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The Impossible Whopper is coming to every Burger King in America next week
Burger King will start selling its meatless Whopper across the United States on August 8, the biggest rollout for Impossible's plant-based product.
The burger chain has been selling the Impossible Whopper, featuring a meatless patty made by Impossible Foods, in a few markets in the United States since April. It first tested the product in St. Louis before announcing in May that it would offer the Impossible Whopper nationally this year.
Interest in plant-based protein has surged as many people try to reduce their meat intake for health or environmental reasons. US retail sales of plant-based foods have grown 11% in the past year, according to a July report from trade group Plant Based Foods Association and the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that supports plant-based businesses.
Previously: Meatless "Beyond Burgers" Come to Fast Food Restaurants
Burger King Adds Impossible Vegan Burger To Menu
Related: Impossible Foods Just Raised $75 Million for Its Plant-based Burgers
Inside the Strange Science of the Fake Meat that 'Bleeds'
FDA Approves Impossible Burger "Heme" Ingredient; Still Wants to Regulate "Cultured Meat"
Following IPO of Beyond Meat, Tyson Foods Plans Launch of its Own Meatless Products
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Monday August 05 2019, @01:23PM
$3.50 is competitive with other burger joints of around the same quality. And I may go out and try that deal this week.
Ultimately, plant-based meat replacements and later lab-grown/cultured meat should not exceed the cost of regular meats. In fact, they should be cheaper.
Moving out of the fast food realm, Impossible Foods also just received approval to sell their "raw" product in supermarkets [reuters.com]. I don't know what the price of that would be, but we do know the price of their competitor, Beyond Meat. They sell a package of 2 quarter-pound patties for about $5-6 (pictured here [barrons.com]). So $10-12 per pound. Raw ground beef costs around $2-4 per pound. I actually bought that and grilled it up for two vegetarians, and they enjoyed it. But from what I can tell it is not nearly as good of an imitator as the Impossible Burger, and it uses beet juice for coloring instead of "heme" [soylentnews.org].
Anyway, it is expensive, like other meatless brands (Boca, Morningstar, etc.) have historically been. That might work for a while, but I find it hard to believe that a plant-based substance can't be made more cheaply than beef as production is scaled up. Same with lab-grown meat, which will supposedly use a small fraction of the resources (such as land, water, energy) needed to raise cattle. If you want to meet lofty environmental goals using these products, and get hundreds of millions to start eating them instead of meat, you need to make it cheaper per pound and per gram of protein, rather than another premium-priced thing for the organic-buying crowd. The plants used should be grown using genetic engineering too; fuck the anti-GMO movement.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]