The Future That Never Needed To Arrive

I eat mostly vegetarian. I've cooked this way for years, and in that time I have never once reached for a fake burger. Not out of principle. It's just that good vegetarian cooking has never struck me as a protein problem. It's a technique problem, and a spice cupboard problem. Dal, a proper mushroom ragu, a Sri Lankan curry built on lentils and coconut, none of these dishes are trying to be a lesser version of meat. They were never short of a "meaty" centrepiece. They were built around entirely different flavours from the start.

So when Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods arrived promising a burger that "bleeds" like beef, I never really believed the pitch, and it's worth asking why, because the answer changes the whole story of what happened to the category. The usual account of the fake meat crash is a luck story: a genuine trend got overheated by hype and capital, then cooled off once reality caught up. I think that's only half right. The deeper problem is that there was never really a consumer insight underneath the product at all. There was an environmental and technological answer, looking for a consumer reason to exist.

What the founders actually set out to solve

It's worth being precise about where this category came from, because the founders were admirably clear about it themselves. Ethan Brown, who founded Beyond Meat in 2009, has described the questions that drove him: what's the most effective way to tackle greenhouse gas emissions, given that roughly 80 percent of agricultural land is used to feed or graze livestock, and could changing the protein source rather than the animal address climate, land use, health and animal welfare all at once. Patrick Brown, a Stanford biochemistry professor, founded Impossible Foods in 2011 on the same underlying case, later built around the discovery that a compound called heme could be produced from plants and used to make a patty smell, sizzle and even bleed like real meat.

Notice what's missing from that origin story. Nobody involved was solving a problem a customer had brought to them. There was no consumer sitting in a research group saying "I wish my veggie burger tasted more like flesh." The problem being solved was upstream and structural: livestock farming's contribution to emissions and land use. That's a real problem, and the science behind tackling it, re-engineering plant proteins to mimic muscle tissue at a molecular level, was a genuine achievement. But it is a supply-side answer to a supply-side problem. The industry then had to go looking for a consumer-facing story to attach to it, and the story it chose is where things start to go wrong.

The insight that was borrowed, not found

Vegetarians and vegans, who make up a small share of any Western population, already had a food culture built over generations, using plant proteins seasoned and cooked on their own terms, as part of an established cuisine rather than a manufactured stand-in for something else.

The modern meat analogue took a different route entirely. It was designed, explicitly, for meat eaters rather than vegetarians, built to recreate the exact flavour, texture and appearance of the animal product it was replacing, right down to a patty that changes colour as it cooks the way beef does. That's not a small design choice. It's the whole strategy: convince people who already eat meat and don't want to change their behaviour or their cooking that they can keep the burger and lose the cow. European consumer research has since found that a lot of people are actually put off by this exact premise, seeing meat mimicry as inauthentic and in conflict with their sense of what a meal is meant to be, and that food traditions built around meat and fish are a real barrier the mimicry strategy never fully accounted for.

So the "insight" Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods built their consumer proposition on wasn't drawn from how people actually eat or cook. It was reverse-engineered from the technology: we have a way to make plants taste like meat, therefore the opportunity must be meat eaters who want to eat less meat without changing anything else about their plate. That's a plausible hypothesis. It was never tested the way a real consumer insight would be tested before a business was built on top of it.

How luck covered for a weak foundation, for a while

None of this stopped the story catching fire, because 2019 handed the category several genuinely spectacular, genuinely real, and entirely unrelated wins in quick succession. Beyond Meat's May 2019 IPO produced the best US listing performance for a raise that size since before the 2008 financial crisis, backed publicly by Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jessica Chastain. Burger King took the Impossible Whopper nationwide across more than 7,000 locations the same year and called it one of the most successful launches in the chain's history. White Castle, Del Taco, Carl's Jr and others followed within months. Then the pandemic added a real, if temporary, retail tailwind on top, as more people cooked at home and thought harder about health.

