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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

plant-based meat

Burger King Is Launching 3 New Impossible Burgers, Expanding Plant-based Offerings in Europe

Burger King’s meatless meat selection just got bigger, as the chain is expanding its family of Impossible burgers in the U.S. On Monday, BK announced it will test three new offerings made with the plant-based “bleeding” burger at 180 restaurants.

The Impossible Whopper Jr. is a smaller version of the wildly popular Impossible Whopper, which BK released nationwide in August and which has been such a hit with customers it recently boosted the chain’s sales by 5 percent.

For those craving simpler sandwiches, The Impossible Burger and The Impossible Cheeseburger are pared-down offerings that come with just ketchup, mustard, and pickles on the plant-based patty.

Burger King will initially test the new burgers at restaurants in Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, Augusta, Cinncinnati, and Buffalo. Given how ridiculously popular the chain’s first Impossible offering was, a nationwide release of these latest three patties will no doubt follow soon.

And while Impossible isn’t yet available on the other side of the Atlantic, that hasn’t stopped BK from doubling-down on its plant-based offerings in Europe. The company is launching its Rebel Whopper, made with plant-based patties from Unilever-owned The Vegetarian Butcher, to more than 2,400 European locations today.

So far, none of BK’s direct competitors have embraced the plant-based meat concept as rapidly or widely, though that is finally starting to change. McDonald’s is testing a plant-based burger that uses Beyond Meat, though that’s only available in Canada at the moment. McDonald’s also has a plant-based burger in Germany, that one made with Nestlé’s incredible patty. Carl’s Jr., too, is working with Beyond and has had a plant-based patty on its menu for some time now. Wendy’s, meanwhile, is semi-secretly testing a plant-based burger, though we don’t know yet if it’s made with Beyond, Impossible, or some other alt-protein.

What we do know is that the list of QSRs offering plant-based meat items is only going to get bigger and that chains will keep expanding their menus to accommodate consumers’ growing demand for alt-protein options.

Pizza Hut Partners With Zume and MorningStar to Put a Plant-based Pizza in a Round Box

Pizza Hut is following the footsteps of dozens of other major restaurant chains and joining the movement for plant-based meat. The Plano, TX-based company announced today that it has partnered with MorningStar Farms’ Incogmeato label to top one of its pies with plant-based sausage.

Dubbed the Garden Specialty Pizza, said pie will be available starting October 23 for $10 per pizza for a limited time at the 3602 E. Thomas Road Pizza Hut location in Phoenix, AZ, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. “Limited supply” in this context means until supplies last, which, given the current craze for plant-based meat products among consumers, could be mere hours.

For both companies, releasing a pizza topped with plant-based meat is a way to ride the coattails of the alt-meat craze. The partnership allows Pizza Hut to compete with the likes of Little Caesars, who tested a plant-based sausage pizza with Impossible earlier this year. For Kellogg-owned MorningStar, promoting its new plant-based brand via a major restaurant chain could help the company’s ongoing efforts to reinvent itself as an innovative alt-meat company on par with Beyond Meat and Impossible, rather than a decades-old peddler of first-generation meat alternatives.

A pie topped with plant-based meat isn’t the only pizza innovation that particular Phoenix Pizza Hut location will see. The Garden Specialty Pizza will be served up in a round box The Hut has developed with pizza-tech pioneer Zume, which recently acquired a company to manufacture its own line of more sustainable packaging.

For Pizza Hut, Zume designed a box that uses less packaging than its traditional square counterpart, takes up less space in a customer’s fridge, and, most importantly, keep the pizza hotter in transit. It’s also industrially compostable. Pizza Hut says once the limited run in Phoenix is over, it will look at ways to distribute the box more widely in future.

All proceeds from both initiatives will be donated to Arizona Forward, an organization that brings businesses and civic leaders together to develop sustainability goals for the state.

Impossible Burger Debuts at Gelson’s Markets Tomorrow in Southern California (Will it Be Impossible to Get?)

Impossible Foods will debut its long-awaited Impossible Burger at retail tomorrow in Southern California. The company announced today that its plant-based meat will be available at all 27 Gelson’s locations across Los Angeles, San Diego, Ventura County and Santa Barbara.

