Beyond Terrible

We can't be selling this to people

The good people at Beyond (of tasty burger fame) have decided to take a swing at something new again by releasing a plant-based 20g protein 100cal fizzy fruity drink line called Beyond Immerse. It’s comically bad, and it’s so funny that no one in the whole process managed to stop it coming to market. In an unblinded n=10 trial conducted at brunch today, about 20% of people gagged while drinking it. The branding of the product is to immerse the consumer in the remarkable nutrition of plants. This consumer is immersed. This consumer cannot escape the horrors.

As stated in a previous post, I think one of the most valuable things the alt protein industry can do is stop bad things coming to market. The people want protein, and we should give the people protein. But we gotta stop putting garbage products into the world. Currently it’s only sold direct to consumers, you need to buy a whole 12-pack of them, but hopefully they put a stop to it before they roll it out in stores.

Quotes from giving it to people at brunch today:

• Why does it taste like that?

• It’s surprisingly bitter.

• It doesn’t taste like either pina or colada.

• They’ve added a lot of flavors to cover up something bad. You can still taste it.

• It tastes pukey sometimes but it’s ok.

• I won’t drink that, I’ve spat it out before.

• Oh my god I fucking love that.

• For 20g of protein and 100 calories, I’d crush four of these. If you put vodka in it, it would slap.

• I don’t know why it’s so weird. It doesn’t taste like… food.

• It tastes like a gross thing covering up another gross thing.

So I think I know what has happened here. The wizards at America’s favorite pea protein provider, Puris, recently did their magic and invented ClearP, a hydrolyzed pea protein that dissolves clear in water. The historic problem with pea protein is that it is THICK and NASTY in beverages. Hydrolyzation is a fix to this problem to help it dissolve, it chops up the long pea protein chains into smaller protein chains and peptides (Peptides! San Francisco do you hear!?!). The problem is that even though it’s dissolved, it must still taste like pea protein or maybe the peptides themselves have a stank to them, so you need a lot flavors to cover the taste. But everyone was very excited about it, and it makes for a very simple beverage. Mix it with water, flavors, sweeteners, and colors, and you’ve got yourself a fancy new protein drink product. So Beyond comes out with Immerse. The problem is likely that the hydrolized pea protein is just not good enough to make a neutral protein water. Sad, but they might be able to do it in the future. It’s almost certainly worth the effort to try.

It looks like a new company has sprung up around hyrdrolized pea protein, VUUM. From looking at their website, I can only hope that the copy was written by an LLM:

VUUM is on a mission to disrupt the stagnant protein drink category. Tested and created by real people after years of formulation implementing cutting edge technologies.

I, for one, want no part of their stagnant protein drink. But I wish them and their real people the best and hope they succeed. Someone please try it and report back.