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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The real success in this area is the Impossible burger. It's made mostly from peas and soy, with heme added to produce the bloody meat texture. The heme is made in a fermentation process not much more complex than brewing. Impossible has no problems with volume production - they sell through Burger King and WalMart. Growth rate about 85%/year.

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As a long-time meat eater, I find Impossible to be a passable substitute for ground beef in a lot of dishes.

If they can get the end user price under control, they could displace a whole lot of beef consumption. At the current price point, it’s not nearly worth it on a taste or economic value comparison with 80% ground beef.

It seems more like they price it high because they can. The process isn't expensive. A 68,000 square foot plant makes a million pounds a month, says the company. It's not like lab-grown meat, which is a slow, expensive process.

Amusingly, Impossible's ground beef like product was getting rave reviews from prominent foodies at first. It first appeared only at expensive restaurants. Then they got Burger King to sell it. Only then was there criticism.

You know how the working conditions in so many meatpacking plants are abysmal, like how Tyson Foods is always making headlines for some heinous shit? I wonder if conditions in Impossible plants are better by default. Fewer occupational hazards or whatever.

It is likely far more automated requiring fewer people then butchering

A single Beyond Meat plant last year was found to have mold, listeria, and rodents. I wouldn’t be so sure that working conditions are much better. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-11-21/beyond-mea...

Beyond and Impossible are very different companies.

How so?

Blame your restaurants. Burger king has figured out how to sell you two impossible kings for $7. The only reason why people still ask for another $4 to swap out the sysco patty on your $12 brewpub burger is because they can and you are used to it.

If only we subsidised this as much as we subside meat production. Or perhaps subsidise nothing. Either way it’s not yet a level playing field.

Why do you think we subsidize meat production? Isn't it sugar and soybeans that we subsidize?

70% of soybeans grown in the US go to feed livestock.

In the west we subsidize water which indirectly subsidizes beef production.

I guess awarding the original water rights might now be seen as a subsidy, in the same way as giving away land for homesteading, but that happened a long time ago. That’s not an ongoing subsidy.

Check out how massive the subsidy difference is

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/18/gigantic...

Their sausage has already done this. It's almost a dollar cheaper than Jimmy Dean at my local, and the Impossible stuff is indistinguishable from pork sausage.

And for some reason I cannot quite process it, even though I generally eat a lot of vegetables. The second most painful trip to the bathroom I have ever had was after an impossible burger. The first one was after a beyond meat burger.

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