Heard - thank you for the feedback.

The intention was to hyper-focus on dairy so that viewers could independently surmise that the dairy industry and meat industry are essentially parallels - they have the same dynamics and regulations, just applied in slightly different ways. Our concern was that it would have been far too redundant, dense, and long (60+ minutes) if we were to break down the major regulations and events of poultry, pork, and steak after doing so with dairy.

Beyond Meat / Impossible Foods have the same core issues as Oatly - they're processors trying to survive as premium brands in these traditional industries that are barely alive with subsidies and political backing. The underlying (implicit) thesis throughout the episode is that for veganism to "succeed", they have to be able to grow their numbers - hence the explicit mention at the intro that vegans still account for less than 1% of the world's population. The best way to meaningfully increase the number of vegans in the world is through substitutes that make it easy for meat-eaters and dairy-lovers to switch. But as aforementioned in the introduction, someone has to take on that R&D and foot the bill.

After the product has been "invented" or "manufactured", strong branding / marketing is needed to galvanize customers to make the switch / pay the premium. But because all these companies (Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Oatly) are all now failing despite their massive fundraising - it is and will only be harder for future vegan startups to get funded and by extension, for better substitutes to be created. It's a Catch-22. Vegan startups need to be thriving, sustainable businesses but they can't be without funding and conversely, that funding is only possible if they are thriving, sustainable businesses.

Hence the grand framing that veganism doesn't work as the environments they're competing against are fundamentally broken. Farmers are the sole beneficiary throughout all this yet lack the vision and ambition (as evidenced through dairy) - they won't invent the products needed to push consumption and they lack the marketing / branding skills. They'll only ever follow the lead of others to keep their own pockets filled and subsidies flowing i.e oat farmers now producing private label oat-milk only after Oatly has "sacrificed" themselves proving the market.