We had known that Impossible was hosting a retail launch event at the Century City mall tomorrow that involved grandmas. Given that there’s a Gelson’s in the Century City mall, we also deduced that the grocer would play a part in the launch. Now we have confirmation, and honestly, the launch is wider than we had anticipated.

Additionally, we also know that Impossible will be selling a 12 oz. package for $8.99 at retail. For comparison, Beyond Meat sells its plant-based ground meat package in a 16 oz. package for roughly $10.

Impossible has enjoyed a series of home runs this year, from being the breakout star at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show to releasing its burger 2.0, to launching the wildly successful Impossible Whopper at Burger King. But this move into retail is a real test for the company. It has to play catch up with Beyond Meat, which has firmly entrenched itself at grocery stores for the past couple of years.

What we’ll have to look for now is how much the Impossible brand means to consumers. Will shoppers’ experience at restaurants like BK translate into sales in the grocery aisle? Almost as important, will there be enough product for everyone who wants it to buy it? Impossible experienced a huge production shortfall earlier this year and actually had to stop shipping its burgers to restaurants while it worked overtime to correct the situation.

Impossible has evidently learned their lesson, as Gelson’s is limiting people to 10 packs of Impossible Burger each.

Hormel Joins the Meatless Meat Movement With New Portfolio of Plant-based Products

Add one more to the list of major CPGs looking to capitalize on the public’s insatiable appetite for plant-based meat. This week, Hormel Foods, who owns brands like Skippy and Applegate, announced the launch of its Happy Little Plants product line. This is Hormel’s first project under what the company’s new plant-based foods division called Cultivated Foods.

The new portfolio’s flagship product is a ground protein offering the Happy Little Plants’ website says you can cook “just like you would with ground beef or ground turkey.” The product contains 20 grams of non-GMO soy protein and is gluten-free.

Right now, Happy Little Plants products are available at select Hy-Vee stores in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Wisconson. Further expansion is in the works, though Hormel didn’t name specific cities or timeframes.

Like most big CPGs bringing plant-based meat alternatives to market right now, Hormel is emphasizing the meat-like qualities of its meatless product. In a bid to appeal to more flexitarians — those wanting to curb meat consumption without going full vegan or vegetarian — food companies are currently creating alternatives to meat that cook, look, taste, and feel like the real thing. In other words, they’re trying to live up to the industry standard set by Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat.

Hormel is one of a growing list of CPGs launching such products. Tyson announced its Raised & Rooted brand of plant-based meat alternatives this past June. Nestle is selling meatless meat patties to QSR chains in Europe and Israel. And just yesterday, Kelloggs-owned MorningStar Farms announced its own new line of more meat-like, plant-based products called Incogmeato.

These companies have long histories in the food industry, but as The Spoon’s Catherine Lamb pointed out when reporting on the MorningStar news, that could be more hindrance than help. As evidenced by events like Beyond selling out of its meatless chicken wings in less than five hours, consumers are flocking to trendy upstart brands in the alt-meat space who can tout health and environmental benefits and don’t have a history of selling SPAM in grocery store aisles. Like Kellogg, Tyson, and others, Hormel is one more company that will have to find a way to leap the divide between its legacy products and consumer demand for new and different ways to do meatless meat.

With Beyond Meat and Impossible Burgers, Food is Now Software

I was excited when my wife brought home Beyond Burgers the other night, but I was soon crestfallen (don’t tell her this) when I saw that they were the old recipe of Beyond Burgers. That version of Beyond Burgers was fine — enough to get me into the plant-based burgers in the first place, but the new recipe the company released earlier this year, is so. much. better.

Because my wife doesn’t write about food tech for a living, she was probably unaware that there even are multiple versions of Beyond Meat at the market. Why should she be? Food is typically food. You have your list, you go to the grocery store, put your items in the cart without looking at them too carefully, and bring them home.

But plant-based foods, especially those that aim to re-create the look and feel of animal meat, are ushering in a new era, one where new versions of the product are constantly being tweaked, updated, and released. In short, we are entering an era where food is becoming more like software.

This was fully apparent when I visited the Beyond Meat R&D facility down in Los Angeles last year. Teams of scientists were putting the company’s patties through various machines, simulations and tests, all to find the right combination of ingredients to create the optimal elasticity, flavor, texture and more of meat.

