What is the most sought after concept in the investment field in these two years? Two words: eat and drink.
The long epidemic has taught capital that everything can be a pseudo-demand, and only food and drink are immortal.
This year, Internet capital frantically poured into the catering, threw a bowl of Chen Xiang Guilan Ramen worth a billion yuan, and also turned Wen Heyou into a unicorn;
Coffee brands and milk tea brands have been praised by investors;
New consumer brands have been attacking everywhere in the past two years, and they want to do all the zero food categories again;
And plant meat has also become a pig on the wind outlet.
In the past year, we have witnessed a series of brands such as KFC, Haidilao, Starbucks, and Dogbury launching plant meat products, and supermarkets have also begun to retail plant meat. The darling of capital lives up to its name.
But in the domestic market, the darling of capital has become a consumer outcast.
This year, Guan Xiaotong recommended a plant-based meat dumpling in a live broadcast, saying that "every 100 grams of plant protein meat is nearly 90% less fat than pork, but it has more than four times more protein."
In the live broadcast, she revealed that the secret of her eating more is on plant meat.
As a result, this live broadcast directly overturned, and the plant meat was scolded by netizens as pig head meat.
On the other hand, Haidilao, in Shanghai, replaced the overlord beef grains of the small material table with a "vegetarian meat" flavor partner, and netizens lamented that Haidilao had lost its soul and betrayed its original intention.
Haidilao vegetarian beef grains
Some time ago, I talked to a friend who made consumer investment about the topic of plant meat, and he told me that the current plant meat manufacturers are very smart, and the main shipment objects are catering businesses.
When it is made into a single dish, consumers may also try a fresh order. If you put plant meat in supermarkets and malls, compete with ordinary meat products, and die ugly.
So in this issue, I want to talk about why plant-based meat does not have a chance in the Chinese market.
01
First of all, the conclusion is that plant meat is not popular in the Chinese market, first of all, cultural issues, followed by commercial issues, products and technology are the least problematic problems.
That is to say, plant meat and Chinese catering culture, compatibility problems are very large.
Some people may ask, is vegetarian chicken vegetarian duck not counted as plant meat? Count, of course!
Chinese table, there has long been a concept similar to "plant meat".
More than a thousand years ago, in the Tang Dynasty, Chinese invented the "vegetarian meat" eating method. That is, the shape and taste of meat are imitated with vegetarian food.
There are elderly students who believe in Buddhism in the family, and I am afraid that they are familiar with dishes such as vegetarian chicken and vegetarian roast goose.
Vegetarian roast goose
In Chinese food culture, there are a large number of imitation meat dishes made from soy products or plant raw materials such as wheat bran. This is similar to the underlying logic of making plant meat with plant protein today.
But the difference is that "vegetarian meat" can only be highly similar to real meat in appearance, and then imitate the taste of meat dishes when cooking. But as soon as you enter the mouth, you can eat the difference.
Whether it is taste, texture or flavor, "vegetarian meat" and real meat are completely two foods.
But the modern goal of plant-based meat and "vegetarian meat" is completely different.
Today's concept of plant meat actually comes from North America. The early target audience was a large number of vegetarians among animal activists in Europe and the United States. In order to meet their demand for taste diversity, a number of startups in the field of plant-based meat have emerged.
Plant-based meat burgers
And these startups put a lot of effort into doing just one thing: how to make plant meat taste exactly like animal meat.
It can be said that China's "vegetarian meat" is just a ritual meat dish, a vegetarian dish in practice. But the existence of plant meat is to replace animal meat.
02
So, can it really replace animal meat? Here, we need to understand the nature of plant meat from a technical point of view.
From the raw material point of view, it is not much different from vegetarian chicken, the same is soybeans, peas, wheat and other crops, the use of plant protein to reduce the taste of animal protein. But to make plants into meat that can be faked and real is actually much more difficult than imagined.
First of all, the taste of the meat is difficult to restore. For example, meat is chewy and fibrous. Therefore, it is not enough to have plant protein, but also to reconstitute plant protein into a piece of meat through chemical separation.
At present, the mainstream technology is divided into wet drawing and dry drawing.
Wet lace will be easier to make elastic meat, but also easier to make meat pieces of meat cake, is now more advanced technology. At present, dry far-drawn silk can only be made into minced meat in China.
