Beyond Meat is undergoing a makeover.
Last month, the popular plant-based meat company announced a new product — Beyond Ground — that, unlike its signature plant-based burger, sausage links, and chicken nuggets, isn’t meant to directly imitate meat. Instead, it has a neutral flavor that “serves as a blank canvas,” according to the company, for customers to season however they like.
Beyond Ground contains only four ingredients — fava beans, potato starch, water, and psyllium husk — and has a macronutrient profile similar to chicken (high in protein, low in fat). It’s an “effort to step outside of the confines of mimicking a particular species and just provide something that is capable of confidently standing on its own as a center-of-the-plate protein,” Ethan Brown, Beyond Meat’s founder and CEO, told me.
The product represents an attempt to meet our current cultural moment, in which wellness has moved beyond mere exercise and nutrition optimization to broader, and dubious, appeals to “natural” living — think the rise of raw milk, the Make America Healthy Again movement, regenerative farming, and homesteading influencers. There’s a reason Beyond’s advertisements have increasingly featured the bean farmers who supply its ingredients.
“There’s this desire to connect back to something authentic…something simpler,” Brown said. “Being a facsimile in that moment is challenging.”
To that end, the company is also shedding “meat” from its name to become, simply, Beyond.
The recent moves follow similar changes the company made last year, like when it launched the Sun Sausage — a product that’s closer to an old-school veggie dog than a high-tech meat imitation — and reformulated its burger to contain less sodium and saturated fat with a simpler and cleaner ingredient list.
The makeover is a “direct reaction,” Brown said, to the many attacks the plant-based meat industry has weathered over the last five years, namely that its products are overly processed and unhealthy (attacks that I would argue are largely inaccurate and unfair). Moving forward, the industry’s success, he said, will depend on making products with “really strong macronutrient content and ratios and then really simple, clean ingredients.”
Meanwhile, Impossible Foods — one of Beyond’s main competitors — has taken a decidedly different tack.
Over the last couple years, Impossible Foods changed its green packaging to a “bold red” design in what it called a “meatier brand identity,” launched an “indulgent” burger (higher in calories, fat, sodium, and protein), recruited the world’s top competitive hot dog eater as a spokesperson, and is considering making a “blended” burger composed of half cattle beef, half plant-based beef. It has also stuck by its key ingredient, soy leghemoglobin, which replicates the heme — an iron-rich molecule — found in beef and is made with genetically engineered yeast to give its burgers an especially meaty flavor.
Call it a tale of two plant-based meat companies.
Both Impossible and Beyond are placing bets on what will retain current customers and attract new ones to the stagnant industry. But the stakes are much higher than just increasing quarterly sales or annual revenue: Plant-based products hold potential to help Americans move away from their high levels of meat consumption, which annually condemns billions of animals to terrible suffering and fuels environmental crises. How these bets shake out will shape the future of meat, and of our planet.
The very confused discourse around plant-based meat
From the mid-2010s through around 2020, plant-based upstarts like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods revitalized the meat-free food sector with products that tasted much more like meat than veggie burgers of the past. Sales of plant-based meat accelerated, and it was widely perceived as a sustainable, humane, and healthy alternative to conventional meat. That this newer generation of products were developed with advanced food technology was often a selling point.
Then came the backlash. Meat industry interests, progressive foodies, social media influencers, conspiracy theorists, and food researchers slammed plant-based meat as fake, high-tech, ultra-processed, and unhealthy. Sales have fallen to pre-pandemic levels, though these attacks have proven less effective in many European countries, where sales are still growing.
It’s not controversial to say that Americans would benefit from cutting back on highly processed foods, especially snacks and beverages loaded with added salt and sugar. But the classification system used to determine which foods are ultra-processed and which aren’t casts such a wide net that many foods that are more or less healthy get caught in it. One of those foods is plant-based meat.
Compared to conventional animal meat, plant-based meats tend to have similar protein levels, less saturated fat, and fewer calories. They also contain zero cholesterol and offer some fiber, whereas meat does not. “These foods can be a valid and helpful way to shift toward more plant-forward diets, which are good for people and the planet,” nutrition scientist Roberta Alessandrini of the Physicians Association for Nutrition recently told CNN.
Plus, the vast majority of the US meat supply comes from factory farms, which are anything but natural, minimally processed, or the pinnacle of health. Each year, billions of genetically manipulated animals are confined indoors, fed unnatural diets of genetically modified corn and soy, given a chemical cocktail of antibiotics and vaccines to stay alive, and after slaughter, their carcasses are doused with chemical disinfectants.
But consumers hold plant-based meat to a different standard. Operating in that cultural reality, it makes sense for Beyond to address its criticisms head-on by reformulating its existing products and launching new ones. But will it work?
