Plant-based mince is now 29% cheaper than beef, lamb, and pork mince at Tesco, according to a price comparison conducted by nonprofit think tank GFI Europe
When the reverse was true it really rubbed me the wrong way. Soybeans are dirt cheap and soybean meal (the defatted version) even more so. On agricultural markets soybean meal is around 300-400 dollars per metric ton. That means it’s traded for less than a dollar per kg. Yet soy based vegan products were for years more expensive than the meat alternative, and lots of these animals would have eaten more than 1kg of soy containing feed to produce each kg of meat. It makes no sense to me. Yes processing the soy meal into a tasty meat alternative is not cheap, obviously, but are you telling me the soy meal to meat conversion is cheaper than the soy meal to faux meat conversion? Really put me off from vegan products.
Same is true for things like oat milk. Oats in bulk cost pretty much nothing yet they managed to sell it for more than cow milk. What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits? And don’t bring up the whole “animal proteins are subsidized” bit. I don’t know about the US but in the EU the subsidies are based on agricultural area. 1 hectare of soy plantation gets the same amount of subsidies as 1 hectare of any other animal feed crop. That’s not the explanation.
I see this as a huge improvement and if plant based products are to really take off they have to be an affordable alternative even to the non vegan.
Soybeans as a commodity can be cheap, but that doesnt mean that an end product made out of soybeans will also inherently be cheap.
The market for soybean based meat alternatives is not that huge, so one of the more expensive aspects of trying to have an end product in an actual brick and mortar store is going to be getting space on the shelf in the first place. Packaging design and maybe some marketing, not to mention creating the actual product itself. All that stuff is expensive even if its mostly soybeans that the end product is made from
Laundry detergent is like 95% water, but it costs far more than if it was actually 100% water
Same. I feel like vegans are being taken advantage of. Soy and oat and other grain based replacements for animal products should be dirt cheap. They’re marketing to hipsters and pricing accordingly. So all that shit about the economy and whatnot? Marketing trash. Make that shit cost what it should and way more people would buy it. Especially with everything going up.
You don’t have to buy such products when you are vegan but personally I’d rather be taken advantage of than have non-human animals be taken advantage of and in a much more severe way. People really get thrown off at the slightest inconvenience when it affects them…
Fair, and expected, but why not both? Why can’t vegan food be profitable and also cheaper than animal-based products? Because of greed taking advantage of people with hearts bigger than their wallets but who will open it regardless and just pay more. The one who is more frugal and doesn’t have as strict of dietary restrictions sees the bullshit on both sides but buys what’s affordable.
I will say this for you vegans… one of you got me curious about oat milk, so I started asking for it at my favourite coffee shop, and I think it makes their coffee better. They push it with new customers, but they serve whole (cow) milk as well. Once I opted for cow milk a couple times, they stopped asking. So I had to mention that I was curious about oat milk. Hoping to push the trend back, where they stop asking me and just do oat milk. I’ll buy oat-based creamer if it’s cheaper/on sale. I want to give it a try at home now. Not because it’s more ethical, but because I found it makes my coffee better.
I like eating meat. I’m not gonna mince words here. But if I found a plant-based alternative I liked and it was cheaper (or comparable), I would get it more, but I have to be careful… because I still need animal protein due to the surgery I got a couple years ago.
Where I live there are little processed vegan options, they are hard to come by/identify, and there are no vegan sections but I’m glad that they are here at all tbh given the state of things. As for prices just like with everything you judge things on a per product basis. If there’s something that costs more than I’m willing to pay I just skip it as I’m not forced to buy certain types of products which are generally not healthy anyway. Not that I disagree about pricing being shitty but you just work with what you have since cruelty is so deeply ingrained in our society it inherently requires effort to minimise it. Just like with privacy for example where you actively need to fight for it. It’s just something you do. Once my current phone is on death bed I will be buying fairphone which is expensive or a similar product out of the same principle.
Eh, maybe at the beginning when you haven’t adjusted and are looking for one to one replacements for meat. After a while though you just get used to beans and lentils, which are dirt cheap, and tofu and eat more of those then the fake meat products.
What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits?
They want to make money by targeting the smaller market of people with more money. It’s marketing strategy, usually tied to “wellness” - which is a super huge market (almost entirely grifters.)
A lot of the “meat imitation” products that got lots of press and media attention were highly engineered products with a lot of unique processes involved, as well as a lot of unique technologies. The raw soy protein input wasn’t the expensive part, it was all the additives to make it more “meat like” that required expensive new production lines, in addition to all the marketing and R&D (paying off the VC investors who funded it really).
There is also the grocery store distribution side of things. These products were niche and didn’t sell particularly large volumes, so grocery stores marked them up a lot to justify the opportunity cost of using shelf space on them rather than something that would have sold at a higher volume.
The reality is, you can get plenty of cheap as hell meat substitutes, they’ve been around for decades (millennia really), you just have to go to speciality stores, or order them online, where enough volume is sold to allow for low margins. meat imitations sold as speciality products in mainstream stores are expensive. An example of a substituted as supposed to an imitation would be textured vegetable protein (often abbreviated to TVP)which can be used in the same way as ground meat. It won’t be the same, you will be able to tell the difference, but, it won’t be worse(assuming it’s seasoned properly) just different, like substituting ground pork for ground beef. And TVP can absolutely be found for much cheaper than ground meat, if purchased from the right place.
Seconding the comment on TVP. It’s shelf-stable, cheap, and can take the place of ground meat in anything where it’s there for the texture, not the flavor. I like it in cottage pie, pasta sauce, and mixed into macaroni and cheese.
