The next challenge for plant-based meat: Winning the price war against animal meat
Animal agriculture is heavily subsidized by the federal government. Animal meat gets to externalize a lot of its real costs like health care, ecological, and worker welfare.
KELSEY PIPER: Perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to mass meatless meat consumption becomes apparent when you get to the checkout line at your local grocery store… The price disparity may well be a big factor keeping meatless meat from breaking through in a big way… The pandemic has only underscored the importance of making meatless meat be a mainstream alternative to factory-farmed meat… Billions of animals are raised on factory farms and killed for food in the United States every year… It is a public health hazard to raise animals in crowded conditions that can incubate and rapidly spread disease.
Those problems have buoyed the plant-based meat industry, which was already coming off a record-setting year when the coronavirus crisis started. The simple idea of plant-based meat is that we can make food that tastes like meat, has the same nutrient profile as meat, and doesn’t come from animals — solving the environmental, public health, and ethical problems with factory farms in one swoop… Consumers are interested. More and more companies have launched plant-based meat brands, more and more fast food and casual dining restaurants have added menu options…
Having won the first battle — getting consumers interested enough to try plant-based foods, and investors interested enough to fund them — plant-based meat companies are setting their sights on a bigger challenge: getting plant-based meat products as cheap as animal meat products are. The plant-based meat industry has to be bigger to compete with animal products on price — and competing on price is a key component of getting bigger as an industry. There’s a lot at stake… One big challenge for meatless meat is to become competitive on price with regular meat. It’s a steep challenge because meat in America is shockingly, unprecedentedly cheap…
Animal agriculture is also heavily subsidized by the federal government. That said, neither Bollard nor Zak Weston, a researcher at the Good Food Institute, thought direct monetary subsidies were the main reason meat was so cheap. More important are invisible forms of subsidization like not enforcing worker’s rights, exempting factory farms from animal cruelty laws, not requiring companies to engage in environmental cleanup, and not restricting practices — like antibiotic overuse — that impose costs on the whole world… Animal meat gets to externalize a lot of its negatives — externalities like health care, ecological, worker welfare, animal welfare.” In other words, if the animal meat industry were held accountable for the costs their products and their workings inflict on society, meat would be much more expensive…
There’s no single brilliant secret to making a mass-manufactured product cheaper… When a company is big enough, it can make purchases at scale, get expensive equipment that’s only worthwhile if it’ll be used to make an enormous number of products, have distribution centers in lots of different parts of the world to minimize transportation costs, and negotiate better deals for its supplies… There is reason for optimism. After only a few years of research and development, plant-based meat products are already within striking distance of animal ones… Investors and companies are betting that as plant-based meat gets better at competing with animal-based meat — on price, flavor, and availability — it will claim a bigger and bigger share of the global market for meat. SOURCE…
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