What will be the next food or drink to be "Beyond Meat"-ified?
Obviously Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger have found massive success. Nugz has done well with plant-based chicken nuggets. What other food or drink items do you think are ripe to be disrupted?
To me, one of the more obvious ones seems to be coffee beans. Curious what else comes to mind and where you all think the lowest hanging fruit is (in terms of obviousness and need, less so for easiness!)
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You can find a coffee alternative made from Sorghum. It's similar to wheat.
Thanks! I know Sorghum is used in whiskey a bit, I'll check it out. Chicory too is a good coffee alternative and I'm sure we've all seen the mushroom coffee (I'm skeptical on that one.)
Incidentally - a startup in Seattle created beanless coffee. I am bullish like you: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/07/08/737628786/a-bitter-end-for-regular-joe-scientists-engineer-a-smooth-beanless-coffee
Thanks! Seems too novel for it not to be attempted. Appreciate the link.
What does coffee beans have to do with meat substitutes?
I think you just go down the $ list... (I'm sure you can find a list, but didn't look up... pizza meats like peproni is next? bacon already has alternatives right?..)
Icecream is probably an interesting target...
Sorry, I wasn't super clear! I more just meant what products do we interact with often that are ripe to be disrupted by a better-for-you, better-for-the-Earth innovation (e.g. made in a lab or re-created with more sustainable ingredients.) In the same way Beyond and Impossible are attempting to reduce factory farming, it seems that coffee beans have a decent-sized footprint and are also subject to environmental changes and rely on a workforce of growers and pickers that are oftentimes exploited or under-compensated.
well than now I get coffee beans :P
Just go down to the most abused industries, industries that employ the most people and industries that pay the least.
With that I'd think garment/clothing production (inc. shoes)... While there is print on demand, something should be done for the actual garment, sawing,cutting and such... you can already see work on replacing drivers for logistics, travel and more.. you can see handling money in retail gets worked on in supermarkets, what about any other retail?... people care young and old has a lot of need.. anything around house work as always was, but specifically cleaning has the cleaning robots, kitchen stuff, food prep, while there is some robots work I think there must be something simple that does a lot... like taking cutting tools from industry and merging a new to make it a house util that actually considers constraints and utility in the right context...
For plastic abuse for example I think the bottled drinks inc. water has a lot of room for disruption due it would be a huge battle probably... personally I imagine a rout-able piping system that can deliver multiple types of liquids with one tap and pipe... that would reduce tons of plastic, logistics and more... but it's basically creating another crazy infrastructure ... but it's huge IMHO...
Plastic consumption is a huge personal push button for me. I would love to do something that helped reduce plastic use in some way, even a small one. Thanks for the long response, certainly got me thinking.
in a way, while not inovative just marketing, sodastream is some help for soda plastic bottles... that kind of thinking ...
Rapid Aged Whiskey
That's an amazing idea! While the whiskey purists may have a field day, making whiskey is all about time. Given that any up-start distillery has to wait 2 to 4 years of not making any money off their whiskey distillate while it ages in barrels, this seems like an obvious path. In fact, if the taste is 1:1 that same, I don't see why anyone would have an issue if the end result was a match.
I think this begets a larger issue with these types of products in that people do care greatly about the process as much as the end result. To touch on coffee again, and especially with whiskey, I think any aficionados will care deeply about the tradition. However, as Beyond / Impossible proved, maybe you don't go for the advanced users (like vegans, in this case) and focus on the middle.