A tale of two plant-based meat companies
Beyond’s bet largely rests on the idea that a significant share of the US population is seeking to meaningfully cut processed foods from their diets. The company is right, in part: Polls show that many consumers aspire to eat a more minimally processed diet. But most don’t act on that aspiration, and many hold more nuanced views on processed foods than the loudest voices on social media.
A recent consumer survey from Purdue University agricultural researchers found that most Americans say they’re concerned about processed and ultra-processed foods, but most also believe that they can be part of a healthy diet and value many of their traits: affordability, taste, shelf life, and most of all, their capacity to save them time in the kitchen.
What’s far more important to consumers than perceived health properties, according to Impossible Foods, is taste.
“Taste is absolutely the #1 purchase driver for consumers considering plant-based meat,” an Impossible Foods spokesperson wrote in an email to Vox. “They’re specifically looking for products that most closely resemble conventional meat. In fact, industry data shows that 9 of the top 10 most purchased plant-based burgers in grocery stores are of the ‘meaty’ variety rather than the ‘veggie’ variety, which is right where our products play.”
The meaty approach appears to be working for the company. In a recent blind taste test, many consumers rated several Impossible Meat products as better than or equal to animal meat.
“Even during the category’s downturn, we’ve maintained a strong position,” the Impossible spokesperson wrote. The company hasn’t disclosed its revenue, but according to the market research firm Circana, last year Impossible knocked Beyond Meat out of the No. 2 spot for US plant-based meat retail sales (50-year-old MorningStar Farms, owned by food giant Kellanova — formerly Kellogg’s — is in first place).
Plant-based meat companies are damned if they do and damned if they don’t
And yet. It would be a great understatement to say that despite Impossible Foods’ impressive standing in blind taste tests and supermarket sales, it hasn’t come anywhere within striking distance of its ambition to take over the meat market by 2035, a goal its founder once said was doable. Plant-based meat retail sales have stalled out at around 1 percent of overall US meat sales.
A decade of whiplash, from meteoric rise to slow decline, has left plant-based meat firms trapped: damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. They’re damned if they do a great job of imitating meat with plants, which requires more food processing and ingredients than the vegetarian products of the 1990s, but puts these newer products at risk of unfair health critiques. (Meanwhile, the protein bar company David and the high-protein milk brand Fairlife, each of whose products are highly processed with ingredients unrecognizable to the average person, are printing money and largely evading criticism.)
But plant-based meat companies are also damned if they don’t try to imitate meat, risking being relegated to the “for vegetarians only” category of healthier but less appetizing protein offerings.
“The tension is real,” Chris Dubois, an executive vice president at Circana, told me. Beyond Meat, he said, has done a great job listening to its customers and reformulating its products to meet the demand for simpler ingredient lists, but “the hard part is, I don’t know that that’s the path to win long-term.”
The animal meat industry has benefited from more than a century of generous government subsidies and favorable policy regimes, while the plant-based meat industry has not, which has created a large price gap between the two. Closing that price gap, Dubois said, could help plant-based meat “creep into people’s purchases more.” That might become possible this year, as beef and chicken prices are on the rise. Making plant-based meat products more convenient by, say, having different varieties that are pre-seasoned and easy to cook, should help too, Dubois said.
I think he’s right on all of these fronts. But ultimately, as I’ve written about before, plant-based meat faces challenges that are harder to pin down, but are likely more consequential than price, taste, convenience, and macronutrient profiles. Food choices are highly influenced by familiarity, gender, and conformity with social norms and beliefs (one of those being that meat, even if factory-farmed, is natural and nutritionally necessary).
In a country where extremely popular meat products like chicken nuggets and hot dogs are highly processed, it’s hard to believe that “processing” is really plant-based meat’s problem in the eyes of many consumers, rather than a convenient justification for maintaining the status quo. As demonstrated by a number of psychological studies, many people go to great lengths to justify high levels of meat consumption.
Making products that are delicious, widely available, easy to cook, and as close as possible in price to animal meat are just the minimum bar plant-based meat companies must meet. Beyond, Impossible, and some of their peers have made strides on all these fronts over the past decade. But to really put a dent in meat sales, they — and their allies in the animal protection, public health, and environmental sustainability movements — will need to redeem plant-based meat in consumers’ eyes and clarify what they really are: moderately processed foods with similar or better nutrition to conventional meat, and with a far lighter environmental footprint that doesn’t require the confinement and slaughter of animals.
It’s hard to break through all the noise with a message as nuanced as that. But in some countries, it’s managed to work. I hope it can work here too.
The post Can the plant-based meat industry save itself from America’s senseless food fights? appeared first on Vox.
