Food of the Future
Plant-based meat promised guiltless consumption of red meat and more, but it now looks to have fallen flat. After years of preparation, products such as Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat showed up in grocery stores across America almost out of nowhere. In just a couple of years, the once novelty product had made legitimate inroads into America’s diet, albeit far fewer than expected. On the surface, a variety of factors contributed to its flop, such as high prices, negative health impacts, and the simple fact that it did not taste as good as what it was trying to replace. The true culprit, however, is what I call the Silicon Valley hype cycle. This has happened before and it will happen again: an entrepreneur’s bold claims spur an influx of investment and support, all towards a product that is not what was promised. However, without a product that profits, these companies are often destined to fail from the start.
Instead of marketing to vegetarians alone, the industry presumed that a close-tasting replacement would be enticing enough to convince millions to make a switch.
To start, what is plant-based meat? In contrast with veggie burgers, which are most often patties made of vegetables and often beans, fake meat is a collection of countless ingredients, many lab-derived. Bioengineered plant products, proteins typically found in beef, and a variety of synthetic fillers and binders make up a product with most of the flavor, texture, and culinary properties of the animal-derived version. The hope with fake meat was to create a vegetarian product that tasted and felt non-vegetarian. To do this, lab-synthesized proteins and more processing were added in. Impossible Foods, an industry leader, developed a new ingredient called soy leghemoglobin based on the heme protein in red meat. Lead competitor
Beyond Meat took a different approach, instead opting for a perfect balance of plant products and vitamins to create the distinct ‘meaty’ taste.
It needs to be said that no fake meat product on the market is just a blend of plant byproducts; they all include countless food additives and chemicals. At the same time, it’s not like this is that far away from the processing required in producing the typical modern American diet. In the case of fake meat, this intensive manufacturing process went into ensuring that fake meat had a taste close enough to convince meat eaters to make the switch. Instead of focusing on just vegetarians, the industry presumed that a close-tasting replacement would be enticing enough to convince millions to make the switch.
In retrospect, this strategy has not exactly worked, even though it started off well. Plantbased meat began as a novelty supermarket purchase. Later, fast food chain Burger King’s commercial adoption of the Impossible Whopper eliminated a lot of uncertainty surrounding fake meat. And while they’ve stayed popular in the fast-food world, it has only been as a separate menu option. In grocery stores, they have also gained this status: not a replacement for meat, but simply an alternative.
A variety of problems — from high health risks due to sodium levels even higher than red meat, to prices far greater than similar meat products in supermarkets, and fears of its incredibly resource-intensive processing — have contributed to its demise. After all, these products delivered a meat alternative that’s somehow less healthy, more expensive, and possibly just as environmentally harmful. And to cap it all off, even though it tastes good, it’s just not quite the real thing. I would best describe fake meat as not vegetable, nor beef, but some odd middle ground. Most of the taste is there, but it is definitely not the same.
Also worth consideration is the political and social connotation built into fake meat. In marketing strategy, industry leaders have leaned into the political impact of vegetarianism in combating climate change. Livestock are major greenhouse gas emitters and, along with animal
welfare, are major motivators in vegetarianism and veganism today. This marketing choice has created the idea that plant-based meat is inherently and inseparably tied to environmental activism.
However, more unavoidable are the social politics of supporting a substitute for meat consumption. Simply put, meat has an intrinsic association with masculinity in our society.
Some products are doomed to underperform when not delivered at scale, such as plant-based meats. Beyond Meat has been unprofitable since its stock market launch, and Impossible Foods, although privately held, reportedly loses money as well.
Arguably the opposite of this is soy, although its cultural pull is much weaker. Online, the epithet ‘soyboy’ has long been used to label effeminate men. At least in popular imagination, male femininity is associated to some small degree with political liberalism. Thus, plant-based meat is viewed as a special product reserved for the liberal, or at very least, not for a conservative. When country restaurant Cracker Barrel experimented with adding Impossible Sausages to their menu last summer, their customer base’s immediate backlash almost prompted them to cancel the collaboration entirely. In many cases, fake meat is so tied to its supposed liberal identity that it limits the audience that it can be sold to. This branding problem has forced the industry to compete for an ever smaller group of consumers, hurting and restricting prospects for growth.
