HelloFresh To Begin Offering Beyond Meat In US Meal Kits

With Beyond Meat on the company’s menus since July in Canada, HelloFresh plans to start bringing the vegan burger to its meal kits in the U.S. in mid-September. HelloFresh CEO and Co-Founder Dominik Richter attributes the company’s success to understanding clients, including the newest trends like meatless meat, CNBC reported.

“We know that the appetite for vegetarian or vegan alternatives to meat is definitely a trend that we can pick up in customer sentiment across HelloFresh,” Richter said, according to the report. Those who are aiming to reduce their intake of meat — flexitarians — are behind the plant-based meat substitute trend.

The NPD Group discovered that 95 percent of people who bought burgers that were vegan had also purchased beef burgers in the last year. According to Euromonitor estimates, the meat substitute market is forecast to reach $2.5 billion by the time that 2023 rolls around. HelloFresh U.S. rival Blue Apron announced its own Beyond Meat partnership last month.

The enthusiasm of investors for the potential of Beyond Meat to gain from the trend has sent its stock price rocketing since its initial public offering (IPO) in May but fell amid a wider market sell-off and a secondary share offering. The company has 2.1 percent of the meat substitute market share per Euromonitor. Shares in Beyond Meat rose by 2 percent during morning trading on Monday (August 19).

In separate vegetarian burger news, Burger King’s experiments with artificial meat began in April of this year when it rolled out the Impossible Whopper in restaurants in the St. Louis area. The Impossible Whopper was a standard Whopper made with a grilled Impossible Burger patty.

The magic of the Impossible Burger, according to Impossible Foods, is a mixture of ground wheat and potato protein mixed with “flecks” of coconut fat. The burgers also “bleed” like a proper burger because of the inclusion of the heme compound, which is found in animals and plants.