Plant-based meat does big things during the pandemic – and it’s getting bigger.
Beyond Meat has launched a new e-commerce site that lets you order their meatless products, including the popular Beyond Burger, right in front of your door. From Thursday onwards, you will no longer be able to get your faux meat from a supermarket or restaurant. You can order it directly online from the company and have it delivered to you.
Beyond Meat’s main competitor, Impossible Foods, debuted its own e-commerce site directly to consumers in June.
The products for sale on the new Beyond Meat site include meatless burger patties, meatless minced meats, and meatless breakfasts. Two-day shipping is included in all orders.
If you’re worried about the environmental impact of shipping products to your door, that’s a good instinct, but Beyond Meat has done what it can to limit the impact. Your order will arrive in recyclable insulated shipping via UPS’s Carbon Neutral Shipping – a program that supports wastewater treatment projects and landfills to offset compensated emissions from your shipment. (However, you should know that offset programs are far from idiotic.)
Impossible Foods does not make promises about carbon-neutral shipping, but it does say that it has been chosen for packaging with minimal impact on the environment. It also notes that the environmental benefits of eating an Impossible Burger instead of cow of cow outweigh any impact made by packaging. But if you prefer to skip shipping, keep in mind that the company has expanded its retail footprint 60-fold since the start of the pandemic: The Impossible Burger is now available in more than 8,000 stores in all 50 U.S. states, including at least 1,700 Kroger -Real estate stores. You can order online through Kroger.com, which will sync with an Instacart delivery lock to get the products to your home.
Launching a site directly for consumers is a smart move for Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods at a time when many people feel safer having food delivered to them instead of going to a store.
The sale of plant foods has escalated into the coronavirus pandemic, in part because some meat became difficult to find in stores following the closure of meat plants that had become Covid-19 hot spots.
In late April, Bloomberg reported that rumors of an imminent shortage of meat helped boost Beyond Meat shares. The stock rose 41 percent in one week, its biggest weekly jump since the company went public in 2019. Although the stock is not running as dramatically now, the company reported healthy second-quarter earnings this month, saying the record net revenue reached $ 113.3 million, up 69 percent over the year.
A growing awareness of the problems with our animal farming system may also increase the appetite for vegetable meat. We know that the giant factory farms that supply 99 percent of America’s meat are at serious pandemic risk, and they are already rattling off human crisis like antibiotic resistance. These industrial farms also harm the climate, not to mention animal welfare.
For all these reasons, it is exciting that the rise of meatless meat has been meteorically fast, and went over a few years from the niche position of vegans and vegetarians to mainstream acceptance and even dedicated fandom. Three years ago, a few people were talking about Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods. Now many foods see their products as not only tolerable but actually trendy.
There are still obstacles to the widespread acceptance of the new generation of meatless meat. For one, there is a price barrier, with plant-based alternatives from Beyond and Impossible costing a little more than equivalent animal meat products. And there has been a slight decline in the products, with some critics saying they are over-processed and healthy.
But it is worth noting that the findings from the first clinical trial with the Beyond Meat plant-based products were published this month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The study found that when participants switched from eating meat to plant-based meat for two months, their levels of LDL cholesterol (aka “bad cholesterol”) dropped, and they lost an average of two pounds.
It has never been easier to get hold of fake meat that actually tastes a lot like the real thing. And you do not have to be a full-fledged vegan or vegetarian to try it. In fact, 93 percent of the consumers who bought Beyond Meat in the store last year also bought some sort of meat product, which shows that plant-based meat is reaching mainstream appeal.
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