On Saturday I stood in front of the meat case at the Hollywood Fred Meyer longer than a reasonable adult should, looking at a package of Beyond Burger sitting six inches from ground chuck, in a box the same shade of red.
That shelf placement is a positioning document. It just costs six dollars.
Two weeks earlier the Impossible Whopper went national, and I heard three separate people discuss it who do not otherwise discuss hamburgers. Two companies, functionally the same product, chasing the same customer. And that customer is not a vegetarian. Vegetarians were never the market. The market is a person who likes meat and has a low-grade unresolved feeling about it.
They have chosen nearly opposite routes to him.
Beyond wants to be meat, and Impossible wants to be the technology that replaces it, which is the entire brand difference dressed up as a category fight.
Beyond takes permission by proximity. Pea protein, plain packaging language, the butcher case instead of the freezer aisle next to the sad veggie patties of 2004. Athletes as proof, not activists. Distribution through grocery and drive-throughs. Even the name is aspirational without being alienating: beyond, not instead of, not anti.
Impossible takes permission by authority. Restaurants first, chefs first, a founder who was a Stanford biochemist, and a story built entirely on a molecule. Heme. They will tell you about heme within ninety seconds of any interview. The product arrives to you already endorsed by a kitchen you respect.
Vegetarians were never the market.
Neither bet is wrong. Both carry a bill.
Beyond's risk is the shelf. If your claim is that you belong in the meat case, you have accepted the economics of the meat case, and pea protein is not a patent. Kroger will make a house version. Tyson has the freezer space and the trucks. Proximity gets you tried and then gets you commoditized.
Impossible's risk is subtler. When science is your brand promise, science becomes your attack surface. You have taught the customer to think about what is in it. That works beautifully right up until the first alarming headline about a lab-made ingredient, and then the word technology stops being an asset and starts being the problem. I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms: the proof point you lean on hardest is the one that gets turned around on you.
Your own category has a version of this choice. Do you win by being the familiar thing done better, or the unfamiliar thing done first. Both are defensible. Picking neither is not.
Meanwhile the best plant-based burger I ate this summer came off a cart on Hawthorne, from a guy who called it a burger and left it at that. No heme, no mission, no meat case. Truffles got the last bite of the bun, which she reviewed favorably and without a positioning statement.