I'm definitely in their target market. I'm willing to pay a modest premium for what they're offering. And at cost parity, I'll buy their product a lot.
What’s the mass market business model for “pretty good, minimally processed, reasonably healthy, low cost burger alternative”? Institutional? Workplace? Schools? Prisons? Dollar store frozen food section? Food cart?
I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a plant based meat company to hope they can accomplish something similar. Wikipedia tells me (I’ve made no effort to verify this) that instant noodles were also originally sold above the price point of the normal noodles they were replacing.
In a way, it’s like the debunked story of the expensive NASA space pen versus the cheap cosmonaut pencil.
Of course, the facts of that story are that private investment, not government spending, came up with an advanced solution, and that pencils really were a potential problem in spacecraft due to fragmentation and flammability. In popular perception, though, the original false story remains very convincing.
Not many of us are going to space regularly. Cheap pencils and pens own the market that matters.
If a fake meat company wants to make a meaningful difference on the environment, they need to cut the cost sharply and make something that can take the mass market.
Similarly, there were people in the 1970s and 1980s who wanted computing to be available to the masses. That now exists, but the road that led to it wasn't a direct one. The original Macintosh was the equivalent of $6500 bucks today. Was that the right price? In one sense no, because most people couldn't afford to spend good-used-car kinds of money on a computer. But it was the right price in that it was enough money to sell a bunch of units, establish a market, and help fund their R&D going forward. Which over time led to today's world of ubiquitous cheap computing power.
Every few years a lawsuit or accusation about the absence of meat comes up in the media cycle, Taco Bell and Subway are favorite targets. If I hear that Taco Bell is selling non-meat tacos as meat tacos and people are enjoying them, to me that's good news and they should be encouraged to share their tactics.
Food that is cheap, nutritious, palatable, and doesn't cause a lot of damage in its production is good. We should use whatever tactics we can. Compromising any of these too much is not good.
As a small incremental expense, a veg burger has to be a lot cheaper than a meat burger for people to choose it consistently. The taste is a minor issue once you load it up with ketchup, pickles, special sauce, etc.
Whereas more expensive things like solar panels or electric cars, only have to be a little cheaper to make a meaningful marginal economic difference to most people.