I saw an ad for an online delivery service for food and I have a lot of time on my hands so I checked it out. I won’t mention the website’s name but they basically sell meat for home delivery.
Here are the names of some of the products they sell:
I checked and I found out what I suspected: these are non-meat substitutes.
I feel that you shouldn’t use words like Beef, Pork, or Duck in the name of a non-meat product. Admittedly, the descriptions identified these products as not being meat but I can see somebody not bothering to read the description and mistakenly thinking something being advertised as “Ground Beef” was ground beef.
For some reason, they didn’t do this with their vegetarian “fish” - that they advertised as Vish.
I agree. Looking at their website it appears the V in VBites products indicates they are made of vegetables. But they do say Beef, etc., not Beef Flavored.
The other names are fine. They don’t say that it’s duck or whatever, but they tell you that you can expect to use it as a substitute in a recipe that calls for duck*. If I saw a label like that, I’d wonder what it was instead of duck; presumably somewhere else on the package it says that it’s a vegetarian meat substitute.
A “ground beef box”, though, I’d expect to contain ground beef. Not just something that tastes like ground beef and can be used in the same recipes, but actual ground beef. And even if it says elsewhere on the box that it’s textured soy protein, or whatever, the part of the label that says “ground beef box” is still wrong.
*I wouldn’t actually expect, of course, that it’d work very well as a substitute for duck, but how well something actually works for its intended purpose is the sort of thing one expects a label or ad to exaggerate, and would not be what I would count as “false advertising”.
I feel “style” is in a gray zone. It can be interpreted that “duck style” means it isn’t actual duck but I don’t feel that’s a clear meaning in the way that “duck substitute” or “imitation duck” would be.
It might not be clear that it’s imitation duck, but all the other interpretations of “style” are even weaker statements. “Duck style pieces” definitely does not in any reasonable interpretation imply that it actually is duck.
I looked at the VBites web site. Their product names are explicit: Meat-Free Beef Pieces, Meat-Free Mince, Meat-Free Gammon Roast, Meat-Free Duck Pieces in Hoisin Sauce, etc. Their fish substitutes are called “Fish-Free,” not “Vish.”
It’s a British company, as you can see by the names (mince instead of ground beef, gammon instead of ham). And they make no bones about their products being meatless.
It looks to me like the ad mentioned by the OP is from a reseller who has renamed the products for the American market. I think they should have been clearer with their names, false advertising or not.
This American site sells real meat too, with names that are similar to the vegetarian products. Some of them are more clear like the Daring Plant-Based Chicken Box, though I don’t know what is so daring about it.
It’s just dumb marketing for this company, just the chance that a customer will mistakenly order an outrageously over-priced vegetarian box assuming it was real meat should be enough to have them re-name the products. The chance of someone ordering meat being pleasantly surprised with these substitutes is quite low.
Loma Linda, CA, has a preponderance of Seventh-Day Adventists living there. The main employers in the community are Loma Linda University (private SDA institution) and Loma Linda University Medical Center (again, an SDA institution).
When I was Vegetarian I frequently shopped at the Loma Linda Market. It was a fun place to visit. There were canned meat substitutes that frequently had “sort of” meat names, such as Prime Stakes.
The absolute worst was a dreadful product called Tuno. That needed to be buried in a deep, deep hole, on somebody else’s property.
It’s been my experience whenever a Vegetarian product similar to animal product is sold, the goofy name clues you in that this is a fakey product.
~VOW
There’s a menu at the top of the page that shows various icons depicted the products they sell; beef, pork, fish, poultry, and plant-based. Click on the icon and it takes you to the relevant section for that type of product.
If you go to the beef, pork, fish, or poultry sections, all of the items display the animal icon next to each product in that section. But the plant-based products do not display the plant icon.