Another difficulty is that there is heme in the meat, so it is also necessary to add soy hemoglobin to restore.
Then there is the fact that plant-based meat has no real fat system. There is no way to produce unique volatile compounds in cooking like ordinary meat, and the flavor and aroma are not enough to eat. Therefore, many manufacturers will use soybean oil, peanut oil, coconut oil instead.
But overall, to make meat with plant protein, the difficulty is still very high, the reduction is still imperfect, but also involves texture, color, flavor and other multiple factors, including some complex biochemical reactions, and when using plant protein to prepare food, there will usually be bitterness and astringency.
03
So, why make plant-based meat?
In China, plant-based meat has removed the label of environmental protection, and the audience has become young people who "want to eat meat and are afraid of fat". Tell everyone: plant meat, it is not meat, so you will not be fat after eating.
This idea is the same as "iced milk tea calories are 0".
But the truth is harsh. We also mentioned earlier that in order to make plant-based meat more like meat, at least 20 additives need to be added. This includes a lot of grease.
Originally, plant protein products should be low in fat, low in cholesterol and low in calories. However, a large number of additives and flavoring agents make the sodium content of plant meat far exceed that of animal meat, which is very bad for cardiovascular disease.
In terms of nutritional value, plant meat is not necessarily stronger than animal meat.
VitaminSaccharine B12, n-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, heme iron and other trace elements unique to animal meat are all deficient in plant meat.
And these elements are essential to the human body. If you often eat plant meat and do not pay attention to the supplementation of trace elements, it is easy to be iron deficiency or anemia.
For people who often have big fish and big meat, it is not impossible to try to balance it with plant meat, but people who eat a normal diet themselves do not need to replace their diet structure.
Allergens in plant meat are also a matter of great concern.
As a man-made food, plant-based meat uses far more added ingredients than natural meat, and its allergen situation is more complicated.
For example, heme will be used in artificial meat to imitate the color and red juice of natural meat, and this heme is a potential allergen, and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also made relevant warnings in 2017.
Plant proteins in the main body of plant meat, such as soy protein, pea protein, etc., may themselves cause allergic reactions in some people.
Last year, KFC tried to launch plant-based meat fried chicken, and then launched products such as plant-cultured golden chicken nuggets.
If you look at the raw materials, this is the chicken flavored fried dried beans. After using additives to make the flavor of chicken, fry it in oil, and flour and cholesterol are not bad.
Under the marketing slogan of "plant", it has created the appearance of advanced technology and healthy food, and finally sold fried products. No need, really no need.
04
But the funny thing is that most of the places where plant-based meat appears most often are products that benchmark Western diets. In the U.S. plant-based meat market, hamburgers are a product that is consumed more frequently by most Americans, contributing more than 80 percent of sales.
But the Chinese diet is very different from the West, and if you want to occupy the stomach of Chinese, you must first be localized.
What is localization, when I checked the information in this issue, I found a very interesting term, called "raw meat".
What is virgin meat? In my concept, meat that can eat the original animal characteristics and body structure is called raw meat. The opposite of virgin meat is "recombinant meat".
Virgin meat has several important advantages that make its place in Chinese food difficult to replace.
First, the utilization rate is very high.
Chinese eat an animal, it is absolutely necessary to eat all the parts of its body and wipe them dry, and eat all the parts that can be eaten.
So we will eat a lot of strange animal parts, hot pot has pig brain, yellow throat, duck intestine, barbecue with waist, sheep treasure, chicken heart, these things are not wasted.
Of course, eating these is of course related to the chronic shortage of meat supply. But for a long time, cultural inertia, Chinese has formed a very scattered inertia towards meat.
In addition, another advantage of primary meat is that it retains the original form of meat and appears fresher. And plant meat, at this level, is almost powerless.
Many plant meat products have successively launched plant meat dumplings, buns, spring rolls and other foods to fit the eating habits of Chinese consumers, and want to make plant meat as a filling, which is more easily accepted by consumers.
These are already very mainstream consumption scenarios, but they all belong to the "recombinant meat", that is, the form of meat cakes, minced meat, and minced meat. The technical limitations of plant meat doomed it to only play a role in this field for a long time.
Meat snacks like duck neck chicken feet, as well as pork knuckles for stewing, are scenes where plant-based meat is difficult to cover.
