The Chicago Tribune on how we shouldn’t write off fake meat just yet:
The boom in meat alternatives has fizzled, for multiple reasons. For starters, the marketing efforts behind some prominent brands backfired by scolding the carnivores among us, who far outnumber the vegans.
At the same time, Florida Gov. Ron Desantis and other redmeat-loving conservatives have joined with big cattle producers alarmed about the environmental advantages of lab-grown products to bash them as “fake meat,” and push for new, anticompetitive laws banning them.
The long list of ingredients like pea protein and potato starch on some of the plantbased meat labels hasn’t helped, either. Health-conscious consumers are steering clear of anything ultra-processed these days.
Perhaps most importantly, the sausages that got so much attention a few years ago just didn’t taste that good.
The result has been a steep market correction. The stock price of Beyond Meat, which traded in the triple digits as recently as 2021, has cratered to a little over $6 per share. Impossible Foods, which isn’t publicly traded, recently got into a scrap with Bloomberg News over a thumbs-down story about the industry.
No question, the movement to replace meat with substitutes has run into headwinds. But stay tuned: We see better times ahead for an industry still in its infancy.
Consumers should keep an open mind as innovative new options appear in restaurants and supermarkets. Meat 2.0 is coming, and next-generation products have the potential to win over the same crowd that tried Meat 1.0 and then, understandably, went back to ordering Big Macs.
As for politicians like Desantis looking for easy targets to rile up constituents, give it a rest. States have no business outlawing healthy products declared safe by federal watchdogs, and that includes the labgrown meats that have barely started to reach consumers. Politicians need to let the competitive marketplace determine winners and losers.
Despite leading a state that produces more meat than Florida, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has taken a smarter approach than Desantis. His administration actively recruited Upside Foods to north suburban Glenview, congratulating it for being the first company to sell “cultivated meat” in the U.S . ...
The new, 187,000-squarefoot Upside Foods factory is indeed pioneering. It is expected to produce millions of pounds of ground chicken each year by growing meat directly from animal cells. The product is not vegetarian, and has similar qualities to any other ground chicken, but no birds are raised and slaughtered to produce it.
Ideally, the Food and Drug Administration and Agriculture Department would work together to advance this new industry. More likely, the incumbent meat industry will continue to fight tooth and nail against the upstarts over labeling and other issues, playing one regulator against another, which could slow growth . ...