Facing declining U.S. sales and massive layoffs, fake-meat producer Beyond Meat has a radical idea for their fourth-generation Beyond Burger patties and Beyond Beef ground... stuff: they'll make it better-tasting and more nutritious.
“Health is one of the top drivers to the plant-based meat category, and we feel a deep responsibility to deliver on that expectation for the consumer,” CEO Ethan Brown told the Associated Press on Wednesday.
I had thought products like Beyond Meat were supposed to be better for you from the start, but the modern fake meat industry is young, and, like any tech product, there will be iterations and improvements.
So I looked into the nutrition of the current version and was a little shocked by what I found. It turns out that a single four-ounce serving of the old Beyond Meat was a sodium bomb, containing 17% of your USDA sodium needs...
...There wasn't much fat savings in a Beyond Burger patty, either — 20 grams vs 23 for the real deal. Although to be fair, the unhealthier saturated fats were much lower.
...The ceiling was supposed to be virtually unlimited. The Washington Post reported last year they thought it seemed that soon "everyone would be eating burgers, chicken fingers, and steaks — made purely out of vegetables."
Why did anyone ever think that? When did the substitute for an affordable and beloved product ever eliminate sales of the real deal? At our local Safeway, a 16-oz package of 80/20 ground chuck is $4.89. The same amount of Beyond Burger runs $14.98. That's a poor substitute for price-sensitive shoppers — which, these days, is almost everybody...more
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