To ring in the new year, I decided to get acquainted with the Instant Pot that my family received for Christmas — Christmas 2021, that is, because it’s taken this long to work through my fear that this pressure cooker, despite its safeguards, is liable to blow up like a pipe bomb. Given my antagonistic relationship with technology, this is not an irrational fear.

In an afternoon, I managed to succeed with two basic operations, yielding enough hard-boiled eggs and juicy shredded chicken breast to last me all week, and to chalk up one miserable failure. Which is about par for the course for me.

I love learning, I hate learning curves. I’m not alone in that, and it’s fine when what’s at stake is a nice gift that gathers dust. The alternative meat industry has hit the hardest part of its market learning curve, where there’s still more to learn than has been learned, but now the players are aware of how much still needs to be mastered. It’s discouraging.

Human beings are hard-wired for immediate gratification, but business isn’t. Several players in the alt-meat sector encountered that lesson in 2022, and not just the much-discussed Beyond Meat. Other companies that found themselves swimming against the current include Very Good Food Company of Vancouver, B.C., which secured a last-minute US$1.4 million lifeline from Reef Capital in December that will keep its doors open for … well, a while. Motif Foodworks had a round of layoffs mid-year and a couple of key legal losses in its intellectual property court battle with Impossible Foods; Impossible and Beyond also laid off workers.

And JBS tossed in the towel on its internal plant-based brand-building venture, Planterra.

A deep breath and an alt-meat industry reset for 2023 is not just an opportunity — it’s a requirement. Alt-meat entrepreneurs and financiers, and conventional meat companies with skin in the alt-game, must turn their attention to the long game in lieu of stratospheric sales gains at the expense of profits and premature public offerings. At the same time, the way the sector goes to the market has to offer more immediate benefits to consumers (taste, price among plant-based alt-meats) and fewer sermons about climate change. The facts may point to the greater sustainable good but consumers have never ranked that issue high among considerations when making a purchase decision. On the other hand, other factors that were mastered by the conventional meat industry decades ago do sway consumers’ decisions nearly every time.

At the beginning of 2024 the alt-meat industry will be at another place on the learning curve; where is hard to predict, because the use of fermented alt-meats and mycelium will certainly see record levels of growth in ’23, albeit off of a tiny base. Meanwhile, regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere seem poised to let cultivated meat out of the lab. The alt-meat market overall will be more complex a year from now.

So, I hope, will my Instant Pot skills. And if, in the meantime, the players wrack up two successes for every dismal failure, well, that’s pretty much par for the course.

Instant karma

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