A large part of food cost is processing.

A regular burger patty is processed by butchering a cow, running meat through a grinder, and then pressing the grind into patties.

A vegan burger patty has to combine multiple ingredients and seasonings with different preprocessing steps, and then it still has to be pressed into patties.

Out of this, cow butchering is by far the most intensive and costly processing step, but the cost of that is amortized over many cuts of meat, not just the hamburger.

The vegan patty has more things to process in it. And if you’re looking at Beyond or Impossible, then some of those things are fancy lab grown proteins.