Economically, the plant-based meat industry has fallen far from its initial hype. Beyond Meat’s market cap has shrunk to one-fourteenth of its peak valuation, and food industry giants such as Kellogg and Tyson have all but abandoned their own fake meat divisions. In the third quarter of last year alone, Beyond Meat’s sales shrunk by 22.5%. As in the case of everything, the money followed what the people chose. As Shanker first noted in Bloomberg, fears of recession and rising inflation left consumers with less money to spend, especially on fake meat, resulting in falling sales.
The Silicon Valley hype cycle is mostly responsible. The story always goes something like the following: a bold innovator has an idea to change the world and works tirelessly to create the technology that makes it a reality. A future is promised, and it’s one that amazingly solves countless problems with just one product. In the case of plant-based meat, it was an all-in-one substitute that would solve the problems of red meat’s health harm, livestock’s environmental impact, and animal cruelty. What’s happened since then? As described before, the existing veggie burger market was replaced with a substitute product, and only 2% of the expected 10% meat market share to be taken was achieved. Selling a product requires a promise, and in this case, it was being able to consume a harmful product with all of the harm removed.
The case of Uber makes a good comparison to fake meat’s problems. Uber invented the rideshare app in 2010 and did so with the bold claim of universalizing transportation: or, to put it in their own words, ‘reimagining the way the world moves’. One decade after its launch, Uber has still never profited from their rideshare business, instead relying on endless restructuring and promises of future profitability to continue new investment. Seemingly, there is an insistence that Uber should work, even when its business model hasn’t. Instead, they suppose to just keep trying until it somehow works out and starts making money.
This model is the case of much of present-day tech innovation. Some products are doomed to underperform when not delivered at scale, such as plant-based meats. Beyond Meat has been unprofitable since its stock market launch, and Impossible Foods, although privately held, reportedly loses money as well. Maybe this could change in years to come, but it will probably stay this way for now. Their bottom line is that they will need to be cheaper to succeed. To lower the price, however, a lot more people are going to need to eat a plant-based burger. The problem, then, is that the fake meat industry is in great need of a new consumer base that doesn’t exist, at least for now. After the last few years, it will take something big for plant-based meat to regain the hype and publicity that made it available in the first place. As Shanker also described, fake meat is now more likely to stay a niche food eaten by a minority of vegans and vegetarians.
However, a new fad is coming soon: in-vitro lab-grown meat. Instead of plant products bound with bioengineered proteins, this technology promises real, genuine red meat grown in a lab without a single living animal. If this is true, the taste problem faced by plant-based meats would be overcome and replaced with a genuine animal copy. However, only time will tell if this can become reality. Investors have already put over $3 billion into cell-cultured startups in the hope that this does become the next ‘big thing’.
In late 2022, Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown insisted that his long-term plan was still possible, because “as the climate situation worsens,” more people would be convinced to make the switch.
When promised the future, we need to have a heavy handful of skepticism. Big Tech and innovative entrepreneurs may promise us the future, but their products are so often grounded in idealism rather than a practical solution to what we actually have to deal with. In 2022, Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown insisted that his long-term plan was still possible, because “as the climate situation worsens,” more people would be convinced to make the switch! If climate change needs to worsen to sell the product marketed as a way to help ameliorate climate change, it can’t be that great of a solution. Fake meat won’t be what we need it to be for a while, so we need to be more critical of the marketing behind plantbased meat and its ‘futurist’ peers. Innovation and promises to bring the future today are much needed, but the bold claims of startups trying to sell a product should never be accepted at just face value. Especially when it comes to completely upending the global industry of what we eat. Although the industry’s sales pitch did not work as well as expected, plant-based meat will be here to stay.
Harrison Goodman Cohn ‘26 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at gharrison@ wustl.edu.