[lampe3]

Can we add an "in the US" at the end?

Since for EU countries this is not true.

I'm living in sweden now and lived in germany and poland.

Plant-based meat products are growing in numbers and the price of meat is going so high that its cheaper to buy the plant-based one.

In Germany one producer of meat sausages want to turn 100% plant based[1].

I will not go into the whats better and not for you. Since this highly depends on not just one food category. You can eat "Vegan" and still eat unhealthy and you can eat meat and be healthy. The body is to complex on just saying is something is healthy or unhealthy on one factor.

[1] https://www.ruegenwalder.de/vegetarische-und-vegane-produkte

[rob74]

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...

[myspy]

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.

[Insanity]

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.

[brodouevencode]

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).

[chengiz]

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.

[AzzieElbab]

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

[tduberne]

I wanted to say the same thing. Here i Germany the choice of vegan sausage and cold cuts is huge, even in small grocery shops. I know lot of people who eat meat regularly _and_ buy the vegan alternatives on a regular basis.

[hef19898]

Which totally puzzles me. Nothing wrong with a vegetarian diet, but would I prefer processed food, vegan or otherwise, over unprocessed one?

[brnt]

Sausages always seemed such obvious candidates. Many nondry sausages are already often a majority nonmeat. They get their flavor already from plant derived flavorants. Yet mostly fake meat products are burger and chicken nugget replacements.

I've got to say, the fake chicken schnitzels are the first one that I really can't distinguish from the real chicken schnitzel. (Before the purists pour in, yes, compared to supermarket chicken schnitzel, which moreover isn't a real schnitzel anyway.)

[trompetenaccoun]

What brand do you mean? I've never tried a vegan schnitzel I think but all the nuggets and such I tried didn't taste good to me. And yeah, you're absolutely right that it makes sense to start with sausages/cold cuts because they're easier to imitate. Depending on where you live, there is a lot of choice now and they've gotten really good. I also had vegan cheese the other day that I'd assumed was real cheese until I found out.

The next step will be cultured meat (precision fermentation and similar methods). If you're in Singapore or Israel you can already try it in restaurants.

[jnsaff2]

In soviet times they had this saying: "the pieces of lard visible in your sausage are the only part which you can rely on to be meat."

[pilotneko]

In the US, both Beyond and Impossible have very good bratwurst-style sausages. Like you said, sausage is apparently very forgiving when it comes to replacing the meat.

[manojlds]

Here in the UK, there's a lot of vegan sausages. The others like vegan / vegetarian burgers and such are relatively less common.

[stuaxo]

Yup, things where the texture is very removed from the original food definitely make sense.

[dfxm12]

I live in the US and I know it's a big country, so I can only speak for my little slice of the country, but we've always had vegetarian & vegan options at our restaurants, and only recently has plant based meat entered into the picture. Lots of food brought to the US from other places, like Mexico, China, India, Italy, etc. is already vegetarian or vegan, so we don't need to have fake sausage on a restaurant menu when we can have huitlacoche quesadillas, sesame noodles, chana masala, tomato pie, or vegetarian variations of other dishes.

[orf]

Mostly the same for Europe. Varies by country but lots of dishes don’t rely on meat.

But you’re missing the point. The bulk of American sausages sold are fake as hell. If I’m eating fake meat, why not actually eat fake meat

[LBJsPNS]

Always is a relative term. I can assure you that as recently as the 1990s there were large swaths of the U.S. where if you didn't consume meat at each meal you would essentially be branded a communist.

[unity1001]

I second this. Where I am in Europe, plant based 'meat products' are growing in number and variety, and their prices are falling. Their taste is as good as or better than meat, and actually they constitute pretty well fleshed out, tasty dishes in themselves. Especially when old housewives start buying a product, you know that it has succeeded in the taste department.

This brand seems to be the one that is pretty successful where Im at (a Mediterranean country), and you know that Mediterranean cuisine is quite tasty and housewives are very picky. This brand is able to replicate Mediterranean taste in all its meat products.

https://heurafoods.com/

These two ones are its particular hits:

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/burgers-epices

https://heurafoods.com/es/productos/bocados-mediterraneos

[Semaphor]

Your link doesn't support your statement. Where does it say they want to turn 100% plant based?

[jansan]

I have not found any news that would support that claim. They sold more vegan products in 2021 than meat products, but nowhere can I find anything that they aim at selling only vegan products.

[auggierose]

This is a gross misrepresentation. Ruegenwalder is not turning 100% plant based, in terms of sold products I would be surprised if they turned > 5% plant based, but I don't know the numbers there.

[yreg]

It seems that they don't plan to "turn 100% plant based", but rather built a new factory that is 100% plant based.

