literally said this was step 2 (after "we're just asking for vegan options, not trying to force anyone, why are you resisting bigot?).

If sexual and then racial grievances hadn't overwhelmed everything else for the last decade, I suspect we would have seen more vegan activism in colleges and tech pushing them to buy this stuff. We may still if it becomes the Next Big Thing after renaming birds for black-trans-palestinians dies down. But hopefully the companies will have burned through their VC money by then.

I linked a lesswrong activist plan for banning meat recently, and they literally said this was step 2 (after "we're just asking for vegan options, not trying to force anyone, why are you resisting bigot?).

Could you link it again? I tried to find it on your personal page, but gave up on page 21.

No, they’re not, and there’s far, far more money in being unpronounceable food additive number umpteen than in being a substitute food aimed at a minority.

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