US fake meat not wanted in China’s bowl
Start-ups hungry for piece of Asian action, but obstacles loom
In the Wangjing neighbourhood of Beijing, ZeroGo is one of the city’s few vegan restaurants. It offers pizza, protein bowls and Asian-fusion fare, and online reviews rave about the menu’s creativity, which includes a vegan Big Mac, complete with vegan cheese and dairy-free special sauce. The “burger” is made from scratch, an original, pea-based recipe.
If the US fake-meat darlings Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have their way, chef Raymond Xie will soon be able to use their meatier patties.
The problem is, he doesn’t want to. “I want to use real fruit and vegetables,” he said. “Not products made with the intention of being a direct meat substitute.”
Plenty of Chinese people share the scepticism about US-style, plant-based imitation meat, a fact Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are about to confront.
Both are hungrily eyeing China, which accounts for 27% of the world’s meat consumption by volume. The recent outbreak of African swine fever has driven up pork prices and primed consumers for alternatives, and if the US companies can win over even a small fraction of the country’s 1.4-billion people, the opportunity is massive.
“We want to be as aggressive as we can,” Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown said in October. The company, whose shares have tripled in value since a May initial public offering, wants to have production running there by the end of 2020.
Impossible Foods CEO Pat Brown said it already had a “very good” prototype of plantbased pork. China has “always been the most important country for our mission”, he said.
But neither Beyond Meat nor Impossible Foods have shared a detailed game plan, and the obstacles are at least as significant as the opportunity. The Chinese already eat plenty of plant protein. Restaurants prominently feature tofu, seitan and “mock” meats, and local start-ups are offering more novel iterations. Plus, for newly middle-class Chinese consumers, meat is a status symbol.
Impossible Foods will also need government approval for heme, its “magic ingredient” that’s made from genetically modified yeast. When might that come? “We can’t comment on behalf of the Chinese state,” said company spokesperson Rachel Konrad.
Beyond Meat has announced a partnership with Taiwanese online retailer momo.com, but its Asian expansion is still in the early phase.
US restaurants haven’t always been able
I want to use real fruit and vegetables, not products made with the intention of being a direct meat substitute
to keep the meat substitutes in stock, thanks to their skyrocketing demand, but Asian consumers are less excited. Several Hong Kong restaurants sold the Impossible Foods burger for short promotions then decided not to make it permanent after lacklustre sales.
High quality and global reputation give Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods an advantage, said Graham Miao, general manager at GFIC, a Beijing-based nutrition consultancy. But the marquee products are based on ground beef and variations, which aren’t typical in Chinese cuisine.
If the US companies don’t “localise swiftly and effectively”, Miao said, they’ll lose out to “ambitious Chinese companies focusing on Chinese-designed products of high quality”.
Several Chinese companies are already making headway with their own meat alternatives. Zhenmeat, for example, used social media to launch vegan meat mooncakes just before the mid-autumn festival in September and quickly sold out. Hong Kong-based Green Monday has also unveiled Omnipork, an imitation pork product, made from mushrooms, peas, soy and rice.
Catering to local tastes isn’t easy. To sell more Oreos, Mondelez has offered special promotional flavours like red bean cake, chilli chicken and spicy pepper pastry, and made the regular biscuits less sweet too.
Some companies have learnt the hard way. The sweet doughnuts at Dunkin’ — a chain that has rolled out Beyond Breakfast Sausage across the US — didn’t appeal to Chinese customers, and its coffee failed to excite in a tea-drinking culture already loyal to Starbucks and others. Dunkin’ is now slowly opening cafes in Beijing and Shanghai, and has tried selling pork and seaweed doughnuts to localise the menu.