So I shop around to get some bits and pieces for a good home made meal, and I notice some items say, a pack of vegan burgers, these are more expensive than regular burgers!
I’m not a vegan but I’m curious as to why these items are priced as such, it’s a bit of a pain for people who can only eat gluten free food as those items are priced high too. The bread we get for me grandpapa is pricey for what you get.
Is it different production methods that make it pricey? You’d think with healthier, easier to get ingredients would be cheaper than producing regular non vegan items.
Meat and dairy are subsidized so that consumers pay below market value for those products, the market is not fair and it’s not free either.
That’s why.
All of agriculture is subsidized. American consumers don’t pay a fair price for anything that’s grown in the US. We don’t pay a fair price for the labor used to pick fruit and harvest the fields, because the farmers use undocumented migrants that are paid below minimum wage.
Do you think we’d be putting corn in our gas tanks if that shit wasn’t subsidized up the ass?
Because the know the people that buy it either are stupid or have no choice (in the cases of the few that actually have to eat those kinds of diets for health reasons).
It’s straight up just because people will pay the price they’re asking…
This is contrary to basic economic principles.
If a beef burger and vegan burger cost the same to make, but people will pay more for the vegan, that world attract more vegan producers to the market, and more competition would reduce the price.
That is a very rudimentary understanding of the system that doesn’t always pan out in a particular time frame or due to external factors.
- It takes time for that effect to occur
- It doesn’t take into account barriers to entry, of which there are many for food
- It doesn’t take into account that there are are actually a small number of companies that own the bulk of our food supply chain and it’s in their financial interest to keep prices high for things that are perceived as luxury
It’s not rudimentary, it’s a complex system reduced to a few sentences.
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Vegan patties have been around forever.
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There aren’t significantly more barriers to entry for food products than other industries.
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Yes vendors want high prices, but that applies to any product, not only vegan products.
The answer is, as everyone else has pointed out, economies of scale. There’s a larger market with more participants producing more beef burgers than there are vegan patties.
Economies of scale affects the costs to the manufacturer. Competition/demand affect the price to the consumer.
Correct. That’s precisely why producers of meat patties can still be profitable at a much lower price point.
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“basic economic principles” is handwaving. you’re storytelling, not making a scientific postulate
It’s a lemmy comment.
it’s storytelling, not science
It’s social media, who’s making scientific postulates?
lots of people talk about economics as though it is science.
Yup it is contrary to normal economic principles, read up on luxury goods and in particular veblen goods and how price finding works there.
In the end humans are not at all times rational. There is no homo economicus. Economics is as much math as it is a social study.
While higher prices cab make products more appealing, that is not the primary reason why vegan products are more expensive.
Burgers (at least supermarket ones) are made from offcuts and other bits that can’t be sold as expensive cuts of meat, so are essentially a byproduct. Pretty much the same for milk. Vegan products usually have to bear the entire cost of production in their price.
You have to pay to have morals in a capitalist society.
Not everything is about new ways that capitalism can be painted as evil. There are valid reasons for why gluten free products are pricier, all of which have been presented in this thread.
Price is set at what the market will pay.
For gluten free products: the whole production chain needs to use different tools or be sealed off from the rest. You can generally use the same mill, kneader, oven, tray for barley, wheat, rye, etc without meticulous cleaning in between. But if you want it to be gluten free you now need to either do that expensive cleaning or more realistically have an entirely separate set of machinery and ensure it never gets in contact with your main line.
Anything that’s trendy they know people want to buy they can charge more because people pay it.
You can buy everyday items that are gluten free and vegan friendly as well. Look at the ingredients and if they don’t have wheat, barley, rye, or triticale then there’s a good chance it’s gluten free. There are some exceptions to that like canned soups or broths, but you don’t have to strictly get items from a gluten free section for it to be gluten free. And your wallet will thank you.
But to answer your question, some GF products have ingredients that are more expensive than wheats. Like tapioca flour for example. But most of it falls under the “healthy” food tax
For the things you mentioned, the vegan and gluten-free options are processed much more. Beef, for example, is arguably a “whole food.”
Gluten-free isn’t healthier unless you have specific conditions. Most people can handle gluten fine, and some vegan foods are primarily gluten (such as seitan).
Vegan isn’t inherently healthy, especially if your eating mostly processed foods. A primarily whole-food vegan diet is likely healthier and cheaper than most people’s diets though.
because fuck you
Economies of scale and subsidies/successful lobbying.
The supermarket does not care how it was made.
Vegan is a feature, so they want to make you pay extra for it.
Lower volume of sales makes the niche supply lines more expensive to maintain
Less competition means more premium prices until a competitor gets attracted to the market
As a long time vegetarian this is exactly what I noticed in the last years. 15 years ago it was almost impossible to get good vegetarian products in the supermarket. I’m talking about something like a vegetable spread, tofu sausages weren’t a thing. Over the years there were more and more competitors and now the spreads are cheap (cheap as in fucking expensive like everything else).
This was also true for Tofu etc. It started with super niche ecological brands, now there are cheap no name products available. This is what will finally also happen to the fancy burger patties that are on the market for some years now.
But you can be sure everyone in the chain will make their margin on the way except for you.
Edit: Beware US citizen, I am speaking for my home country which is Germany.
There’s probably also a lot of r&d that still needs to be earned back as opposed to the meat industry which has streamlined everything.
I was thinking something similar too:
Why almond/soy milk is more expensivs than cow milk? To make almond/soy milk you just need to maintain the plants. To make cow milk you need to have cow food, take care of the cow etc. and generally it seems much more inefficient than making plant-based milk. I dont know if they use the whole almond/soy etc to make the milk or only part of them, but still.
On this wikipedia article, under Nutrition and Sustainability, you can see for example that while Soy and oat milks have around half (almond has around ¼) the calories of cow milk (plant based milks seem to be healthier too, due to lower saturated fats and sugar contents), they are much more efficient to produce. Like, oat milk seems to be around 6-7 times more efficient to produce than cow milk which counters the fact that it may have half the calories.
Some may consider cow milk as byproduct of the meat industry, but since baby cows need to feed from it and cows already spend energy to make it, I dont think of it that much as byproduct, it’s necessary.
As someone people said though, it probably is due to the financial incentives given to the cow milk industry🤷
You can make vegan milk at home and it’s way cheaper than cow’s milk. Oat milk is SUPER EASY: 1 cup oats/2 cups water, soak for 15 minutes, blend and strain. Others are similarly easy and there are plenty of recipes online.
Wut👀 wow, thanks
Might check it soon
Home made vegan milks have a very short shelf life compared to the supermarket version. But as said, are super cheap to make.
When making almond milk, I add the left over almond milk pulp to my bread dough.
Yeah it makes sense that they dont last long enough
Its subsidies that keep it cheep. Producing beef doesn’t provide free milk. Typically different varieties of cattle are used for dairy and beef. But dairy cows may end up in low grade beef - except when they are put to pasture after their useful life and given a year to rest (this beef is more expensive).
A large part of food cost is processing.
A regular burger patty is processed by butchering a cow, running meat through a grinder, and then pressing the grind into patties.
A vegan burger patty has to combine multiple ingredients and seasonings with different preprocessing steps, and then it still has to be pressed into patties.
Out of this, cow butchering is by far the most intensive and costly processing step, but the cost of that is amortized over many cuts of meat, not just the hamburger.
The vegan patty has more things to process in it. And if you’re looking at Beyond or Impossible, then some of those things are fancy lab grown proteins.