Each of these events was genuine. None of them was independent evidence of the others. Investors read Burger King's numbers as proof the IPO valuation made sense. Other restaurant chains read the IPO and Burger King's rollout as proof they needed a plant-based item on the menu immediately. The next round of capital read the growing list of partnerships as proof the whole category was investable at scale. What looked, from a distance, like a fast-moving consumer revolution was actually a handful of temporary, mutually reinforcing signals, echoing off each other rather than confirming a genuine underlying shift in how people wanted to eat.

What the reversal actually revealed

By 2022, the numbers had turned everywhere at once. Plant-based meat retail sales have fallen every year since 2021, down 7 percent in 2024 alone. Investment in plant-based startups fell 64 percent in 2024 to $309 million, down from $854 million the year before. Impossible Foods, having raised over $2 billion, has run multiple rounds of layoffs. Meatless Farm, the UK vegan meat brand, made its entire 50-person workforce redundant and entered administration in June 2023, months after its founder had said the plant-based movement was here to stay. JBS shut down its Planterra plant-based business outright. Kellogg's had planned to spin off MorningStar Farms as a standalone company and quietly admitted, once the numbers were finalised, that it wasn't valuable enough to stand on its own.

The explanation that gets offered most often is the rise of "ultra-processed food" as a public health concern, and it's true that the category got recoded almost overnight from healthy choice to processed suspect. But I don't think the UPF wave broke something that was working. I think it gave people a vocabulary for something that had been true from the very first bite: a product engineered specifically to fool the mouth into believing it's eating meat is, by definition, an engineered product. Tofu was never sold as "meat that isn't meat," so it had nothing to lose when the processed food conversation started. The Impossible Burger was built entirely on the premise of a very close, technically impressive mimicry act, and mimicry acts are exactly what a health-conscious, ingredient-suspicious consumer starts to distrust once they start reading labels properly. The category didn't get unlucky with timing on the UPF conversation. It had built its entire consumer proposition on the one attribute that conversation was always going to expose.

Luck versus position, the harder version

I've written before about the difference between a position that's genuinely earned and a moment that just happens to arrive at the right time. This is a harder case than that, because it isn't simply a real position that got its speed exaggerated by luck. It's closer to this: there was a real problem, a real piece of science, and no real consumer insight at all, and luck is what let that gap go unnoticed for three or four years. The IPO pop, the Burger King rollout, the pandemic cooking spike, and a wave of ESG-minded capital all arrived close enough together to look like proof of demand. They weren't proof of demand. They were proof that a well-funded, well-marketed supply-side solution can travel a long way before anyone stops to ask whether the person eating the burger ever actually wanted what they were being sold.

The plainer question, for any product built the way this one was, isn't "is this trend real." It's "did we start from a problem someone actually has, or from a capability we already had and went looking for a customer to attach it to." The second one can still work. It can even work for years, if the luck holds. But when the luck runs out, there's nothing underneath to catch you, and that's the difference between Happen's crash-era luck and fake meat's IPO-era luck. Happen had a genuinely earned commercial position waiting for its moment. The fake meat category had a genuinely earned scientific achievement, and borrowed its consumer story from thin air.

Where else, in your own business, has a real capability quietly become the whole justification for a product, with the actual customer need added afterwards as a marketing afterthought?

Sources: UN Environment Programme, "Tackling the World's Most Urgent Problem: Meat" (2018); Contrary Research, Impossible Foods business breakdown; NYC Food Policy Center, "'Meatless Meat' and the Popularity of Plant-Based Meat Alternatives"; ScienceDirect, "Meat replacer? No thanks! The clash between naturalness and processing" (2021); PMC, "Plant-Based Meat Alternatives: Technological, Nutritional, Environmental, Market, and Social Challenges and Opportunities"; Time and Fortune reporting on Beyond Meat's May 2019 IPO; PYMNTS and CBS News on the Burger King Impossible Whopper launch; Good Food Institute data via Quartz, "Fake meat industry struggles as Impossible Foods..." (2025); FoodNavigator, "Ultra-processed foods backlash: Winners and losers" (2026); Green Queen and Plant Based News on Meatless Farm's administration (2023); Retail Dive on JBS Planterra and Kellogg's MorningStar Farms.