Plant-Based Patties vs. Beef: Cost, Protein and Sodium Per Patty

Before any of the numbers mean anything, you need to know exactly what was done to them. This is the part most comparisons skip, and it is the part that determines whether the rest is worth reading.

Everything Sits at 113 Grams

Every product in this comparison has been scaled to 113 grams — four ounces, the classic quarter-pound patty — in its raw or frozen state. If a patty is sold at 64 grams, its numbers have been multiplied by 1.77 to reach 113. If it is sold at 150 grams, they have been scaled down.

That scaling deserves a plain warning, because it is easy to misread. Saying that MorningStar Grillers Original delivers 28.2 grams of protein per 113 grams does not mean one patty gives you 28 grams of protein. One patty gives you 16 grams. It means that if you ate 1.77 of those patties, which is roughly what a quarter-pound of that product weighs, you would get 28.2 grams. That is why the table below prints the as-sold column right next to the normalized one — you need both to shop, and either one alone will mislead you.

There is a happy piece of arithmetic hiding here, though. The three ratio columns — dollars per gram of protein, sodium per gram of protein, saturated fat per gram of protein — do not change at all when you scale a patty up or down. Both halves of the fraction move together. Those ratios are the fairest comparison available, and they are immune to the patty-size trap entirely.

Where the Money Came From

The beef prices are national averages published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics for August 2026, the most recent month available: $6.318 per pound for ground beef, 100% beef, and $7.950 per pound for lean and extra lean. Both figures fell from July. These are price levels across the country rather than one store's shelf on one afternoon, which is the honest way to price a commodity that varies by region.

The plant patty prices are a different kind of number, and the difference matters. They come from a single dated capture at one retailer on September 11, 2026, because plant patties are branded products with no national average to draw on. A Wegmans capture of the full freezer set on that date is what every plant-side dollar figure in this piece rests on. Your store will differ, possibly by a lot, and the ranking is more durable than the absolute numbers.

Three products appear in the nutrition columns but not the price column, because no price was captured for them at that retailer. Leaving the cell blank seemed better than guessing.

The Sodium Guardrail

To make the sodium column readable, we drew a line at 25 milligrams of sodium per gram of protein and marked the products that sit above it.

That line is an editorial choice, not a health recommendation, and it is worth being blunt about that. It is not a threshold any agency publishes, it is not a limit anyone is suggesting you observe, and the full column is printed below so you can draw your own line wherever it suits you. It exists purely because "this patty has 260 milligrams of sodium" is a meaningless fact until you know how much protein is coming with it.

Start with the single fact that unravels most published comparisons: the plant-based patties sold side by side in the same freezer case range from 57 grams to 150 grams.

That is a 2.65-fold spread inside one category. A Dr. Praeger's All American Drive-Thru patty weighs two ounces. An Impossible Indulgent patty weighs 5.3 ounces. If you read their panels next to each other, the Indulgent looks like a calorie catastrophe at 380 calories against 110 — but you are looking at nearly three times as much food, which is not a nutritional finding, it is a weight difference.

The reason this trap persists is that almost nobody prints the weight. Nutrition panels lead with "1 burger" as the serving size, and the gram weight sits in small type beside it where no one reads it. The one published guide that does put patty weight next to the panel is the Center for Science in the Public Interest's plant-burger comparison, and seeing those weights lined up is what made this whole analysis possible.

It is also worth knowing that this category reformulates constantly. Four of the products here have changed formula since the figures most articles are still quoting: Beyond moved from 5 grams of saturated fat to 2, Impossible from 8 to 6, Dr. Praeger's Perfect Burger from 530 milligrams of sodium to 410, and MorningStar Grillers Prime from 400 to 320. Every panel in the table below was pulled from a live manufacturer label or current package copy on September 11, 2026. A comparison written two years ago is not slightly stale here. It is arithmetically wrong.

Here is the result we did not expect.

Normalized to 113 grams, MorningStar Farms Grillers Original delivers protein at 6.6 cents per gram. Grillers Prime delivers it at 7.8 cents. Ground beef at 80/20 comes in at 8.1 cents, and 90/10 at 8.8 cents. The two cheapest sources of protein in this entire comparison are plant patties — and they beat both grinds of beef.

The mechanism is protein density, hidden by patty size. Grillers Original packs 16 grams of protein into a 64-gram patty. That works out to 25 grams of protein per 100 grams of product, which is denser than cooked 80/20 ground beef at 24 grams, and far denser than the raw grind at 17.2 grams. These are not watered-down beef substitutes. By weight they are more protein-dense than the beef they stand in for, and the small patty is exactly what disguises it.

One important caveat on that particular product: Grillers Original contains egg whites and calcium caseinate, which makes it vegetarian but not vegan. If that distinction matters to you, it changes the shortlist.

