Plant Based Fail

The Empty Promise Of Animal Meat Displacement

It has been a rough couple of weeks in the media for the plant-based meat category. The major black eye came from a BusinessWeek cover story by Deena Shanker with the painful title, “Fake Meat Was Supposed to Save the World. It Became Just Another Fad” and subtitle, “Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods wanted to upend the world’s $1 trillion meat industry. But plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop.”

Ouch.

The reaction from the vegan echo chamber was swift and childish.

Impossible Foods resorted to calling the article “another opinion piece” and oddly relied on Reddit users to defend the company, taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times. Such an exorbitant and useless spend seems especially ill-timed given this week’s news of the company cutting 20 percent of its workers.

Meanwhile, social media exploded with various forms of outrage aimed at the Bloomberg reporter who wrote the piece, Deena Shanker. This common response is known as “shooting the messenger”, and at times crossed over into vicious attacks.

But lost in these knee-jerk reactions is the grim reality that the main promise of plant-based meat – that these products will displace animal meat – is unfulfilled and will likely remain so into the future.

We can keep arguing over whether sales of plant-based meats are going up or down, or whether these products are healthy or not, of even if the meat lobby is paying Bloomberg to publish stories to bash the category. (This conspiracy theory was floated more than once on social media, including in a comment on Impossible Foods’ LinkedIn post.)

At the end of the day, the only relevant question is this: Are meat eaters substituting plant-based meats for animal meats in any significant way?

Read the rest at Forbes.