The Fake Meat Industry Is Failing

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The fresh round of cuts was reported on Monday by Bloomberg, citing an unnamed source. If the cuts go as deep as the source claims, around 140 of the company’s 700 staff will go. The move comes off the back of attempts to reduce the company’s headcount through voluntary buyouts. So far, the company has not responded. This will be the third wave of layoffs at Impossible in just the last year, and marks another wretched milestone for the beleaguered company which has continually failed to justify its own hype.

The Left and the global elites have long demonized eating meat, and accordingly have pushed fake, plant-based “meats.” But is the entire vegan house of cards on the verge of toppling over?

Impossible Foods has made a name for itself thanks to partnerships with a number of big-name brands and restaurants. Its products can be found at chains like Burger King (which sells an Impossible Whopper), White Castle and Qdoba.

Impossible Foods maintains it is simply streamlining its business so that it can continue to “hyper grow.” A number of key executives have left the company over the past year, and former CEO Pat Brown is on leave until the spring. Brown’s replacement, Peter McGuinness, is trying to make the company fight smarter, with a particular focus on breaking down negative consumer perceptions of his company’s products.

This new strategy has included taking out a full-page advert in the New York Times to counter claims that plant-based meat alternatives are “just another fad.” The move came in response to a Bloomberg Businessweek cover story on the flagging fortunes of the industry.

The story, published in September, noted that “just a few years ago… plant-based meats were ascendant,” but “now, after once enjoying double-digit growth, sales in the plant-based meat category are not just flat but declining.”

The company has tried to make it seem like there’s no trouble in paradise. It recently claimed that its sales were up more than 50 percent in 2022, and in September, CEO Peter McGuinness maintained that Impossible Foods has a strong balance sheet. In the face of the job cuts, the company wants the public to believe that it’s simply streamlining itself to promote better growth.

However, statistics for the plant-based meat market don’t inspire optimism. According to the research firm IRI, sales of meat alternatives dropped 15 percent by volume for the 52 weeks ending January 1.

There’s also data from HundredX, which states there has been a growth in the number of consumers who say they have eaten Impossible products but who are less likely to eat as much in the future.

Industry experts have blamed a number of factors. One is the growing cost-of-living crisis, which has driven consumers back to real meat, which remains cheaper.

Public perception remains a significant problem. In July, Deloitte conducted a survey which revealed a decline in the belief that plant-based meat alternatives are healthier and more ethical than real meat. A 2021 survey of Australian men suggested that over 70 percent of them would rather die ten years sooner than give up eating meat. And that survey was conducted by a pro-fake meat group.

Part of the problem for the industry has been the connotation of wokeism surrounding fake meat. An example of this cited by Bloomberg was the intense customer backlash that erupted over the summer when Cracker Barrel announced its plans to add Impossible Foods’ sausage as a menu option.

Despite indications to the contrary, Impossible CEO McGuinness maintains that his company has been able to buck the general trend for plant-based meat alternatives, with growth in retail sales of 70 percent in 2022.

However, it isn’t only Impossible Foods that’s flailing in the water. Other fake-meat companies now find themselves in a similar predicament.

Other manufacturers are having a harder time disguising their troubles. Shares in Beyond Meat plunged 75 percent in the first three quarters of last year. Like Impossible, the company has been forced to slash its workforce by almost 20 percent, with 200 employees losing their jobs.

The company has suffered from a string of setbacks. For one, McDonald’s chose to discontinue its much-hyped “McPlant” burger. And in November, Beyond made headlines when photos emerged showing mold in and near its food-production and storage equipment.

There were also documents showing that their products had tested positive for the harmful bacteria listeria. This forced the company to publish a statement assuring the public that they go “above and beyond industry and regulatory standards” and that they are “in good standing with Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture.”

Of course, it didn’t help that Beyond Meat’s COO brought the company bad press when he was arrested for biting a man’s nose in a parking lot and making a death threat after a football game.

Despite the fact that consumers are demonstrating they simply aren’t interested in replacing meat with these plant-based alternatives, the powers-that-be continue to push it, and now even some of the top names in meat production are breaking into the fake-meat industry.