The premium, beef-style patties tell the opposite story. Impossible Burger Patties, bought in the two-count box, cost 17.1 cents per gram of protein — more than double what the beef costs. So "plant-based patty" is not a price category at all. The spread inside the plant set is wider than the gap between plants and beef, which means the brand you pick moves your money far more than the plant-versus-beef decision does.

If this kind of arithmetic is the way you shop, our ranking of 25 foods by protein per dollar puts patties in the context of the whole grocery store.

The Pack-Size Penalty

Before you change brands, it is worth checking the box size, because for several products that single choice moves the number more than the brand does.

A Beyond Burger two-count box ran $5.49, which is $2.75 a patty. The six-count bag of the identical product ran $12.99, which is $2.17 a patty. Same patty, same panel, 21 percent difference in what the protein costs you. The two-count boxes are where this category earned its expensive reputation, and the value packs are a materially different proposition sitting four feet away in the same freezer.

Everything below is per patty as the product is actually sold, with the normalized protein column and the three ratio columns beside it. The ratio columns are the ones that survive the patty-size problem, so they are where the real comparison lives.

Beef figures are USDA FoodData Central values for raw ground beef scaled to 113 grams, priced at BLS August 2026 national averages. Plant panels are manufacturer labels or current package copy as of September 11, 2026, priced from the dated retailer capture described above.

Worth noticing before you scroll on: the bolded cells in each column belong to four different products. No single row wins this table, and that is the finding. If you want to see how far a normalized protein budget stretches across a whole week, we costed that out in our $5-a-day, 100-grams-of-protein meal plans.

If there is one column where the comparison is not close, this is it.

Both grinds of ground beef sit at 3.3 to 3.8 milligrams of sodium per gram of protein. Every plant patty in the comparison falls between 14.8 and 43.3. That is a four-fold to thirteen-fold difference, and it holds no matter how you slice the patties, because the ratio is immune to the size problem.

The reason is structural rather than sinister. Plain ground beef is essentially unsalted — 66 milligrams of sodium per 100 grams, which is just what is naturally in the meat. Every plant patty is a seasoned, formulated product where salt is part of the recipe rather than something you add at the stove. You are comparing an ingredient against a finished dish.

That advantage does evaporate the moment you buy beef that has been seasoned for you. A pre-seasoned supermarket beef patty was recorded at 430 milligrams of sodium per four ounces against 75 for plain grind — which puts seasoned beef patties squarely in plant-patty territory. Beef's sodium advantage is real, but it belongs to plain ground meat specifically.

The Patties the Guardrail Eliminates

Now for the part that runs against instinct.

Four patties sit above the 25-milligram line, and they are the four most vegetable-forward products in the set: Dr. Praeger's California Veggie at 43.3, Actual Veggies Black Bean at 40.0, MorningStar Garden Veggie at 30.0, and Dr. Praeger's All American Drive-Thru at 26.0.

Look closely at what is happening there, because it is not what it appears to be. Dr. Praeger's California Veggie carries only 260 milligrams of sodium — less than a Beyond Burger, less than most of the beefy patties. Its problem is the other half of the fraction. With just 6 grams of protein in the patty, there is very little protein to carry that salt, and the ratio blows out. The patties that read as least processed and most wholesome are the ones this column eliminates, and being vegetable-based is precisely what causes it.

Saturated fat is the axis plant patties are marketed hardest on, and it is the axis where two of them lose outright to the fattiest common beef grind.

Ground beef at 80/20 carries 0.44 grams of saturated fat per gram of protein. Gardein Ultimate, by the brand's own published figures, carries 0.53. Impossible Indulgent carries 0.77 — roughly double the beef. Neither of those is a marginal difference, and neither is what the category's marketing would lead you to expect.

The reversal gets broader when you compare against the leaner grind. Ground beef at 90/10 comes in at 0.197 grams of saturated fat per gram of protein, which beats Impossible Burger Patties at 0.316, Beyond Stack Burger at 0.250, Gardein Ultimate and Impossible Indulgent. Against lean beef, a good share of the plant set loses on its own headline axis.

This is exactly why the answer has to be conditional, and why both beef comparisons are printed. Swapping a plant patty for 80/20 beef and swapping one for 90/10 are different decisions with different answers, and which one you are actually making depends on the tray you would otherwise have bought. Our look at the saturated fat gap between popular beef cuts covers how much room there is on the beef side alone.

Two things are worth saying plainly. The strongest performers here are genuinely strong: Dr. Praeger's Perfect Burger at 0.050 grams per gram of protein is roughly one-ninth of 80/20 beef, and the current Beyond Burger at 0.095 is not far behind. And the packaging claims check out — the Beyond package states "75% less saturated fat than 80/20 ground beef," citing 8 grams per 4 ounces for the beef, against the 8.6 grams that USDA data gives for a 113-gram raw patty. Checking a brand claim usually turns up something; this one holds.

