Plant-based meat costs 82% more than regular meat on average. Plant-based eggs? 110% higher. Vegan cheese runs over double.
But here’s what bugs me about this whole conversation. A bag of dried lentils delivers protein at roughly 2 cents per gram. Ground beef lands between 4 and 8 cents. That plant-based patty sitting in the fancy packaging? Somewhere around 10 to 15 cents.
The cheapest protein on Earth is already vegan. It’s trying to make it taste like a hamburger that blows the budget.
I think most people are confusing two things when they complain about vegan prices. They’re talking about the processed stuff, the fake meats and dairy clones, not the beans and rice that have fed civilizations for centuries at pennies a bowl.
A whole-food plant-based diet can shave a third off your grocery bill compared to a meat-heavy one.
So the real question isn’t “why is vegan food expensive?” It’s “why does a plant-based burger cost twice as much as a beef burger?”
Here are 7 reasons. Some of them will tick you off.
1. Meat Gets a Government Discount You Never See on Your Receipt
The US Farm Bill funnels the bulk of its crop subsidies into corn and soy. Roughly 60% of grain production in this country feeds livestock, not humans.
Translation: the government pays to keep animal feed dirt cheap, which keeps meat dirt cheap, which is how $4.99 ground beef ends up in your cart. The raw materials for a beef patty live inside a price-protected bubble.
Peas and lentils that go into a vegan burger? They fall under “specialty crops,” which get scraps by comparison.
Only 3% of US cropland grows fruits and vegetables. The system was built to churn out cheap meat, and it’s doing exactly that.
Europe runs the same playbook. A Nature Food study found the EU spends four times more public money farming animals than growing plants. Factor in feed subsidies and over 80% of farm payments flow toward animal products.
Your beef isn’t cheap. It’s subsidized. You pay for it through taxes instead of at the checkout.
2. Meat Had a Century-Long Head Start
The meat industry has been refining its machine since the early 1900s. Pork alone consolidated from thousands of small plants down to a few massive operations cranking out product at pennies per unit.
Plant-based meat companies? Most of them are less than 15 years old. They haven’t crossed the production threshold where costs collapse. They’re grinding through the expensive startup years while going up against operations that hit that mark generations ago.
Here’s something I didn’t know before digging into this. Large slaughterhouses sell the hides, tallow, blood, and bone meal from every animal. That revenue from non-meat parts (called the “drop credit”) can cover the entire processing cost.
The meat itself gets sold at roughly the price of the live animal.
Plant-based brands have no version of that. No side revenue stream picking up the tab.
3. A Beef Burger Has One Ingredient. A Vegan Burger Has 20.
Ground beef is ground muscle. That’s the whole recipe.
A plant-based burger is a formula with 15 to 20 separate components. Each one has its own supply chain, price tag, and quality control problem. Pea protein isolate. Coconut oil shipped from Southeast Asia. Methylcellulose binders running $10 to $18 per kilogram. Proprietary flavor compounds you can’t buy at the store.
And here’s the part that gets overlooked. The beef trimmings in ground meat are leftovers from carving steaks and roasts. The premium cuts already got sold.
Ground beef is the byproduct. A vegan patty is the main event, built from scratch with ingredients sourced for this purpose alone.
That gap in cost structure exists before anyone turns on a machine.
4. Making a Pea Taste Like a Cow is Pharma-Level Work
Impossible Foods gets their burger to “bleed” using heme protein manufactured by genetically engineered yeast inside bioreactors. That’s not a kitchen. That’s closer to a pharmaceutical operation.
Sterile rooms. Specialized tanks. Trained scientists monitoring fermentation. Meanwhile, the cow manufactures that same heme protein inside its own body for zero industrial cost. All it needs is feed (which, remember, taxpayers are subsidizing).
I’m not knocking the science. It’s genuinely impressive. But it costs real money, and that money shows up on your receipt.
Beyond Meat has burned through close to half its revenue on R&D and overhead in some stretches. Tyson spends almost nothing inventing chicken because the chicken already exists.
Plant-based R&D is invention from scratch. Meat R&D is tweaking what works. One of those is cheap. The other isn’t.
5. The Grocery Store Pockets a Bigger Cut
This caught me off guard. Supermarkets don’t mark up every product the same way.
Fresh meat often carries a thin 8 to 15% margin. Stores treat it as a loss leader, the thing that pulls you through the door. Plant-based products? Retailers tack on 35 to 50%.
Their reasoning: vegan stuff sells slower, occupies the same shelf space, and risks sitting there unsold. So they charge more per unit to cover the risk.
It feeds on itself. High margins push prices up, which kills volume, which gives the store permission to keep margins high.
Getting on the shelf at all isn’t free either. “Slotting fees” run $1,500 to $10,000 per store per product. For Tyson, that’s a rounding error. For a plant-based startup, that cost gets folded straight into what you pay.
6. Most Vegan Brands Don’t Own a Single Factory
A lot of plant-based meat companies farm out production to contract manufacturers. They don’t own the facility, the equipment, or the trucks. They’re renting time on somebody else’s line.
Every stop along the way takes a cut. The ingredient supplier grabs a margin. The contract manufacturer grabs a margin. The brand grabs a margin. Then the retailer grabs another margin at the shelf.
That’s four separate markups between the factory floor and your fridge.
Big meat processors own the feed mills, the trucks, the slaughter facilities, and the packaging plants. They locked up every layer of that cost stack decades ago. Plant-based companies are tenants at every stage.
7. The Price Trap That Keeps the Whole Thing Stuck
Here’s the cruel part. Costs can’t come down without more volume. Volume can’t go up without lower costs.
Price is the top barrier to buying plant-based for 38% of European shoppers. One retail test found that cutting a vegan burger’s price by just £1 below the beef option made people 134% more likely to grab it.
The demand is sitting right there. It’s pinned down by the price tag. And when inflation tightens household budgets, people fall back to the cheapest protein on the shelf, which is subsidized beef, which drains even more volume from the plant-based companies trying to scale down their costs.
I could be off base, but I think this loop is the single biggest chokepoint. Not the technology. Not the flavor. The math won’t cooperate.
The Bottom Line
Vegan food isn’t expensive. Processed vegan food engineered to copy meat is expensive. That’s not the same thing.
A bag of lentils will always cost less than a steak. The premium on that plant-based patty is the price of constructing a brand new food system inside the skeleton of one that spent a hundred years perfecting cheap animal protein.
Subsidies, scale, factory ownership, grocery store markups, and the wild complexity of making plants impersonate meat. It all stacks. None of it is permanent. But right now the deck is tilted, and the vegan burger showed up to a rigged game.
Want cheap vegan food? It already exists. Dry goods aisle. Bottom shelf.