Beyond Meat certainly isn’t alone in its constant state of iteration. Impossible Foods was the belle of the ball at CES this past January as it launched a new recipe for its heme-burger. Like Beyond, Impossible will continue to improve its recipes even after it comes to retail next month. And the recipe tinkering won’t end this year, or with Beyond and Impossible. Nestlé is already revamping its Incredible Burger, Rebellyous is sure to improve upon its fake chicken nuggets, Omnipork will update its plant-pork, and JUST is always exploring new ways to make its mung-bean eggs (let’s not even get into the cultured meat that will make its way to market in a few years).

It’s not hard to see why there is so much recipe tweaking. First, plant-based meat companies like Beyond and Impossible are trying to do something that hadn’t really been done before. Instead of offering a veggie alternative to meat like a black bean burger or portabello mushroom “patty,” they are trying to re-create meat from the ground up. There wasn’t a playbook to go by, and the chances that they would get it perfect right out of the gate were pretty slim.

The new version of Beyond Meat (and the sister product, Beyond Beef ground) is so much better than the first version. At least for meat eaters and flexitarians who were looking for something like meat, but less ethically and environmentally complicated. As Beyond and Impossible spend more on research and development, they will uncover new ingredients, new combinations and new manufacturing techniques to make their products even better and tastier. (For more check out our interview with Impossible CEO Pat Brown.)

The same can’t be said for traditional animal meat. Sure, there will be varying degrees of quality, but beef is going to always taste and feel like beef, chicken like chicken and pork like pork. The cow (or pig or chicken) is not going to become a different animal.

Of course, this is part of the appeal of meat — you pretty much know what you’re going to get, and you will always know how to cook it. The same can’t be said for plant-based proteins, which will undergo constant tweaking. With these new iterations comes the chance that Beyond and Impossible will forget that perfect is the enemy of the good, and they will keep messing with it to create the Windows Me of plant-based meat: a recipe foisted upon the consumer that is just… awful.

But unlike software, there is no “Umami patch” that can be downloaded to the patties on store shelves to correct an off flavor. Think: New Coke, but only much more complicated. Coke, however, only had to deal with flavor, plant-based proteins need to have not just the right flavor but texture and appealing looks as well. A misstep could result in entire production runs being scrapped and new marketing campaigns to bring people back to a brand.

All of this tweaking and recipe improvement also plays into the criticism that plant-based proteins are too processed. It’s not hard to imagine critics already lined up against plant-based proteins to point fingers at scientists in white coats and petrie dishes creating “meat” in sterile lab environments. Animals, on the other hand, are familiar and all natural (well, in theory, I don’t think anyone would argue that factory farming of meat is in any way natural).

Aside from market realities and public perception though, I’m most fascinated by food as software because it represents a whole new way of thinking about food itself. The basic building blocks of our meals can be improved upon, resulting in new flavors and textures that we never even considered.

The natural endpoint for all this goes way beyond, well, Beyond, and the way we think of food now. At some point food will literally become software that is beamed to your 3D food printer, where meals that match you precise flavor and dietary needs are extruded directly onto your plate.

But until that day comes, just pay attention to the label to make sure you are buying the correct, that is, the newest, version of that plant-based burger.

To Scale Meat Alternatives, Startups Need to Stop Relying on Meat-Industry Machinery

In a perfect world, we would never again have to think about how the sausage gets made. To make that fantasy a reality, we have to start thinking about how the veggie sausage gets made.

The plant-based meat revolution – heartened by the wild success of products like the Impossible and Beyond Burgers – is based on the concept that we can make animal meat obsolete by using technology and plant protein to mimic meat’s taste and texture. But so far, this tech-driven approach hasn’t quite extended to production technology.

Since the dawn of factory farming in the 1970s, the meat industry has been on a constant trajectory of optimization in production. Even today, industry interests are pushing for faster line speeds at processing plants, with the pork industry requesting a lift on the current limit of around 1100 pigs an hour. Even at the initial rate, this subsection of the industry alone was producing more meat in a handful of weeks than the plant-based meat industry produced in total in 2018. It seems that the meat industry is still the reigning champ of moving fast and breaking things.

