Would love to hear an informed opinion on why meat alternatives aren't commodities.

Is what the first mover brands are doing that unreproducible?

Getting patents.

Meat replacements are already dime in a dozen, there's been a boom at least for a couple of years in Europe. Some are better than others, but none have a power to control the market. Even if a single brand will be the most popular, there definitely will be (already is!) a commodity market where people will buy a good enough meat replacement from their local grocery store. If the main ingredient is oats or fava bean is maybe akin to difference between chicken and pork.

Impossible burgers are an order of magnitude better tasting than any other meat replacement I've tried. Beyond burgers are hilariously worse.

Sure, but there's no way that would lead to market dominance. It will perhaps be the highest profit product and a market leader, but plenty of other options are good enough for a healthy market to exist.

And TBH I think the obsession with a burger replacement is some American thing, here they are used for replacing meat (mostly minced meat) in all kinds of foods. I'm not sure I've even tried a fake-meat burger yet.

I searched through a few Impossible patents as a result of this thread. They've certainly got a number.

As near as I can tell (not chemist), they're focusing their patents on (a) extractive methods (e.g. how to produce raw starting blocks from actual, grown plants) & (b) specific mixes or treatments that target the meat-analog market.

For example, a lot of their parents are of the form of "a food product with X% this, Y% that, Z% the other. Where X had a molecular weight of A and a gel point of B degrees. Where Y has..."

Where's "here"? In Switzerland you also see lots of burger replacements, imported like beyond or "homegrown" like the green mountain burger.

In the Netherlands, burgers are definitely a thing, but the ones that get people excited so far appear to have been chicken, meatballs and smoked sausage (which are traditionally important here). The introduction of the Beyond Burger made some noise, but mostly because of it being hyped in the US. It does not appear to be a regular buy, though that might be because it's also really expensive, comparatively.

All anecdotal, though.

Finland. Lots of domestic meat replacement products. I know Germany doesn't have nearly as much, but that's not too surprising as it's a slow adopter of everything.

I missed that prediction. I did however see a great article a while ago on just how cheap and efficient modern chicken production is ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiYVoHEV5hs ). Pork is still a default ingredient in the majority of Asian dishes despite doubling in price. My prediction would be that meat alternatives will remain niche, the size of which dependent on how good their marketing turns out to be. On cost they are competing against generic engineering (and breeding) of animals and high intensity farming practices. Nobody is talking about reducing pork production in China, and it will be large pig farms replacing the devastated ones. And maybe the monster-size pig breeding initiatives will pay off. Meat consumption is a social issue, not an economic one.

Beyond and Impossible are far from first movers. Veggie burgers are for sale for at least three decades (most notably Quorn), it's just that they've managed to get VC funding and made a huge rumble about it that the US press leapt up.

As someone who's been eating these things for a long time, it's notable they made something that's actually good.

Historically, veggie burgers were terrible. Most meat eaters still love their beef, but most of my friends actually like Beyond Burgers and get them not because they care about the environment or animal rights, but simply because they like the taste and want something beside a beef burger for a change.

I'm not saying it can't be replicated. I have no idea how well these companies will hold their share in the future. If I had to bet, I'd bet that McDonald's and Burger King and Wendy's will all make their own version, and Kraft or Frito Lay will make one for supermarkets, too.

But the market has definitely changed with the newer burgers. They're actually good now!

I have the opposite reaction. In the old McDonald’s veggie burger, the main ingredients are peas, carrots, onions and potatoes. In an Impossible Burger the main ingredient is “textured wheat protein”. I would much rather have the old-school veggie burger which has the virtue of being made of stuff that sounds like real food.

Right?

While they don't begin to approximate beef, I've tried these two recipies and like them

https://www.forksoverknives.com/recipes/five-ingredient-vegg...

https://www.forksoverknives.com/recipes/basic-veggie-burger-...

For health reasons I've spent the past year trying to give up meat and other animal products, to eat whole food plant based, and I've found every approximation of meat to just be blah and have just given up trying to recreate meat and instead have just found other things to make, but you can make a pretty good sandwich out of a bean-based pattie.

These franken-creations like the impossible buger just seem like a bad idea. They use a lot of extracts/refined stuff, which means you've got some amount of waste, and all the added cost of refining the ingredients and processing the patties and you still don't come close to re-creating a good seasoned beef patty.

A lot of people simply want to switch due to the environmental impact but take the first four impossible burger ingredients list :

- Water

- Textured Wheat Protein -

- Coconut Oil

- Potato Protein

3 of the 4 ingredients require a lot of processing, two of those are made from crops that are able to be farmed in a fairly sustainable fashion. The coconut oil however, at a scale required to replace beef, would likely quickly become unsustainable like palm oil is.

A single coconut only provides about 2 ounces of oil... it might be better than raising cattle but just eating beans, or whole wheat, would probably be orders of magnitude better.

Beef is BY FAR one of the least sustainable sources of food we eat. Lamb, to my knowledge, is the only thing worse, and the two are so much worse than everything else, nothing is even close.

Coconuts would be literally 100 times better than beef. Not to mention, coconut oil makes up less than 8% of the total burger. So, even if it was hypothetically worse (which it's not even close) the other 92% being exponentially better would far outweigh it.

>Coconuts would be literally 100 times better than beef.

And having something other than beef or fake-beef is better yet... which is what my comment is... finding alternatives to hamburgers instead of trying to recreate a hamburger by playing Doctor Frankenstein.

> Most meat eaters still love their beef, but most of my friends actually like Beyond Burgers and get them not because they care about the environment or animal rights, but simply because they like the taste and want something beside a beef burger for a change.

Seconded. They're the same price in Canada and the taste of the Beyond patties is often better than the meat ones. It's a good change of pace if I'm not seeing pure protein (in which case whey powder is probably better anyway).