After exiting Beyond Meat, Tyson Foods will launch meatless products this summer
After exiting Beyond Meat, Tyson Foods said that it will roll out its own plant-based meat substitutes beginning this summer.
The Jimmy Dean owner sold its stake in Beyond before the company went public, citing its desire to produce vegetarian meat substitutes under its own umbrella of brands. CEO Noel White told analysts on the quarterly conference call Monday that the plant-based product will launch this summer on a limited basis, with a wider rollout in October and November.
[...] Beyond made the strongest market debut so far this year on Thursday, surging 163%. The stock has a market value of $3.97 billion, dwarfed by Tyson's own market value of $22.66 billion. Tyson shares gained more than 2% Monday.
Despite the difference in market value, Beyond and other makers of plant-based meat alternatives — such as Impossible Foods — pose a threat to Tyson. Beyond Meat's CEO, Ethan Brown, told CNBC that the company is trying to capture the meat industry's customers. Its gluten- and soy-free products are meant to more closely resemble and taste like meat than previous iterations of veggie burgers.
Also at CNN.
See also: Beyond Meat goes public with a bang: 5 things to know about the plant-based meat maker
Competitors Sink Their Teeth Into The Meatless-Meat Industry
(Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday May 09 2019, @05:57PM (9 children)
I personally do want to move that way, eventually. We should have plant/fungi-based substitutes or lab-grown meat, especially if we are talking about living and working in space, on Mars, etc.
Ground rules include: the substitute or lab-grown version ought to be cheaper than the meat it is replacing. No virtue signaling expensive purchase for me, like "organic" food.
The heme-bleeding Impossible Burger seems like a good direction to go in. Not that the substitutes need to precisely mimic meat to the extent that you can be fooled into thinking it is meat (a black bean burger is fine too), but they should give it a shot.
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(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Thursday May 09 2019, @06:47PM (2 children)
Lab-grown meat is still meat. Perhaps a better name would be Beyond Sentience or Beyond Biological?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:31PM
It's a qualifier. You've got Kobe beef out there, and you have pink slime. Lab-grown meat could encompass the whole spectrum, but it is made in a non-traditional way and is already facing intense opposition from the established livestock industry.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:22PM
Soylent Green?
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Thursday May 09 2019, @07:10PM (3 children)
You are right on about developments for space travel and having products that have a status/signal attached to them. Seeing how they couldn't get the biosphere 2 thing to work out right I don't want to be on a spaceship unless there have been significant strides in food quality and production.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 09 2019, @08:21PM (2 children)
I haven't ditched meat. I just had some today. But I am pretty sure that I could go weeks, months, or years without it, and that is what I will shoot for at some point down the road. One way to look at it is: if shit hit the fan and you had to become a subsistence farmer (maybe with some robot assistance), would it be more efficient to raise livestock or grow plants for meat substitutes? There's also an animal suffering argument that is compelling for some people, although we can only care about that so much (it's a first world problem).
We are entering a golden age of meatless products. Early versions like Boca and Morningstar were tolerable or kinda bad, rubbery nonsense. The marketing was very premature, laughably portraying people fooled into eating meatless products, when the actual difference was obvious. Just like nobody would mistake turkey bacon for the real thing. But in the last decade or so there was a lot of engineering as Silicon Valley types started pursuing the ideas further and throwing money at it (you've got Bill Gates investing in egg substitutes [npr.org], for example), and that has resulted in a new generation of meat substitutes that can credibly replace actual meat [pri.org]. To the extent that eating it would probably disgust some vegans/vegetarians as they are not used to it. Check out the photo [pri.org] in the article, showing a technician pouring heme. Lol.
There is probably some unnecessary tension between meat eaters and vegetarians/vegans because of activism [youtube.com], PETA, and meat eaters having bad experiences with overhyped beta-version meat substitutes. But now people are getting curious again and finding that Impossible Burger tastes like meat. Dressing it up also helps disguise it. Apparently, I tried someone's leftover Impossible Burger from Cheesecake Factory two days ago. It was good, but I'll have to try it fresh sometime.
Lab-grown meat is a whole different story. With lab-grown meat, there is the potential to precisely replicate traditional meat, create novelty cuts of meat (rearrange meat, fat, and bone cells in new ways), with no ambiguity (other than industry FUD) that the substance *is* meat. It obviously isn't ready for the prime time, and if it was we would probably have similar stuff like 3D printed organs and bones in widespread use, when we clearly don't. But it's probably coming, and we could eventually see a situation where the market says you can't have anything but lab-grown meat unless you make a special order to a small farm or go to a fancy restaurant. Meat substitutes and meat can co-exist, meat substitutes and lab-grown meat can co-exist, but will all three co-exist after a few decades? Not for most people.
Of course, there is another option. Be like Gaaark and eat mealworms and crickets. Some people are used to this and even enjoy it, others see it as a slap in the face or a globalist plot (refer to Snowpiercer for more... details). We'll see if space travelers and Martians are forced to eat bugs.
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(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday May 09 2019, @11:35PM (1 child)
Oh, you mean that shiny yellowish luster? That's fools gold
(grin)
Seriously though, the Chinese developed their cooking so that will eat things well beyond what the Westernized world would (i.e. they could adjust to a lack of meat in their food easier than the westerners). And I don't see them giving up meat as yet, on the contrary.
What this says about the "golden age of meatless products " is left as a homework.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @12:02AM
I say golden age because there are more choices, more investments, consumers spending more money on it, better taste, etc. More fast food places carrying these is also a very interesting trend, with a lot of action in just the last few months.
https://vegnews.com/2016/2/meatless-meat-market-will-reach-52-billion-by-2020 [vegnews.com]
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/07/business/mcdonalds-meatless-burger-germany/index.html [cnn.com]
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(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Friday May 10 2019, @02:22AM (1 child)
I give the substitutes a free pass on high price for a few years because the meat industry has huge economies of scale and government subsidies (free access to public water and land in some places, etc...) But if these things become more popular and the price doesn't go down, the free pass will be revoked.
I haven't had the Impossible Burger. I find veggie burgers that don't even attempt to taste like meat to be decent, but not as good as a good beef burger. I find most veggie burgers that try to be meat substitutes to be awful. The Beyond Meat Burger is the first vegan burger that provides a texture identical to a good beef burger and a taste close enough that I can tell there's a difference but I don't mind it.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 10 2019, @02:34AM
It's at various places and it might cost double that of a regular burger.
https://www.thecheesecakefactory.com/menu/glamburgers-and-sandwiches/impossible-burger/ [thecheesecakefactory.com]
The real tipping point will be when it comes to all ~7,200 U.S. Burger King locations, expected sometime this year:
https://www.denverpost.com/2019/05/07/burger-king-meatless-impossible-whopper-nationwide/ [denverpost.com]
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