Sausage-making may be unpleasant, but it is impressively efficient.

The plant-based meat industry, on the other hand, has been slow to address the unique production needs of its products, and as a result, it has been slow to scale. Demand for popular plant-based options has outpaced supply to such a degree that Bloomberg keeps a crowdsourced, interactive “outage” map to show where the Impossible Burger is unavailable due to product shortages.

The solution most companies are taking to this problem? Partner with co-manufacturers to use meat industry machinery and facilities. Instead of mimicking the efficiency of the meat industry’s production technology, the plant-based meat industry is using the same machinery straight off the shelf. Beyond Meat, for example, produces much of its product out of beef processing plants in Georgia and California. In this way, plant-based meat companies are victims of their own success: turning to stopgap options to match the market’s appetite without solving the underlying production puzzle.

This doesn’t just denote a lack of innovation. It’s hobbling the ability of plant-based meat companies to economically increase production volume, and as such, to lower costs. Even as sales of plant-based meat climbed to $3.7 billion in 2018, production volumes fall far short of the 105 billion pounds of animal meat produced each year. Despite a major uptick in sales numbers, the actual volume of plant-based meat on the market still makes up a miniscule one-fifth of one percent of the meat industry. This isn’t surprising when you take into account that plant-based options are two to five times more expensive than factory-farmed meat. Even as the dollars roll in, the amount of plant-based meat on the shelves isn’t skyrocketing. With these stats, it’s not surprising that the majority of consumers still turn to animal meat for cheap, widely available protein.

The plant-based meat industry can make significant progress by addressing some of the fundamental incompatibilities of meat-industry machinery with plant-protein processing. After all, the meat industry didn’t become the behemoth it is by failing to optimize its production tech.

Plant proteins may be made to taste like meat, but they don’t function like animal proteins. Meat industry machinery is calibrated and automated to deconstruct carcasses and prepare cuts and grounds made from specific animals. It’s less effective at producing meat from plant sources, which have markedly different functional properties in terms of moisture retention, protein structure, and so on.

Another option plant-based meat companies are turning to is a food extruder: a machine initially designed to form foods like pasta and cheese puffs, and also to structure protein. While these are sophisticated machines, we are only in the early days of redesigning them for the massive scalability plant-based meat production requires right now. This means that even with highly skilled operators, it can be difficult to achieve product consistency and avoid costly errors. These machines are also expensive to begin with, with price tags reaching into the millions for a single unit.

Some of the potential changes to machinery could be as simple as adding internal sensing and modifying certain preset functions on otherwise similar machines. Other options represent a more revolutionary redesign of the entire flow of the production process that allow for products to be made continuously instead of batch-by-batch, and with substantial energy and input savings to boot.

To outcompete the old guard, the plant-based meat industry has to stop ignoring how the veggie sausage gets made and adopt new machinery that’s actually optimized for the industry’s unique needs. When this happens, plant-based meat can finally become widely available at an accessible price.

Until then, we’ll be stuck with shortages and stuck with the status quo.

A Taste of Omnipork, The First Meat Alternative Developed Specifically for Asia

Last week I visited Kind Kitchen in Hong Kong and got to taste a special type of pork gyoza that was juicy, tender, and delicious — and also happened to be made entirely of plants.

Kind Kitchen is part of Green Common, a group of plant-based retail shops and restaurants. In addition to the physical outlets in Hong Kong, Green Common also has a wholesale operation which distributes vegan products to thousands of grocery stores and restaurants throughout Asia. Its products are also available for consumers to purchase online.

Even as the number of flexitarians in Asia begins to rise and the Chinese government calls for a cut in meat consumption, vegan products can be hard to come by in Hong Kong. Asia is the world’s largest consumer of pork, and right now, there aren’t any good alternatives on the market — especially those that would appeal to the dietary preferences of an Asian audience.

According to David Yeung, founder of Green Common and its parent company Green Monday, it can be hard for Western people to understand Asia’s relationship with pork. “Pork is a foundation ingredient in everyday cooking,” Yeung told me over milk tea (made with Oatly) at Kind Kitchen. “Almost like salt and pepper.”