As a recent piece at The National Pulse details:

The world’s largest meat-producing corporations, like JBS and Tyson, are aggressively pushing into the new “ownership envelopes” of fake food by restructuring themselves and acquiring salmon-aquaculture farms, pea-protein companies and insect farms. These mega-players are rebranding themselves not as purveyors of particular foodstuffs – meat or dairy – but instead as purveyors of the most desirable macronutrient of them all, protein. Tyson, for instance, has already trademarked the term “the Protein Company”. In a real sense, like the banks in 2007, the fake food sector is on the verge of becoming “too big to fail”, if it hasn’t already acquired that status.

And plant-based products aren’t the only meat alternatives that the globalist elites would have us eating. An article on the World Economic Forum’s website promotes the eating of weeds.

“Finding new plant-based foods is becoming increasingly urgent with the world’s population forecast to grow by two billion in the next 30 years. While farming animals for meat generates 14.5 percent of total global greenhouse emissions, weeds capture carbon from the atmosphere and can therefore help to control climate change.”

Another article suggests humans can be conditioned to eat and even enjoy such things as insects and grubs.

And if the people won’t be persuaded to abandon meat peacefully, then they’ll have to be forced into it. In Europe, climate alarmists are calling for the government to make meat more expensive by placing taxes on it, arguing that livestock farming is responsible for up to 13 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions.

Ultimately, the goal is to have the people weakened and debilitated by feeding them highly processed, artificial “foods.” In this way, the world’s populace will be much easier for the globalists at the World Economic Forum to control.

While our first instinct might be to cheer the latest bad news from the fake-food industry, reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated. Billions have been poured into plant-based and alternative meats and they have the full moral and institutional backing of the scientific, political, and cultural establishments. Fake foods aren’t going anywhere, sadly.

Robert Downey Jr.’s most recent photos are fueling speculation from viewers that his appearance is due to nutritional deficiencies from his vegan diet, with one user dubbing him “Iron Deficiency Man.”

Majority or entirely plant-based diets are held up as the future of food, indeed as a new “global diet,” by everybody from reformed drug addict Robert Downey Jr. – who as a vegan now looks half the man he did just a few years before – to institutions like the Lancet, the United Nations, and of course the World Economic Forum.

So although an individual player, like Impossible or Beyond Meat, or even multiple players, may crash out of the market, this actually means very little about the future of fake food as a whole. A cursory glance at a list of new startups, or the latest round of investments by a venture capitalist like Paul Graham, will reveal umpteen new companies in every segment of the fake-food industry, from plant-based meat alternatives to cell-cultured – i.e. lab-grown – meat.

Advocates of these fake foods are changing their strategy to increase adoption. They know well enough by now that they will not get the public to eat their products simply by making appeals to taste and nutrition. We know that a “burger” made from soy protein and sunflower oil, or a “plant-based egg” made from a slop of mung-beans and canola oil, with untold artificial flavourings, colourings and texturisers, will never be the real thing, let along taste or nourish us as well as the real thing. We are not stupid or so divorced from our instincts as human beings. Not yet, anyway. Scientific studies have already shown that appeals to taste and nutrition fall totally flat with consumers.

What doesn’t fall flat, though, is social pressure.

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Shame is already a powerful part of advertising campaigns for plant-based products. Take, for instance, the revolting “Help Dad” campaign, by “oat-milk” brand Oatly, in which hapless fathers are shamed by their “enlightened” children for wanting to drink a glass of real milk.

Inflation and the cost-of-living crisis are also being leveraged to move consumers away from eating animal products. Last summer, In a remarkable op-ed for the New York Times entitled, “You want to buy meat? In this economy?”, Annaliese Griffin stated, quite baldly, that “inflation has the potential to drive welcome change for the planet if Americans think differently about the way they eat.” After noting that “historically, cost has been a powerful force that has changed Americans’ diets,” Griffin even went so far as to praise the 1917 Lever Act, which allowed the federal government to requisition food from the public to prevent hoarding.

Although we’ve yet to see direct government intervention to get to people to abandon animal products, the craziness of the last three years should warn us not to believe anything is impossible – except Impossible turning a profit. ✪

▶️ 12 Minutes 23 Seconds ⭐️ Gary Brown

▶️ 11 Minutes 10 Seconds ⭐️ Michael Brower

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