Last year, Zhou Black Duck also launched a vegetarian duck neck, I was curious to see the news, found that this vegetarian duck neck is actually no bone!
Zhou Black Duck Vegetarian Duck Neck Promotional Picture
Is it still called a duck neck without bones? I, the wuhan natives, said that I absolutely could not agree.
Let's extend this question a little bit, that is, we know that the cooking methods of Chinese food are very complicated, and the traditional meat consumption scenarios are very diverse.
A kind of pork can make hundreds of different types of food through different forms such as meat pieces, meat slices, shredded meat, and minced meat.
Shabu-shabu, grilled, marinated, fried, each cooking method has different requirements for meat quality.
Shabu-shabu is required to be thin, but it can withstand shabu-shabu; barbecue requires grease and can volatilize aroma; marinated meat should look at the flavor and be chewy.
Chinese food culture has a long history, paying attention to the complexity of the taste, the same ingredients can eat different flavors.
Many early adopters will focus on the evaluation of plant meat, such as "lack of meat flavor", "single meat feeling", etc., and in terms of the form of plant meat, it is not suitable for the complex cooking method of Chinese food, and cooking on fire will destroy the protein in plant meat.
From this perspective, if plant meat wants to be on the Chinese table, nutrition and deliciousness seem to be incompatible.
05
CBN Commercial Data Center previously released a "2020 Online Plant Meat Consumer Insight Report", which divided plant meat into three major consumer groups: young early adopters, healthy lifestyles and elite quality families.
"2020 Online Plant Meat Consumer Insight Report"
Young early adopters, love to follow the trend, have a strong curiosity about innovative forms of plant meat.
Healthy living people, pay attention to diet nutrition and collocation, plant meat low fat characteristics become the main reason for their purchase.
Elite qualityists, this type of consumer group mainly likes to import plant meat products, and the scale of consumption has increased year by year, such people have high consumption power and are willing to pay for "high quality".
But only there is no uncle and aunt who usually buy vegetables, and there is no ordinary consumer who is nine to five in the morning.
After all, Hema has a "plant protein burger meatloaf", weighing 226g and costing 59.9 yuan, and you can buy three pieces of real beef cake.
Starbucks has pushed a different kind of beef green sauce pasta made of "plant beef", which sells for 69 copies, which is half more expensive than ordinary pasta. Compared with them, vegetarian chicken sold in the vegetable market is as cheap as if it doesn't cost money.
No wonder plant meat is still parked in Western restaurants, foreign fast food restaurants and high-end shopping malls in first-tier cities. Because only here, its high cost is likely to be paid for.
After all, for most ordinary people, after the fresh energy has passed, we only care about this thing is not cheap, good or not.
06
Finally, I want to talk about eating meat.
Why do people need to eat meat? One important reason: protein is needed.
Before farming civilizations, meat was almost the only way we could get protein from nature. In a sense, the entire history of the development of human civilization is a history of struggle to continuously transform nature and obtain cheaper and richer nutrition.
But human beings are not animals born purely according to instinct, and pure nutrition is not necessarily what we really need, what is really scarce.
Humans need protein, they need delicious enjoyment, and they need food to bring us a sense of abundance and pleasure in life.
Only by combining food and nutrition in a certain way, reprocessing, and becoming a form that can maximize our pleasure needs, this is the meaning of food culture.
And plant meat is only one of these permutations. But it just so happens that it doesn't fit our perception of food, it's not cheap enough, and it's not nutritious enough.
In the past, we were often amazed at the power of technology and unconditionally surrendered to everything new. When we see Cook talking to Siri at the Apple conference and unlocking the screen with face recognition, we will always involuntarily recognize at that moment, and the future should be like this.
But do new things, new technologies, necessarily represent political correctness? Do we have to pursue, unconditionally praise, support the new? Not necessarily.
When the food that can be eaten is all industrial products produced by the assembly line, and the water drunk is all chemical reagents that break the molecular structure, is this brave new world really what we yearn for?
Technology can change lives, but that doesn't mean it has the power to erode lives, doesn't mean we have to move toward that efficient, standardized future, doesn't mean we have to change parts of our culture to accommodate some so-called new technologies.
Who says that the fireworks in the wet market and kitchen don't represent a future direction?