To address that shortage of pork alternatives while still respecting the dish’s cultural significance, Yeung launched Omnipork under his Right Treat brand last year in Hong Kong. The minced “pork” product is made of soy, pea protein, shiitake mushrooms, and rice. It has no cholesterol and higher amounts of calcium and iron than pork, but slightly less protein.

Omnipork display at Kind Kitchen in Hong Kong. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Yeung decided to develop Omnipork with a relatively neutral flavor to optimize versatility, so it can be used to make everything from dumplings to meat sauce.

In addition to Hong Kong, Omnipork is also sold at roughly 1,000 suppliers in Macau, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand. Nearly two-thirds of its distribution points are restaurants, ranging in fanciness from hawker stalls in Singapore to 3 Michelin star dining establishments.

Yeung has aggressive expansion plans in mind: He told me that by the end of the year he expects to sell Omnipork at close to 5,000 outlets. The number will rise to roughly 10,000 outlets after their anticipated entrance into the Chinese market over the next few months. By the beginning of 2020, he hopes Omnipork will be available in up to 15 countries. His team is also developing new Omnipork products, such as dumplings and ready-to-eat meals.

A 230 gram pack sells for around $40 HKD ($5 USD) at Green Common. According to Yeung, that puts it on par with regular pork. In fact in some cases it’s a lot cheaper, since the African Swine Virus has recently depleted the Chinese pig population and made pork prices skyrocket in Asia.

But no matter how cost competitive it is, people won’t buy meat alternatives unless they taste good. After my taste test experience, I think that Omnipork measures up. Sure, its texture is slightly spongier than pork, and it has a slight pea protein aftertaste. But while it doesn’t have a ton of flavor on its own, it meshes super well into a variety of dishes, from ramen to dumplings.

Ramen and gyozas made with Omnipork from Kind Kitchen. [Photo: Catherine Lamb]

Realizing the unmet demand for plant-based foods, Western companies are also beginning to target Asia as an emerging market for plant-based products. JUST sells its animal-free egg scramble in Singapore, Hong Kong, and China, and Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are also available in several Asian countries. Earlier this week Smithfield, the world’s largest pork producer (and interestingly owned by a Hong Kong-based company), announced the launch of its new line of plant-based protein, though hasn’t specified if it will sell its new products in Asia.

Hong Kong was actually the first area to carry Beyond Meat outside the U.S. — at Green Common. That isn’t exactly surprising, since Yeung was an early investor in Beyond through his Green Monday Ventures platform (yes, another branch of his plant-based empire).

There are also a few players beginning to make meat alternatives in Asia, mostly in the cell-based meat space. In Singapore Shiok Meats is developing cultured shrimp, and back in Hong Kong Avant Meats is developing lab-grown fish swim bladders.

When I asked Yeung if he was planning on selling Omnipork in Europe or the U.S., he seemed hesitant. He said that they were hoping to expand outside of Asia over the next year but will continue to keep their focus on that part of the world. “It’s a white space, a complete vacuum,” he said, indicating how few plant-based products are developed specifically for Asian palates and dining patterns.

The world’s meat consumption is projected to rise. Pair that with a growing population, climate change, and food safety issues, and Asia is primed to be a leading market for meat alternatives. “We built a platform a platform for the entire future food ecosystem,” Yeung said. “Now we want to catalyze it.”

Subway Partners With Beyond Meat for Plant-Based Meatball Sub

Subway joined the growing number of QSRs offering plant-based meat options this week, announcing a new partnership with Beyond Meat.

The two companies will start testing the Beyond Meatball Marinara sandwich, a plant-based take on one of Subway’s classics, in September, according to a press release. The sandwich will be available in 685 Subway restaurants for a limited time in the U.S. and Canada. Subway didn’t specify how limited that time would be or what happens afterwards. Presumably, the Beyond Meatball Marinara will be available as long as supplies last, and its expansion will depend on how popular the sandwich proves during this testing phase.

Subway is the latest fast-food outlet to start offering a plant-based option on its menu. At the end of last month, Beyond added a partnership with Dunkin’ to sell plant-based breakfast sandwiches in NYC. Beyond also has menu items at chains like Del Taco and Carl’s Jr., as well as a strong retail presence in grocery stores. The company even launched a new ground-beef-like product at Whole Foods earlier this summer.