When the reverse was true it really rubbed me the wrong way. Soybeans are dirt cheap and soybean meal (the defatted version) even more so. On agricultural markets soybean meal is around 300-400 dollars per metric ton. That means it’s traded for less than a dollar per kg. Yet soy based vegan products were for years more expensive than the meat alternative, and lots of these animals would have eaten more than 1kg of soy containing feed to produce each kg of meat. It makes no sense to me. Yes processing the soy meal into a tasty meat alternative is not cheap, obviously, but are you telling me the soy meal to meat conversion is cheaper than the soy meal to faux meat conversion? Really put me off from vegan products.
Same is true for things like oat milk. Oats in bulk cost pretty much nothing yet they managed to sell it for more than cow milk. What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits? And don’t bring up the whole “animal proteins are subsidized” bit. I don’t know about the US but in the EU the subsidies are based on agricultural area. 1 hectare of soy plantation gets the same amount of subsidies as 1 hectare of any other animal feed crop. That’s not the explanation.
I see this as a huge improvement and if plant based products are to really take off they have to be an affordable alternative even to the non vegan.
Soybeans as a commodity can be cheap, but that doesnt mean that an end product made out of soybeans will also inherently be cheap.
The market for soybean based meat alternatives is not that huge, so one of the more expensive aspects of trying to have an end product in an actual brick and mortar store is going to be getting space on the shelf in the first place. Packaging design and maybe some marketing, not to mention creating the actual product itself. All that stuff is expensive even if its mostly soybeans that the end product is made from
Laundry detergent is like 95% water, but it costs far more than if it was actually 100% water
Same. I feel like vegans are being taken advantage of. Soy and oat and other grain based replacements for animal products should be dirt cheap. They’re marketing to hipsters and pricing accordingly. So all that shit about the economy and whatnot? Marketing trash. Make that shit cost what it should and way more people would buy it. Especially with everything going up.
Not sure about soy beans, but you can buy a lot of beans very cheaply. Oats are also very cheap.
Processed foods are always going to cost more, and probably suck. Make your own, meat or vegan it’s going to be better for you, tastier, or both.
You don’t have to buy such products when you are vegan but personally I’d rather be taken advantage of than have non-human animals be taken advantage of and in a much more severe way. People really get thrown off at the slightest inconvenience when it affects them…
Ah yes, the “slight inconvenience” of being poor.
Fair, and expected, but why not both? Why can’t vegan food be profitable and also cheaper than animal-based products? Because of greed taking advantage of people with hearts bigger than their wallets but who will open it regardless and just pay more. The one who is more frugal and doesn’t have as strict of dietary restrictions sees the bullshit on both sides but buys what’s affordable.
I will say this for you vegans… one of you got me curious about oat milk, so I started asking for it at my favourite coffee shop, and I think it makes their coffee better. They push it with new customers, but they serve whole (cow) milk as well. Once I opted for cow milk a couple times, they stopped asking. So I had to mention that I was curious about oat milk. Hoping to push the trend back, where they stop asking me and just do oat milk. I’ll buy oat-based creamer if it’s cheaper/on sale. I want to give it a try at home now. Not because it’s more ethical, but because I found it makes my coffee better.
I like eating meat. I’m not gonna mince words here. But if I found a plant-based alternative I liked and it was cheaper (or comparable), I would get it more, but I have to be careful… because I still need animal protein due to the surgery I got a couple years ago.
Where I live there are little processed vegan options, they are hard to come by/identify, and there are no vegan sections but I’m glad that they are here at all tbh given the state of things. As for prices just like with everything you judge things on a per product basis. If there’s something that costs more than I’m willing to pay I just skip it as I’m not forced to buy certain types of products which are generally not healthy anyway. Not that I disagree about pricing being shitty but you just work with what you have since cruelty is so deeply ingrained in our society it inherently requires effort to minimise it. Just like with privacy for example where you actively need to fight for it. It’s just something you do. Once my current phone is on death bed I will be buying fairphone which is expensive or a similar product out of the same principle.
Eh, maybe at the beginning when you haven’t adjusted and are looking for one to one replacements for meat. After a while though you just get used to beans and lentils, which are dirt cheap, and tofu and eat more of those then the fake meat products.
They want to make money by targeting the smaller market of people with more money. It’s marketing strategy, usually tied to “wellness” - which is a super huge market (almost entirely grifters.)
A lot of the “meat imitation” products that got lots of press and media attention were highly engineered products with a lot of unique processes involved, as well as a lot of unique technologies. The raw soy protein input wasn’t the expensive part, it was all the additives to make it more “meat like” that required expensive new production lines, in addition to all the marketing and R&D (paying off the VC investors who funded it really).
There is also the grocery store distribution side of things. These products were niche and didn’t sell particularly large volumes, so grocery stores marked them up a lot to justify the opportunity cost of using shelf space on them rather than something that would have sold at a higher volume.
The reality is, you can get plenty of cheap as hell meat substitutes, they’ve been around for decades (millennia really), you just have to go to speciality stores, or order them online, where enough volume is sold to allow for low margins. meat imitations sold as speciality products in mainstream stores are expensive. An example of a substituted as supposed to an imitation would be textured vegetable protein (often abbreviated to TVP)which can be used in the same way as ground meat. It won’t be the same, you will be able to tell the difference, but, it won’t be worse(assuming it’s seasoned properly) just different, like substituting ground pork for ground beef. And TVP can absolutely be found for much cheaper than ground meat, if purchased from the right place.
Seconding the comment on TVP. It’s shelf-stable, cheap, and can take the place of ground meat in anything where it’s there for the texture, not the flavor. I like it in cottage pie, pasta sauce, and mixed into macaroni and cheese.