Del Taco’s meatless meat tacos: a surprise fast-food hit

Two months ago, Del Taco announced a partnership with meat alternative company Beyond Meat. The fast-food chain, with 580 locations across the United States, would offer Beyond’s plant-based beef in its tacos for $2.49.

For the fledgling plant-based meat industry, it’s been an incredibly eventful two months since then. Beyond Meat had an eye-popping IPO in which its stock price raced to nearly $170, for a market cap of more than $10 billion. It’s now worth more than 80 S&P 500 companies, including Macy’s. And last week, Beyond Meat debuted a new, improved burger — which cooks better and tastes meatier — in grocery stores.

So many companies have launched plant-based meat products that it now makes headlines when a company — like Del Taco’s competitor Taco Bell — announces that it is not joining the bandwagon.

Taco Bell may be missing out. Del Taco announced Wednesday that its jump into plant-based meat has been an enormous success. According to a spokesperson for the company, the Beyond taco was one of the most successful product launches in the company’s history, with two million sold so far.

The reception to its new Beyond products has been so enthusiastic that Del Taco is launching additional Beyond products — the Beyond 8 Layer Burrito and the Epic Beyond Cali Burrito — and giving away free Beyond burritos with any purchase for a week, starting on June 20.

Products like veggie burgers, fake chicken, and soy and almond milk are growing in popularity and market share — and they’re getting tastier and harder to distinguish from animal products. New breakthroughs in food science have made it easier to imitate the flavor and texture of real meat.

Beyond Meat was among the pioneers of this new generation of plant-based meat, which aimed to replace bean-based veggie burgers marketed mostly to vegans. The company’s commitment to refining its products and improving the taste have been crucial on that front — consumers who also eat meat are fairly picky about the flavor of plant-based products.

The rest of the plant-based meat industry has been thriving too. Burger King has been expanding its Impossible Whoppers to stores across the country. Qdoba announced in April that it would serve Beyond Meat competitor Impossible Foods. The industry giants Tyson and Purdue are pursuing their own plant-based product lines. A few years ago, the Impossible Burger was available in a handful of restaurants; now it can be found in more than 5,000.

There are skeptics. Taco Bell and McDonald’s have announced their intent to wait on plant-based products, and some analysts say that the companies suspect consumer interest in plant-based meats is a fad.

But advocates argue that plant-based meat will only get better from here. Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have released new product lines and improved products this year, and the new money they’ve raised will allow them to keep doing so.

And plant-based meats don’t have to displace all animal meats in order to make a big difference. Every burger replaced with a Beyond Burger has an impact on CO2 emissions, demand for factory farming, and need for antibiotics. The more the plant-based meat industry grows, the more those impacts will be visible — and that might, in turn, fuel more interest in plant-based meats.

Beyond Burger’s team doesn’t just believe they’ve found a niche — they say they’ve figured out the “Future of Protein.” The impressive sales figures from their product launches so far suggest that, at least for now, it’s a future consumers want a taste of.

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