Impossible, meanwhile, is set to do a nationwide rollout of its Impossible Whopper at Burger King this week. The company, who is Beyond’s chief rival, already works with White Castle as well as some non-burger chains like Qdoba and Little Caesar’s. Impossible is also (finally) heading to retail stores this September.

Given the surging popularity of both Impossible and Beyond, we can expect the list of QSRs testing out plant-based options like these to keep growing throughout the rest of the year.

Burger King Launching Impossible Whopper Nationwide Aug. 8 (While Supplies Last)

Burger King is making its plant-based Impossible Whopper available at all its 7,000-plus locations starting August 8.

Burger King’s accelerated national rollout of the Impossible Whopper is pretty impressive, given that the burger only just debuted as a test in April. The Impossible Whopper will cost $5.59 (a dollar more than a regular Whopper), and if you are dead set on trying one, you’ll want to act quickly. As CNN Business writes, Burger King has not made the Impossible Whopper a permanent part of its menu and it will only be available while supplies last.

And supply has been an issue for Impossible, which experienced a four-month long supply shortage that only ended a couple of weeks ago. But there will be new stresses on Impossible’s supply chain, as the company just yesterday announced that it will be available at retail outlets starting in September.

True, we don’t know exactly what Impossible’s availability at retail will look like. The company didn’t provide any specifics on what product was coming to market (patties or ground “beef”), or numbers around size or location of its first foray into supermarkets. So the retail rollout could be a slow drip that doesn’t impact restaurant availability all that much.

If early results are any indication, BK’s Impossible rollout could be a whopper in and of itself. Early market research showed that Burger Kings that offered the Impossible Whopper saw an 18 percent increase in foot traffic over those that did not. Burger King’s President for the Americas told CNN Business that the Impossible Whopper is drawing in new customers, something we’ve heard of first hand from at least one Spoon reader who hadn’t been in a Burger King in forever and made a trip specifically to try one out (he liked it!).

Sales of plant-based meat are booming, as so-called flexitarians are drawn to a product that tastes and feels like meat, but doesn’t have all of the ethical and environmental considerations associated with eating animals. Impossible rival Beyond Meat had its Q2 earnings call earlier this week, and reported sales of $67 million for that quarter and increased its revenue outlook for the year to $240 million.

As part of its nationwide launch of the Impossible Whopper, from Aug. 8 – Sept. 1, Burger King is running a “taste test” promotion with DoorDash, which lets you buy both a traditional Whopper and an Impossible one for $7.

Will you be taking a plant-based bite?

Beyond Meat Reports $40M Q1 Earnings, Predicts $210M Net Revenue for 2019

Today Beyond Meat had the first earnings call since they went public last month.

The company blew growth expectations out of the water and reported net revenue of $40.2 million in Q1 of 2019, which is an increase in 215 percent since the same period in 2018. It reported a first-quarter net loss of $6.6 million, or .95 per share.

Beyond’s CFO Mark Nelson gave guidance that the company will have a net revenue of over $210 million by the end of 2019. That’s slightly higher than Wall Street’s estimate of $205 million. In response to these positive numbers, Beyond’s shares rose 16 percent after the reporting was released.

The plant-based meat company’s sales are no doubt helped by its well-publicized IPO, as well as its expanding retail and restaurant footprint. Interestingly, the revenue from the two sources is almost split 50-50: grocery store sales accounted for $19.6 million of Beyond’s revenue, while restaurant sales made up $20.6 million.

On the earnings call Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown stated that the company would use its new capital to “invest in current and additional manufacturing facilities, to expand its research and development and its sales and marketing capabilities, and for working capital and general corporate purposes.”

Perhaps most notable was Brown’s emphasis on international expansion. He mentioned the high market potential in South Africa and Chile, as well as Europe and Asia. This could help it differentiate from plant-based competitor Impossible Foods, which is only available in the U.S., Singapore, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Despite their impressive stats, Beyond still has lots more room to grow. On the call Brown stated that Beyond Meat has only 2 percent market penetration in the U.S. He hopes to increase that both here and abroad, all while driving down the cost of their products.

