Aug 12, 2022 08:58 PM
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/plant-ba...nimal-meat
INTRO: In the past couple of years, meatless meats have been on a wild ride. In May 2019, Beyond Meat went public and its share price soared by 163 percent—the most successful opening day for any company since 2008. A year later, as the pandemic wreaked havoc on slaughterhouses, plant-based meat sales in the US boomed. By the end of 2020, grocery sales of plant-based meat and seafood were up by 46 percent. At the same time, a glut of fast food brands were getting in on the action and announcing their own plant-based launches.
After the hype came the slowdown. US retail sales in 2021 stayed stubbornly at their 2020 levels. Beyond Meat’s share price has tumbled to around 14 percent of its mid-2019 peak, while its net losses increased to $182.1 million. McDonald’s US test of the McPlant burger—which contains one of Beyond’s meatless patties—ended without any confirmation that the fast food behemoth has plans to take the collaboration further. The dizzying turnaround in the hype cycle is causing people to wonder: Is the plant-based meat revolution already running out of steam?
It’s a good question. But maybe we should start with an even more basic one. Like, what the hell are plant-based meats for in the first place? It’s easy to imagine lots of potential futures for plant-based meat, points out Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University. We could have a world in which people start swapping their vegetables for soy protein burgers or conventional meat consumption stays the same—or increases—but people supplement their meat-heavy diets with some extra plant-based meat. The retail market for plant-based meats would soar in these scenarios, but this wouldn’t necessarily deliver on promises of reducing the carbon emissions of our diets or animal suffering in the world.
If you’re interested in emissions and animal welfare—which the founders of Beyond Meat certainly are—then you might want to look beyond the sheer size of the plant-based-meat market and ask a different question. Are people swapping meat for plant-based alternatives? And since beef has many times the emissions of other kinds of meat, it makes even more sense to ask whether people are trading their cow-based hamburgers for pea and soy protein patties. “Displacing beef is a major goal for plant-based meat,” says Emily Cassidy, a research associate at the World Resources Institute’s Food Program. “In terms of agricultural emissions, beef is the elephant in the room.”
This is where things get tricky. Figuring out whether plant-based meats are replacing beef isn’t something you can tell from share prices or total retail sales. Instead, we have to rely on data from surveys and analyses of supermarket shopping carts. The evidence we do have suggests the Great Displacement isn’t happening (yet). “There’s relatively little evidence that plant-based meat alternatives are currently displacing conventional meat,” says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute... (MORE - details)
INTRO: In the past couple of years, meatless meats have been on a wild ride. In May 2019, Beyond Meat went public and its share price soared by 163 percent—the most successful opening day for any company since 2008. A year later, as the pandemic wreaked havoc on slaughterhouses, plant-based meat sales in the US boomed. By the end of 2020, grocery sales of plant-based meat and seafood were up by 46 percent. At the same time, a glut of fast food brands were getting in on the action and announcing their own plant-based launches.
After the hype came the slowdown. US retail sales in 2021 stayed stubbornly at their 2020 levels. Beyond Meat’s share price has tumbled to around 14 percent of its mid-2019 peak, while its net losses increased to $182.1 million. McDonald’s US test of the McPlant burger—which contains one of Beyond’s meatless patties—ended without any confirmation that the fast food behemoth has plans to take the collaboration further. The dizzying turnaround in the hype cycle is causing people to wonder: Is the plant-based meat revolution already running out of steam?
It’s a good question. But maybe we should start with an even more basic one. Like, what the hell are plant-based meats for in the first place? It’s easy to imagine lots of potential futures for plant-based meat, points out Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist at Kansas State University. We could have a world in which people start swapping their vegetables for soy protein burgers or conventional meat consumption stays the same—or increases—but people supplement their meat-heavy diets with some extra plant-based meat. The retail market for plant-based meats would soar in these scenarios, but this wouldn’t necessarily deliver on promises of reducing the carbon emissions of our diets or animal suffering in the world.
If you’re interested in emissions and animal welfare—which the founders of Beyond Meat certainly are—then you might want to look beyond the sheer size of the plant-based-meat market and ask a different question. Are people swapping meat for plant-based alternatives? And since beef has many times the emissions of other kinds of meat, it makes even more sense to ask whether people are trading their cow-based hamburgers for pea and soy protein patties. “Displacing beef is a major goal for plant-based meat,” says Emily Cassidy, a research associate at the World Resources Institute’s Food Program. “In terms of agricultural emissions, beef is the elephant in the room.”
This is where things get tricky. Figuring out whether plant-based meats are replacing beef isn’t something you can tell from share prices or total retail sales. Instead, we have to rely on data from surveys and analyses of supermarket shopping carts. The evidence we do have suggests the Great Displacement isn’t happening (yet). “There’s relatively little evidence that plant-based meat alternatives are currently displacing conventional meat,” says Dan Blaustein-Rejto, director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute... (MORE - details)
