The fake-meat challenge for US firms in China, where millions aspire to eat real meat and plant-based foods are natural

Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat want to break into China’s huge market, but face some hurdles: price, and the fact eating real meat is a sign of status there

Vegan foods are already part of the Chinese diet – made from natural ingredients such as tofu, beans and mushrooms, whereas imitation meat is highly processed

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A burger featuring a Beyond Burger patty by US plant-based imitation meat producer Beyond Meat, which is looking to break into the Chinese market.

Published: 12:15pm, 17 Dec 2019Updated: 12:44pm, 20 Dec 2019

In the Wangjing neighbourhood of Beijing, ZeroGo is one of the city’s few vegan restaurants. It offers pizza, protein bowls and Asian-fusion fare, and online reviews rave about the menu’s creativity, which includes a vegan Big Mac, complete with vegan cheese and dairy-free special sauce. The “burger” is made from scratch, an original, pea-based recipe.

If the American fake-meat darlings Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have their way, chef Raymond Xie will soon be able to use their meatier patties. The problem is, he does not want to. “I want to use real fruit and vegetables,” he says, “Not products made with the intention of being a direct meat substitute.”

Plenty of Chinese people share the scepticism about American-style, plant-based imitation meat, a fact Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are about to confront. Both are hungrily eyeing China, which accounts for 27 per cent of the world’s meat consumption by volume.

The recent outbreak of African swine fever has driven up the price of pork and primed consumers for alternatives, and if the American companies can win over even a small fraction of the country’s 1.4 billion people, the opportunity is massive.

A roasted vegetables platter dish at ZeroGo vegan restaurant, Wangjing, Beijing. Photo: Simon Song

“We want to be as aggressive as we can,” Beyond Meat chief executive officer Ethan Brown said in an interview in October. The company, whose shares have tripled in value since it went public in May, wants to have production running in China before the end of 2020. The response at a major food industry trade show earlier this year was encouraging, the company says.

Impossible Foods also made a splashy trade show debut in China. In November, the company brought almost 50,000 samples of its meatless beef to the China International Import Expo in Shanghai. Chief executive officer Pat Brown says that it already had a “very good” prototype of plant-based pork.