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Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Would love to hear an informed opinion on why meat alternatives aren't commodities.

Is what the first mover brands are doing that unreproducible?

Getting patents.

Meat replacements are already dime in a dozen, there's been a boom at least for a couple of years in Europe. Some are better than others, but none have a power to control the market. Even if a single brand will be the most popular, there definitely will be (already is!) a commodity market where people will buy a good enough meat replacement from their local grocery store. If the main ingredient is oats or fava bean is maybe akin to difference between chicken and pork.

Impossible burgers are an order of magnitude better tasting than any other meat replacement I've tried. Beyond burgers are hilariously worse.

Sure, but there's no way that would lead to market dominance. It will perhaps be the highest profit product and a market leader, but plenty of other options are good enough for a healthy market to exist.

And TBH I think the obsession with a burger replacement is some American thing, here they are used for replacing meat (mostly minced meat) in all kinds of foods. I'm not sure I've even tried a fake-meat burger yet.

I searched through a few Impossible patents as a result of this thread. They've certainly got a number.

As near as I can tell (not chemist), they're focusing their patents on (a) extractive methods (e.g. how to produce raw starting blocks from actual, grown plants) & (b) specific mixes or treatments that target the meat-analog market.

For example, a lot of their parents are of the form of "a food product with X% this, Y% that, Z% the other. Where X had a molecular weight of A and a gel point of B degrees. Where Y has..."

Where's "here"? In Switzerland you also see lots of burger replacements, imported like beyond or "homegrown" like the green mountain burger.

In the Netherlands, burgers are definitely a thing, but the ones that get people excited so far appear to have been chicken, meatballs and smoked sausage (which are traditionally important here). The introduction of the Beyond Burger made some noise, but mostly because of it being hyped in the US. It does not appear to be a regular buy, though that might be because it's also really expensive, comparatively.

All anecdotal, though.

Finland. Lots of domestic meat replacement products. I know Germany doesn't have nearly as much, but that's not too surprising as it's a slow adopter of everything.

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