Not meat. It’s Beyond Meat.

If you love eating meat, but are also an environmentalist, Beyond Meat could be the answer to your dilemma. Founded by Ethan Brown, in 2009, Beyond Meat is a California-based producer of plant-based meat substitutes. What they are trying to achieve is quite simple in theory, but is much harder to execute. The company has recently come into the limelight, thanks to their meatless burger, which tastes like meat, chews like meat, smells like meat and even looks like meat, but is not meat. They are using a myriad of natural ingredients and plant-based protein to achieve this extraordinary feat.

According to their mission statement,

“At Beyond Meat, we believe there is a better way to feed the planet. Our mission is to create The Future of Protein® — delicious plant-based burgers, sausage, crumbles, and more — made directly from simple plant-based ingredients. By shifting from animal to plant-based meat, we are creating one savoury solution that solves four growing issues attributed to livestock production: human health, climate change, constraints on natural resources and animal welfare.”

Pretty straight forward, isn’t it?

They want to change the way people consume meat. In fact, they want to replace the meat in our food, with their vegan meat-like products.

How are they doing this?

Although their product happens to be food, Beyond Meat is in fact, a tech company. They deploy super hi-tech processes and technologies to make their meatless products possible. It is not as simple as using pea protein, mung beans and brown rice to make a meatless patty which tastes, feels and looks exactly like meat. There has to be more to it than that, and there is. Let’s explore the different processes that their product goes through, before coming together to be the perfect final product that consumers buy.

• Analytics Lab: Their analytics lab specifically measures how much chew the patty possesses, using a texture analyser. Of course, they rigged a highly specialised machine to do just that for them! This is necessary to maintain the same consistency and chew as that of a regular meat patty.
• Colour Lab: This lab ensures that everything they are making doesn’t just taste good, but also looks appetising. It’s noteworthy that they strictly refrain from using any sort of genetically modified organisms (GMO), so whatever aesthetic upgrades they give their product in this colour lab, are all natural. They extract pigments from fruits, vegetables, and edible flowers and use them as ingredients for their patty. As a matter of fact, they have a small bench-top machine that makes beet powder using actual beetroot, in a matter of minutes.
• Test Kitchen: This is where they try out their final product for tasting and appearance-sampling, before it reaches the plate of the end consumer. For this stage of the process, they don’t just put a patty in a bun. They create a proper meal, complete with all the condiments that go into making a great burger!
• Sensory Lab: This is where they get in real customers to taste their product and give feedback. This is a blind taste test for the consumers. They are served with several samples without being told which sample is what. Based on the customer’s feedback, further steps are taken to refine the product.

What else is out there?

Right now, there are only two other brands making and selling fake meat products — Impossible Foods and Tyson Foods.

• Impossible Foods: While Beyond Meat prides themselves in being completely free of GMO ingredients, the Impossible Burger is the creation of modern genetic engineering. Impossible Foods was the first company to start making completely meatless burgers. They have been pretty successful so far, even landing a partnership with Burger King, to sell an Impossible version of their most popular offering — the Whopper.
• Tyson Foods: Tyson is new to the game, and only recently launched plant-based protein products, under the brand Raised & Rooted. They have also announced products like chicken nuggets and patties. Tyson’s CEO Noel White also said in an interview, that not all Raised & Rooted products will be wholly meat-free. They plan on launching blended products as well, which will be varying mixtures of pea-protein and beef. They are doing this for people who love meat too much to completely give it up. With these blended products, they will be able to reduce meat consumption, compared to their traditional counterparts.

What does the market say?

Going by the numbers, it looks like Beyond Meat is killing it in the market. When they first went public, their offering price. was $25, and opening trades were at $46 a share. Today, their stock price is a whopping $ 177.11. We can’t say for sure if the consumers are in love with the idea of meatless burgers, but Beyond Meat is surely making their investors happy. Beyond Meat has received investments from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Obvious Corporation, Bill Gates, Biz Stone, the Humane Society, and Tyson Foods.

What’s in store for the future?

Since their first product in 2016, Beyond Meat has sold 25 million burgers around the world. After filing their $100 million IPO in November of 2018, they made it clear that they are in it for the long haul. Founder and CEO, Ethan Brown turned vegan after being a meat lover for a major part of his life. He has always been passionate about the environment and also pursued a career in clean energy. When he realized that livestock had a larger contribution to climate change, in terms of emissions, he decided to do something about it. He targeted the burger industry because it is something that people love. He decided that it’s rather simple to convince people to have what they already love than convincing them to eat plants. Currently, they offer chicken strips, sausages, and beef crumble, apart from their burger patties. They have other products like bacon, steak and more, in the pipeline which will be hitting the market soon. Brown claims that plant-based meat will eventually take over the meat market. Although he is not certain about when that will happen, he believes that it will happen in his lifetime.