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Comment by dsfyu404ed | Hacker News Reader

This is nice for all the reasons mentioned but honestly I'm probably not going to ever eat it until it makes its way onto the value menu. I don't go to fast food to get a $5 burger, I go there to get a $1.55 burger. I can't be the only one.

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Well at some point we will have to reckon with the economics of how a $1.55 burger comes to be. It's simply not possible without sacrificing health, animal welfare, and the environment. Not trying to be preachy about this, but in a cheap meal there are many costs upstream which you pay for one way or another, just not at the counter.

I see no reason we can't have a plant based $1.55 burger that's not superior to the meat burger on all those metrics. The plant burger doesn't have the whole animal portion of the supply chain to pay for. It seems like an economics of scale issue.

My original post more accurately could have read "the economics of how a $1.55 meat burger comes to be."

I don't know anything specific about how the Impossible meatless burger is produced. I know that there are some tricky economics involved in beef production, specifically in government subsidies for the corn which is fed to cattle to make beef; the stream of meat "byproduct" which is turned into "ground beef"; and the huge supply of land and water rights used for grazing cattle which was obtained long ago by huge ranches for free or cheap, which any new at-scale competitor (meat or meatless) will have a hard time beating.

You're not going to just convince the average consumer to not buy the $1.55 burger in front of them by telling them to think about the upstream. You need to provide them with a straightforward alternative. Right now a $5 meatless burger might be able to compete with a $5 beef burger, but it's still going to lose in the $1.55 weight class.

If people had to pay the true cost rather than the often subsidized one, it would be a more equal choice. I wouldn't propose to market "meaty" vs "meatless" on the basis of these hidden costs.

The irony to me is that the $1.55 burger is truly the "impossible" one. Without massive subsidies for feed corn, water, farm labor, etc the value meal burger would not exist.

There is no "true cost". It always boils down to an whether or not any given side effect should be covered and that always boils down to subjective and opinionated arguments.

What if it cost $2.55?

The meat-free burger will cost customers about one dollar more than the beef version.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/1/18290336/burger-king-impos...

You're not. the mcdouble is the cheapest, most nutritious sandwich every made. A vegan burger can't compete.

Agreed. You might not want to build your entire diet around them but under $2USD for ~400kcal in about as balanced as a format as you can expect from a burger is pretty damn impressive. The fact that you can walk into a McDonalds on just about any continent and get said McDouble and it will be just like any other McDouble is a miracle of modern logistics and process control.

Don't disagree about the process control but is 200kcal/$1 really the best you can do? I mean obviously you can buy something in bulk and beat that but it's less interesting than if you only had $2.

Okay so research results:

* A 2 pack of Hot Pockets is $2 and 640kcal.

* Two banquet turkey pot pies are 640kcal for $1.80.

* Cheating somewhat because the ratio is amazing Kroger brand pizza rolls are 1467kcal for $2.77.

* Found a vegetarian option! Totino's Triple Cheese Party Pizza is 700kcal for $1.34.

Hot Pockets are kinda sandwiches I suppose.

Supermarket prices are an unfair comparison; you should compare with a mini-market that provides a microwave for customer use, as you don't need to heat up the McDouble.

Whitecastle has impossible sliders now

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