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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

I'm from Germany, and I can confirm that the number of vegan alternatives to any imaginable animal product have increased sharply both in quantity and quality over the last years, to the point that you can get good vegan alternatives at discount supermarkets now.

Even in the US, I wonder if what Bloomberg is calling a "flop" is a real flop or just some companies falling short of their over-ambitious forecasts (or the even more ambitious goals of their investors/stockholders)? But I'm not really qualified to talk about the situation in US supermarkets...

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Aldi has a great chicken replacement and the meatballs packaged with a pack of ketchup are excellent. I would wish for them to be available in a larger version without the ketchup.

Another problem I have with all of this is the plastic packaging for everything. Getting something like that at a veggie butcher would be cool.

In a podcast I heard that The Vegetarian Butcher initially had experimental biological degradable packaging, but after buying hundreds of thousands they all went bad, and had to be thrown out. Now they use plastic packaging and they only try to solve one problem at a time.

This sounds weird to me, it was a surprise to them that biodegradable packaging biodegraded?

The general assumption is that biodegradable materials biodegrade under conditions different from regular use and storage, or over long timeframes. The timber in your house is biodegradable, but if you keep it dry it will last a century or so. Packaging that biodegrades in regular storage isn't nessesarily bad, but surprising

Ah, it was a storage issue? That's interesting, thank you.

Didn't our ancestors just use paper for such things? Or cloth?

I guess lots of them died of dentistry before getting to oregon, but still.

Killer cavities or misspelling of "dysentery"?

Knowing that the dentists of the early-mid 19th century were mostly trained as barbers, probably both.

Waxed paper, usually. It is not nearly close to biodegradable. It requires specific yeasts yo be present in the soil or the paper will remain for a very long time. Also waxed fabrics and glass or ceramic jars.

Dysentery?

I prefer polypropylene packaging to cardboard coated in PFAs. The latter is ostensibly "compostable", as long as you're ok with compost laced with forever chemicals.

Herbivorous Butcher in Minneapolis https://www.theherbivorousbutcher.com/

"Getting something like that at a veggie butcher would be cool."

Wouldn't it just be shipped in plastic and repacked in plastic?

They could ship a lot of them in less plastic to a vendor where you could get them in a paper bag.

How does that work if they use fake blood?

In the EU the quality is good of the plant-based meats. In the US/Canada is it quite bad though.

Maybe it is the same situation for regular meat, can’t comment on that. But finding actually good tasting and healthy meat replacement here in Canada is a challenge.

>"finding actually good tasting and healthy meat replacement here in Canada is a challenge"

I can confirm. Few things I tried - I did not like it at all. Also I do not know about now but back way before COVID when I actually tried this fake meat the cost was outrageous. Throwing some decent fresh meat into a grinder and turning it into burger tastes way better and was way cheaper.

Beef prices have fallen in the US over the past year (quite unlike all other meat) because farmers increased production. That certainly contributes to the "flop", but anecdotally no one I know (in the US) likes or even seeks out the fake meat. It's just not accepted here as far as I can tell (and I work in the restaurant/hospitality industry).

Depends where you live, in SF, LA, Vegas, Austin, and Miami I have impossible burgers all of them time - even Mighty Taco in Buffalo has impossible meat and Buffalo is last to get anything (they “allowed” Uber ten years after everyone else).

The high quality fake meat is great - really satisfies the want for a burger or hot dog since becoming vegetarian and makes a lot of dishes where something like ground beef is usually called for very similar to what I used to have.

Of course there are markets where it has been more readily adopted than others, but even in those markets it's not performing the same as it has in Europe or Asia.

Yeah, I was just sharing my own anecdote - I know lots of people that eat it and I’ve personally had it in lots of cities when traveling.

Re your second paragraph, you are exactly right. The title is clickbaity, to the point of using a disparaging term (fake) instead of a generally accepted one (lab grown). The article is meant to be shared by meat lovers, who were never the market. Entrepreneurs and early adopters did proselytize it - but that happens in every industry. Lab grown meat is everywhere in the US and people buy and eat it. It's just another choice that consumers have now. It is not a flop.

Do you think this trend will continue if the price of meat falls?

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