Facing declining U.S. sales and massive layoffs, fake-meat producer Beyond Meat has a radical idea for their fourth-generation Beyond Burger patties and Beyond Beef ground… stuff: they’ll make it better-tasting and more nutritious.
“Health is one of the top drivers to the plant-based meat category, and we feel a deep responsibility to deliver on that expectation for the consumer,” CEO Ethan Brown told the Associated Press on Wednesday.
I had thought products like Beyond Meat were supposed to be better for you from the start, but the modern fake meat industry is young, and, like any tech product, there will be iterations and improvements.
So I looked into the nutrition of the current version and was a little shocked by what I found. It turns out that a single four-ounce serving of the old Beyond Meat was a sodium bomb, containing 17% of your USDA sodium needs. Since I make my (real) burgers out of six-ounce 80/20 patties, one burger — no seasoning, no toppings, no bread, no fries — would represent more than a quarter of the amount of sodium I should eat in a day.
One of my burgers contains just 6% of my USDA allowance. That’s before I season them, of course, but they don’t take much. Come over sometime, I’ll fire up some charcoal in the Weber.
There wasn’t much fat savings in a Beyond Burger patty, either — 20 grams vs 23 for the real deal. Although to be fair, the unhealthier saturated fats were much lower.
Beyond Meat now aims to change those figures with their refined product. According to the New York Post, the new stuff that goes on sale this spring will “cut saturated fat by 60% by switching from canola and coconut oils to avocado oil” and “also have less sodium and more protein.”
Customers will finally get a new-and-improved version with maybe as much nutrition as actual beef — and that’s a good thing? I suppose it is, but it’s also a tacit admission that the original product wasn’t all that good or good for you.
It may well be that, like electric vehicles, now that the die-hard market has been tapped and the curiosity-seekers have had their curiosity satisfied, the fake meat market is finding its floor.
The ceiling was supposed to be virtually unlimited. The Washington Post reported last year they thought it seemed that soon “everyone would be eating burgers, chicken fingers, and steaks — made purely out of vegetables.”
Why did anyone ever think that? When did the substitute for an affordable and beloved product ever eliminate sales of the real deal? At our local Safeway, a 16-oz package of 80/20 ground chuck is $4.89. The same amount of Beyond Burger runs $14.98. That’s a poor substitute for price-sensitive shoppers — which, these days, is almost everybody.
For those who prefer their “meat” to be plant-based, I’m glad there are modern simulacrums far more appetizing and convincing than the flabby tofu burgers of prior decades. But this is a market in need of a shakeout, with too many high-priced players chasing after an increasingly price- and nutrition-conscious market — that’s also far smaller than the optimists hoped.
But Beyond Meat still has to significantly narrow the price difference, which looks like a nearly impossible task.
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