Beyond Meat 2.0 Is Coming To Grocery Stores Nationwide This Month
For the past few months, Carl’s Jr. has been the sole purveyor of Beyond Meat’s new 2.0 burger patties, which have gotten rave reviews as to how close they are to real meat. While they’ve been rolling out in restaurants nationwide quietly over the past few months, we now have an idea as to when everyone will be able to cook the 2.0 patty as well.
Starting today, Beyond Meat 2.0 will begin rolling out to grocery stores nationwide, and it should be everywhere by the end of June. The burger patties will be available in new packaging, and ground beef should follow soon afterward.
Photo courtesy of Beyond Meat
The new patties are made with cocoa butter and coconut oil to give it the appearance of marbling, like you would find in ground beef. There’s also improvements made to the color, as apple extract has been added to help it brown without getting too much red from the beets inside. Beyond Meat has also changed the protein to be a complete source, meaning you’ll get all nine essential amino acids from eating this meat in adequate amounts. A combination of rice, pea, and mung bean protein is responsible for that nutritional upgrade.
Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown thinks that this version gets close, but still not all the way to animal meat. “I’m a pretty tough critic,” he told Foodbeast. “My number is gonna be lower than many, but I’d say we’re 65 to 70% of the way there.”
Brown isn’t just going to stop at this 2.0 version, however. He feels that plant meat will go the way of smartphones, in that it both provides more function than animal meat and can be continually upgraded.
“We’ve been consuming meat since prior to being homo sapiens, it’s part of the process of evolution that created the bodies we have and the brains we have,” he says. “I don’t think we’re gonna get it in 10 years, and that’s how long we’ve been working at this, so we need some more time, but I think we’re getting closer and closer.”
While the new 2.0 patties still come at a relatively high cost compared to ground beef, Brown also believes that will change rapidly as his company, which just went public, continues to scale.
“As we start to approach scale, we’ll be able to dramatically underprice animal protein,” he claims. When that does happen, it may only be a matter of time before plant-based meats become the norm.
