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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

I agree, Beyond overdoes the fake smoke flavor. But they seem to be better equipped to scale up than Impossible, they've beaten them to mass market in almost every location I've seen.

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I bought a package of Beyond Meat. It was right next to the ground beef, and looked like ground beef. I assumed I could substitute it for ground beef in my spaghetti. Big fat nope! I opened the package, and it smelled exactly like dog food. The smell when cooking it was horrible. It completely ruined my batch of spaghetti. I don't know how people are cooking this stuff and enjoying it. Maybe there's some other way to cook it or season it? As someone who isn't much of a chef, I don't know what to do with it. Go to your favorite search engine, search for "Beyond Meat Smells..." and check out the autofill. I know I'm not the only one.

Yeah, the artificial smoke flavor makes it useless for anything that isn't supposed to taste like it was on an open flame grill. I tried using the Beyond ground burger substitute for tacos once and all I could taste was that stupid smoke flavor.

The Impossible ground burger substitute is far more versatile, but harder to find. None of my local grocery stores carry it.

There is no smoke flavouring in Beyond Burgers.

Maybe people are getting spoiled product? I regularly use Beyond and Impossible and usually don’t notice any off smell. Once I got a pack of Impossible from the refrigerated section that did smell wrong.

put it on a charcoal grill and cook a hamburger. It's definitely not beef but the taste is ok for what it is. I think of it like a veggie compromise, not a perfect burger but not terrible either.

Actually that's an interesting idea I wonder if Impossible or Beyond meat have considered selling their stuff as dog food. I'm sure vegan dog owners would love that.

That'd probably do a lot of damage to their brand, as silly as it sounds, since people wouldn't want to be eating something used as a meat substitute in dog food (which has historically been not very safe/good for humans).

Then go to the same engine and see autocompletes for "ground beef smells". Given enough sample, there would be some people complaining about random weird things, and those are the people typing such searches in search engines.

I’ve found I have to brown it, or it has a weird aftertaste that lasts for hours.

After browning, that’s replaced with a nice nutty cashew flavor. This is especially true of the patties.

I imagine that they'll tweak the flavoring for customers like Taco Bell, who wouldn't want the over-the-top smoke flavor. Like others here, I have tried Beyond as a ground beef substitute (in chili) and found it to be way too smokey.

On the other hand, Impossible + ground turkey makes a great chili.

impossible is focusing on restaurants more than mass market. observe eg partnerships with chefs/restaurants. a fairly large amount of beef in the US is consumed in restaurants/made to order type stuff; that's what they're attacking

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