Beyond Meat went public in 2019 with the promise that plant-based artificial burgers would be the future of meat. Well, we’re in the future, and no one is really buying (or eating) it. With the once-booming meat replacement market hanging on by a thread in the MAHA-led beef tallow and raw milk era, the head of Impossible Foods believes he can heal the meat divide by making a burger for everyone: half meat, half plant.
According to Semafor, Impossible’s CEO Peter McGuinness told audiences at the World Economy Summit that the alt-meat market went wrong when they went all in on positioning themselves as a climate-friendly alternative to Big Beef. He argued the industry was “mismarketed and mislaunched” and invited their product, high-end veggie burgers, to get caught up in the culture war. Alternative meats were virtue signaling, basically, and the meat eaters were never going to get on board with it.
So, he’s going back to the drawing board, and he’s sketched out the cure to the sickness at the heart of our culture: the hybrid burger. It’s one of those solutions that is so simple, so obvious that it gives you the impression that you actually didn’t put any thought into it at all, and that if you did think about it for more than a second, you would conclude that it’s probably a terrible idea that serves no one. But McGuinness doesn’t have that second. “If that got meat eaters to try it and like it, I think it’s a win,” he said.
Getting meat eaters to make the switch was kind of the whole pitch with alternative meats in the first place, because vegans and vegetarians are already not eating meat and don’t need to be tricked with meat-like textures. Why else would you need to make fake burgers bleed? And back in 2019, when these fake meats were all the rage, it was meat eaters who were switching up their diets who made up the majority of the sales, with 90% of the people eating non-meat burgers not identifying as being committed to vegetarian or vegan diets. Nielsen data from that time period found that 98% of alternative meat buyers were also buying meat and just liked the variety.
Novelty is nice for a while, but if the idea was to slowly convert those real meat eaters to alt meats, that never really took. A 2022 study found that people who bought plant-based meat at least once ended up buying slightly more ground meat after their first purchase of a meat alternative. Getting people to convert full-time requires them to make a change in lifestyle, and because plant-based products tend to cost more than real meat options, you kind of have to count on them making that change for reasons that reflect their morals or values, because it’s not going to help their budget. Trying to position alt meats as a health product also didn’t quite work, as more research into the products showed that plant-based patties were often higher in sugar and sodium and lower in important nutrients found in real meat.
There probably is a market for plant-based meat replacements beyond just existing vegans, vegetarians, and recent converts. While McGuinness’s hybrid burger is, frankly, a solution for no one, he is probably right that “People don’t want to eat tech food or climate food.” But the odds of the current big players in the alt-meat game cracking the code are getting longer. Last year, McGuinness revealed that Impossible still hasn’t turned a profit and could be sold off entirely. Rival fake meat-slinger Beyond Meat just completed a deal to reduce its debt, which drove its stock price under $1—just a little bit lower than its peak of nearly $250 per share shortly after its IPO in 2019.
