The HN crowd is not the typical consumer that shops at Walmart. The typical consumer buys things that they can afford and makes compromises on flavor.
The ethical part won't effect demand just like it hasn't effected demand in the past. The price and taste will help consumers afford more meat. And I'm sure that they would agree that is a noble thing.
Eventually Walmart is going to start a price war with meat. It's going to be really interesting how the market will respond. I suspect a majority of people won't care.
Everyone here is talking about taste, quality, and all the other things office workers making six figures base their purchasing decisions on
For every pound of free range, organic fed, fair trade ground beef that gets sold at Whole Foods Walmart sells a truck load of house brand 80/20.
Plant based ground beef replacements are not going to have a measurable impact on the meat industry or environment until they can deliver almost the same experience as cheap ground beef at a lesser price.
I see no mention of price in this article which tells me price is not one of the strong suits of this product. While another choice of vegetarian beef is certainly a good thing for vegetarians and the Whole Foods crowd I don't see this product affecting everything at the macro level. Things will likely get cheaper over time but we do not appear at a tipping point yet.
The real change is going to happen when people can't tell a difference in taste and Walmart starts selling synthetic meat at a substantial discount to meat. At that point the consumer won't care just like the consumer doesn't care if their strawberry flavored cereal has real strawberries in it.
You're foolishly projecting ideology and personal beliefs into somewhere so far removed from the consumer that it simply won't matter.
Commodities buyers don't care who's corn is ethical or who's corn is unethical. They don't care who's ground beef is manly and who's isn't. It all comes down to cost per results at the end of the day. Resource usage is just a part of that calculation. No different than the cost of shipping.
If McDonalds and Walmart can cut their existing beef with fake plant beef or lab beef without hurting their bottom line (by making their products less attractive to consumers) they will.
Will there be people who try and capture the high end market with some ideologically themed marketing in the meantime? Of course. But make no mistake, the long term goal for these new synthetic meat (both plant meat and lab meat) producers is not the high end market. It's the thousands of reefer cars that put that house brand 80/20 on a store shelf near you. Pandering to whatever the premium consumer wants to hear until you can make your product cheap enough and good enough to make real money is just a necessary part of bootstrapping that.
Putting the McDouble back on the dollar menu with the help of synthetic beef is what societal progress looks like.
Exactly that. One of these days, someone will give me a choice between a normal, horrifyingly-grown slab of meat and a slightly-more-expensive-but-ethically-grown one, and then we'll see who's a hypocrite!
I see free range chicken breasts for way more than that. If they’re targeting the consumers who buy based on ethics, they’ve already reached a not-unreasonable price.
I don't see the economic realities stacking up. The price of cheap, processed meat products is pretty low... and not all of the price is ingredients. It's a long way to the bottom.
Meanwhile, the higher end ethical consumers... it's hard to predict their consumer preferences/choices. I suppose some vegans want meat and some omnivores want to be vegan... but as I said, I'm dubious about these groups' real size.
This won't get to $1 per kg overnight. There probably needs to be adequate demand all along the continuum to fuel volume price reductions.
I also think it's naive to assume that environmental (eg energy/carbon savings) benefits will materialize. Its equally naive to assume eco consumers will buy the story otherwise, over the long term.
The main bull case seems to rely on overwhelming cost advantage. Where's the reason to think this will happen.?
Oh please. Don't try to blame the consumers for this one. Some person at a grocery store or a restaurant has no realistic way of knowing how the meat he's buying was raised and slaughtered. What's he going to do, arrange a farm tour every time he gets something to eat? The best you can get is places like Whole Foods which claim their meat is more ethically treated, but even here you're just relying on their word and their fancy marketing.
Moreover, the middle class in this country is disappearing, so people on the bottom end have less and less money to spend on decent food, so of course they're going to get whatever's cheapest. It's not like the grocery store advertises, "buy this cheaper meat here where the cows have been tortured to death, rather than this more expensive meat where they haven't".
You can only blame consumers when the consumers actually have sufficient information to make an informed choice, and make the wrong choice anyway. Laws like this aim precisely to prevent consumers from having this information. This is why we need decent government to make capitalism and "free markets" work as well as possible: it's the government's job to keep the playing field level and fair, and laws like this are counter to this goal because they tilt the field in favor of the most evil companies who want to hide how they make stuff so that consumers can't make an informed choice.
The consumers ultimately will decide the fate of the mean industry. However, I doubt that consumers will change their habits in a way that will be in their best interest.
Consumers can choose to buy meat from local sources that are ethically raised and at a scale that doesn't negatively impact the local environment. Yes, that will probably cost more then what's at the grocery store. But do we need to eat meat every day, week, or month?
To put all the responsibility on the meat industry, policy, and the government is in my opinion the wrong approach. I think we should be educating consumers and influencing change through the scale of economics.
Eh, even with the lengths this comment went to present a working framing I still don't accept it.
Either cannibalism is so objectionable that I'd refuse to patronize a restaurant that served human flesh, or I'd probably not mind them being cooked side-by-side.
That might be a bigger things for vegans, by buying even vegetarian stuff from burger king you're supporting a company that financially motivates a lot of actions you find unethical - that is logically consistent at least.
Interestingly I don't think it'd be the only logical stance for an ethical vegan - purchasing beyond meat products would signal the company of the increased relative demand of vegetarian substitutes potentially leading to that company investing more in beyond meat products and lowering their meat purchases, decreasing the market stability and liquidity for real meat products.
Unless this stuff is cost-competitive with the cheapest meat out there, it won't change anything.
The vast majority of people still buy their food solely based on what's most affordable, with little to no room to account for "ethical reasons" beyond that. In that regard, "organic" or "ethical" often amounts to paying double if sometimes quadruple the price of "regular" products.
If artificial meat can undercut regularly produced meat, price wise (without tasting too bad), then that could be a real game changer, but until that happens it will remain only interesting to the fringe demographic of people with too much disposable income. Which isn't that big of a demographic and as such will never have the potential to enact the desired environmental impact change.
It already has happened. Fast food chains have at least had to apply some humane standards to the meat producers they buy from thanks to pressure from the public. And many of them are also rolling out meat substitutes due to customer demand.
Most social change comes from the ground up, not the top down. Companies like Tyson aren’t inherently evil, they just prioritize profits. Tyson is investing in meat replacements right now because customers have said they want them.
I hope this will get better, I would (and do when possible) pay more for free range, ethically raised meat products. I imagine producers will follow the money if enough people think that way.
Make it cheap enough and the branding matters a lot less.
Just cycle through brands until once sticks. The meat products industry is already full of potentially disturbing stuff that people think is delicious (hotdogs and chicken nugget goo (really, mechanically separated chicken) come to mind).
The ethical part won't effect demand just like it hasn't effected demand in the past. The price and taste will help consumers afford more meat. And I'm sure that they would agree that is a noble thing.
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