That’s ambitious to be sure. Several investors (very reasonably) asked questions about production capacity. If a big fast-food chain, like McDonald’s, opts to add Beyond Meat to their menus, would they be able to quickly amp up production to fulfill those orders? What about overseas? Brown seems confident that their new production partners and manufacturing methods can handle growing demand, but clearly Beyond’s production issues of last year (and Impossible’s current struggles) aren’t far from investors’ minds.

Things may be looking rosy for Beyond right now, but the company still has plenty of competition who wants to take a bite out of their customer base. Impossible Foods recently raised $300 million and is planning to head into retail later this year. Nestlé’s meatless Awesome burger is hitting shelves in the U.S. this fall. The Swiss company currently sells a different plant-based burger, called the Incredible burger, at McDonald’s in Germany. Tyson Foods, who recently parted ways with Beyond Meat, is also releasing their own new line of plant-based protein products this summer.

KFC Contemplating a Plant-Based Chicken Option

KFC isn’t “chicken” when it comes to experimenting with plant-based proteins. This week, Kevin Hochman the president of KFC’s U.S. business told Business Insider that the fast food chain will be meeting with several alternative protein makers to explore what an alterna-chicken product would look like.

The notion of a Kentucky Fried Plant-based Chicken menu item actually shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise, as restaurants across the country are joining the movement towards plant-based meat. Burger King is rolling out the plant-based Impossible Whopper nationwide, White Castle offers the Impossible slider, and Red Robin, Del Taco and Qdoba all have plant-based “meat” options on their menus.

KFC didn’t provide many details about its plant-based ambitions, but perhaps the company felt compelled to say something publicly after one of its key rivals, Chick-Fil-A, said last week it was exploring plant-based options.

The big issue facing both KFC and Chick-Fil-A right now is that the two big alternative protein companies, Beyond Meat and Impossible make beef and/or sausage substitutes, not chicken. In fact, Beyond Meat recently pulled its chicken strip offerings from store shelves because, according to a company FAQ, they “weren’t delivering the same plant-based meat experience as some of our more popular products.”

However, given that KFC doesn’t seem to be on any strict deadline for bringing a plant-based option to market, it could potentially find a partner like Tyson. The chicken giant announced earlier this year that it was developing its own plant-based proteins. Additionally, there is Seattle Food Tech, which has developed plant-based chicken nuggets for large scale commercial kitchens like those in school cafeterias and hospitals.

Of course, the true test for any plant-based chicken meal at KFC will be: Is it finger-lickin’ good?

Arby’s Fires Up its Beefy Base, Says It Will Shun Plant-Based Meat

Sorry to all those flexitarians who had thought maybe they would finally get the chance to eat at Arby’s. Contrary to some earlier reports, Arby’s will not be serving the Impossible burger and will remain dedicated to having the meats.

The non-controversy flared up this week when two vegetarian–based news publications wrote that Arby’s had been in talks about creating a sandwich using Impossible’s plant-based burger. They both cited a story from The Information earlier this month, but evidently seeing the news in a veggie publication was enough to make Arby’s president, Rob Lynch, see heme-based red. In an article published by Fortune today, Lynch recounted his reaction after seeing that potential change in direction:

Lynch recalled his momentary panic after reading the misreport. “Please, please, please say it isn’t so!” he quickly queried colleagues, who reassured their boss no one was exploring plant-based options.

Both the initial reports and Lynch’s reaction are totally predictable.

Arby’s talking with Impossible would make total sense as there is an ever-growing list of QSRs adopting plant-based meat alternatives, including Burger King, Carl’s Jr., White Castle, Del Taco, Qdoba and more. They all see sales of plant-based meat booming and are moving quickly to cash in. In fact, Burger King went from testing the Impossible Whopper to deciding to roll it out to all locations nationwide in less than a month.

And, sadly, in this modern political age, it wasn’t surprising at all to see how Lynch responded. This is, after all, the same restaurant chain that created a special vegetarian menu by serving the same sandwiches, just without the meat (good one, bro). Lynch was just leaning into what’s driving the company and reaffirming Arby’s meat marriage. This notion that you can only be one thing, and anything else is a betrayal, is rampant in today’s public discourse.

It’s silly. And dumb. And ultimately doesn’t matter. Vegetarians and flexitarians will have plenty of other fast food options to spend their money, and Arby’s will always have its meats.