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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1510 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 3, 2024

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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.

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