One honest wrinkle on Gardein: the brand's own FAQ lists 10 grams of saturated fat and 19 grams of protein, while CSPI's independent table reads 9 and 20. The ratio comes out at 0.53 or 0.45 depending on which you take. Both exceed 80/20 beef's 0.44, so the finding survives either way — but the disagreement is real and worth knowing about.

Everything above is measured raw, the way you buy it. What you eat is a different object, and the difference is not small.

Because protein survives cooking while water and fat do not, you can derive a cooking yield directly from USDA's own paired records. Raw 80/20 ground beef holds 17.2 grams of protein per 100 grams; pan-broiled, the same beef holds 24.0 grams per 100 grams. The protein did not increase — the patty shrank around it. That ratio gives a yield of 71.7 percent. For 90/10, the equivalent calculation gives 79.4 percent.

That derivation lines up closely with the published USDA Table of Cooking Yields for Meat and Poultry, which gives 75.2 percent for ground beef patties at 12 to 22 percent fat when broiled, and 70.0 percent for patties above 22 percent fat when pan-broiled. Notice that USDA's lowest published band starts at 12 percent fat, which means a 90/10 grind sits below every published row and has no yield of its own — the paired-record derivation is the only route to it.

Two limits belong on this section. No patties were weighed for this article; these are published and derived figures, not a first-party kitchen experiment. And plant patties do not appear in USDA's yield table at all, so there is no comparable as-eaten column for them here. What the beef numbers do establish is the direction: the fattier the grind, the more of it disappears, which is why the quarter-pounder you shaped never looks like a quarter-pounder on the plate.

Reassuringly, none of this touches the protein column. A 113-gram raw 80/20 patty delivers 19.4 grams of protein whether you weigh it before or after cooking. The patty gets smaller; the protein stays.

Cooking loss shows up in almost every protein-per-dollar question, which is why we ran the same treatment on batch-cooked chicken against deli meat.

Intellectual honesty requires flagging that the peer-reviewed literature reaches a different conclusion on the cost question than our table does.

A 2026 analysis in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis found that plant-based patties had a higher cost per gram of protein than the meat products it tested, describing them as a more costly protein source. That is the opposite of what we found for the two MorningStar products.

The likely explanation is the sample rather than the arithmetic. That study compared five generic formulations — 100 percent beef, a beef-soy blend, pea protein, soy protein and mushroom-based — rather than the branded American retail set you actually face in a freezer aisle, and it was not pricing a Wegmans shelf in September 2026. Two studies can both be right about different things. We are not claiming the paper is wrong; we are reporting that the branded US shelf, normalized and priced on one date, does not behave the way the generic formulations did.

If the bigger question behind your freezer-aisle decision is about eating patterns rather than patties, our review of what the longevity data says about vegetarians, pescatarians and meat-eaters is the wider frame.

The same research raises a caveat that genuinely cuts against the plant patties, and it deserves its place here. Protein quality indices confirmed better amino acid profiles in the meat-containing products, with the plant analogues lower in certain essential amino acids including threonine and arginine. A gram of plant protein and a gram of beef protein are not perfectly interchangeable units, which means every per-gram column in this article is a useful simplification rather than a complete one. The same paper also found plant products showed more favorable polyunsaturated-to-saturated fat ratios, so the trade runs in both directions.

There is no single winner here, and any article that hands you one is hiding a column.

If protein per dollar is what you are optimizing, the answer is one of the two MorningStar soy patties, which beat both grinds of beef outright — with the caveat that Grillers Original is vegetarian rather than vegan, and that a single patty gives you 16 grams of protein, not the normalized 28.

If you want the lowest sodium per gram of protein available, plain ground beef wins by a margin nothing in the plant set approaches, and it is not close. That advantage belongs to plain grind only; season it yourself and you control where it lands.

If saturated fat is the axis you care about, the picture reverses. Dr. Praeger's Perfect Burger and the current Beyond Burger sit at a small fraction of 80/20 beef, while Gardein Ultimate and Impossible Indulgent sit above it.

And if you want one patty that is near the front on all three axes at once, the numbers point at the Beyond Burger six-count bag: 10.3 cents per gram of protein, 14.8 milligrams of sodium per gram, 0.095 grams of saturated fat per gram. It still costs about 27 percent more per gram of protein than 80/20 ground beef. That is a considered trade rather than a free one, and now you can see exactly what you are trading.

The broader point is the one the table makes on its own. The swap is not the single decision it is marketed as. Price, sodium and saturated fat point in different directions, the product you pick matters more than the category you pick, and the box size sometimes matters more than either. If this way of shopping appeals to you, our cost-and-nutrition showdown on cottage cheese, Greek yogurt and skyr runs the same method on the dairy case.