The ≤5% estimate is just as inaccurate though.

> “Over the full year [2021], we sold for the first time more of our vegan and vegetarian products than of the classic meat products. Last year, the ratio had been fifty-fifty,” the spokesperson added, without giving detailed figures.

https://www.just-food.com/news/germanys-rugenwalder-muhle-ey...

[InCityDreams]

>but I don't know the numbers there

When you do know [the numbers]...please let us know. Perhaps before posting?

[kris_wayton]

The numbers I can find do suggest high percentage growth in Europe, but growth on numbers that are small compared to the US. Something like ~$7B in sales in plant based meat in the US, and ~$3B in sales for Europe. So maybe a bit early to judge? Meaning, maybe there's a similar plateau for EU, but it hasn't gotten there yet?

[pastage]

Those numbers tracks with GDP per capita of the US and EU. I'm guessing it is going to be different if you look at certain segments of the market. Also in this case you probably need to look at tonnage per capita. You might also be right that it is too early to say, comments here can be up to a year ahead of statistics.

[robjan]

Same in Hong Kong. Recently Impossible, Beyond and (our local equivalent) OmniFoods have been introduced to almost all restaurant menus. It's died down a bit, but still quite popular. And this is the place with the highest meat consumption per capita in the world.

[vgatherps]

I live in Hong Kong and can only remember one time I saw a fake meat on a restaurant menu, and it was at an extremely western health-focused restaurant of a large gym chain (nood food). It's definitely not "almost all" restaurant menus.

[bwv848]

Interesting! Can you order faux meat for claypot rice?

[taylorius]

It's a bit of a flop in the UK too tbh. It's been pushed fairly hard, but not that much uptake.

[Oxidation]

I've avoided it because of the push. A tech-adjacent company that's pushing a "disruption" that hard makes me very suspicious.

In principle I'm all for it ethically, and it's probably no "worse" then any other ready meal/processed food à la Unilever that I sometimes eat. But I'd rather just eat tofu (which I do very much like anyway) than whatever some "founder" is pushing on me so he can get another funding round in.

[OJFord]

It's a flop for me because of the 'plant-based' marketing. I make my own burgers with jackfruit or chickpeas and things quite often, but I call them what they are, not 'plant-based', which is about as appetising to me as 'meat-based'. (What's the meat?! Surprise mix of whatever was going cheapest plus horse?).

[onion2k]

You must live in a very different part of the UK to me then. Every supermarket has extensive plant-based options, Greggs has been expanding their vegan range, McDonalds has the McPlant on the menu permanently now..

[Nursie]

https://www.statista.com/outlook/cmo/food/meat/meat-substitu...

The size of the meat-substitute market in the UK appears to have grown steadily to about 1.5 billion quid.

With the UK beef products market hitting around 4.4 billion quid, I'd say that's pretty sizeable.

[nxpnsv]

Similar in Austria, veg products are increasing in quality and availability. There is even a 100% vegan burger king...

[AstralStorm]

It actually is not, they use standard mayo.

[scythe]

>and the price of meat is going so high

Sounds like a contributing factor. But this isn't a normal situation; there's a war going on, and before that there was a huge disruption to global trade due to COVID-19. These aren't the sort of conditions that anyone wants to see continue indefinitely.

"Plant-based meat" already existed before 2015. Then Impossible Burger came up with synthetic heme and thought it would be a game-changer. Long story short, it raised a few eyebrows, but it didn't produce the desired uptake.

I might be missing something, but aside from that, I don't know what the core innovation is supposed to be in the recent products, aside from a big PR push and an economic crisis.

[drakonka]

I'm also in Sweden and agree. There are so many great plant-based alternatives everywhere now, and I'm constantly seeing new products and varieties on the shelves. I've found excellent alternatives for everything except whole eggs.

[the_mitsuhiko]

There is definitely more and more meat alternatives in the stores now. One other curious development are these blended meats like 50% meat, 50% mushrooms or 50% meat and 50% plant.

[scythe]

Taco Bell has been selling this as "seasoned beef" for quite a while now.

[bawolff]

In the us, "plant based meat" refers to a specific type of fake meat product (impossible burger and friends), not all meat substitutes.

[Maken]

I am not so sure about that. In Spain we have also seen a remarkable increase of vegan offerings, with even the smaller supermarkets having a good selection of vegan food and vegan precooked dishes. However, I have barely seen anybody ever buying those. So, I can't tell if that increment in supply is a response to an increment in demand by the consumers, or those companies are burning money fast hoping for a market to appear.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

Yep, i've almost completely stopped eating meat because the vegan and vegetarian replacements are so good.

[InCityDreams]

*upvotes in European * Fucking hell, i was eating vegan sausages 30 years in the uk...