Beyond Meat Says Being Attacked Has Just Made It Stronger

In 2019, the future of vegan meat looked rosy. Beyond Meat was on the verge of going public and the media could not get enough of juicy, bleeding, plant-based burgers that would make lentil pucks a thing of the past and convince a whole generation of meat-eaters to try vegan fare. Things were so good that a few attack ads warning consumers that the ingredients and processing involved in making plant-based burgers was something to be afraid of didn’t seem worth making a fuss about.

In retrospect, that may have been a mistake, says Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown. In the intervening years, enthusiasm for vegan meat peaked then waned—with Beyond Meat’s share price taking a hammering in the process. Now Brown is answering those attack ads head on—switching up the ingredients to make a healthier Beyond burger and launching new sausages that lean into the whole vegetable aspect of plant-based meat.

But are tweaked recipes enough to turn around the fate of vegan meats? WIRED spoke with Brown about the industry’s troubles, wrestling with pigs, and why he thinks RFK Jr. should be a natural ally of meatless meats.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

WIRED: Since the pandemic, the mood in the plant-based industry has changed a lot. From the outside, it seems like there is less enthusiasm, less optimism, fewer sales. How has it felt on the inside?

Ethan Brown: To help me to understand how to get through all of this, and move through it, I really have looked through some of the literature on disruption. And it’s interesting to see how neatly our journey fits into some of that literature.

One framework that’s very well known is the Gartner Hype Cycle, and that’s actually what we’re going through. As well as Crossing the Chasm. Both of those fit what’s going on with Beyond Meat. And then also historically, there are good examples of this type of phenomenon, whether it’s alternative energy, or the advent of mechanized ice. Have you seen this analogy that folks have used for plant-based meat and mechanized ice?

I read a great piece on that. It’s fascinating.

It’s exactly the right idea. This is the stuff of pioneers, It’s the stuff of disruptors, and we thought we were going to skirt it. We thought we were going to leap right from niche to mainstream in 2019 and we didn’t. We had a precipitous fall.

We had a period that was longer than I would have liked in the trough. And then we began to emerge from that and go up what in hype cycle literature is called the slope of enlightenment, and I think we’re right at the base of the slope of enlightenment now.

Beyond is widely seen as a bellwether for the plant-based industry as a whole. I suppose that’s because it is one of the few publicly listed companies in this space, Oatly being another notable example. It often seems that Beyond’s performance—and stock price—is used as a stand-in for the entire sector.

We absolutely do represent the industry as a whole, and lead it. We’re the largest stand-alone plant-based meat company in the world. Is it fun? No. Is it worth it? Yes.

It’s disruptive stuff. It’s challenging. It definitely makes you stronger, it really does because it is so all-consuming to be at the center of a lot of focus that is not necessarily geared towards your best interest. So it can either break you or make you stronger, and we really faced a choice where we said “Are we going to explain that this isn’t fair?” Or are we going to do something about it? And we absolutely decided to do something about it.

When Beyond went public in 2019, you had this line in the letter included in the IPO prospectus. You wrote: “We see no material obstacles to a perfect build of meat from plants. With each advance, I believe the market for our products will increase, and our sales will grow.” That really encapsulates a mindset back in 2019, where plant-based meat felt like a technological problem to be solved—make a product that’s close enough to meat, and people will buy it, no problem. I wonder if plant-based meat today feels like more than just a technological challenge—you have to deal with things beyond the product. It’s not just about meatiness anymore.

I think that’s right. I think that what we viewed—and should be viewed—as inherently good, was characterized differently.

So when we talk about that perfect build of meat from plants, we’re talking not just about the sensory experience and nutritional benefits. But there is an elegant simplicity throughout our entire process which really does have goodness in it. And we knew that and we were excited about offering that to the world.

We knew there was going to be these attacks against us, but we didn’t know they’d be so effective. They did a really good job. Demonizing and characterizing what is ultimately a very good process into something that they felt they could get consumers to fear and have doubt around.

You’re a vegan for ethical reasons, right?

Right.

I cover this space a bunch, and that is the bit that founders don’t like to talk about much. Even though a lot of them are motivated by the same reasons—that motivation sometimes gets lost.

The world changed with the publication of [Charles Darwin’s] The Origin of Species. We were given an understanding of our relationship with the rest of life on Earth that you can’t unsee once you see it. That is that we’re all from the same origin of life, we share the same central nervous systems and the ability to feel pain and pleasure, all these things.

If you read it, you can’t view the world the same way again. It is what motivated me every day, as well as human health and climate. And it allows me to get through these things. When you’re called to do something, the obstacles diminish in size.

What do you mean by “called”?

When I was beginning my career, I faced a series of questions from my own father about how I wanted to spend my career. It came back to the concept of contribution, and from a professional perspective it really centered on climate. In creating meat directly from plants, I found something where simultaneously you could address the human health issue, climate, and then these ethical concerns.

What did your father think of that?

He’s a philosopher, so he liked it.

Does he eat meat?

Very little. Extremely little.

What does he think about Beyond?

He loves it.

Well, he’s biased.

He’s very sweet about it. He wears a pin that we have and stuff like that, and gives them out to people, and it’s very cute.

The reason I asked the ethics question is that a couple of months ago I hosted a panel about cultivated meat. And one of the CEOs on that panel was saying that they see the conventional meat industry as a partner and don’t see their own aim as displacing meat consumption. But if you look at who is pushing bans for cultivated meat, or running attack ads against plant-based meat, there are elements of the meat industry that certainly aren’t acting like partners.

It’s a fair observation. There are three things in our case. One is the ability to win—you always want to pick fights you think you can win, and that’s a very big industry, so where you spend your energy is important.

Second, we have a farm in my family that I spent a lot of time on and we had animals there ourselves so you get to know the families involved in animal agriculture, and they’re really good people, a lot of them. So I’ve always been sensitive to an us-versus-them dialogue.

The third reason is we just have to stay focused on things that are positive about our brand and not get drawn into a fight. There’s this phrase: If you wrestle with a pig, you get a lot of mud. And I have a pig, so I know that to be the case.

How often do you wrestle with it?

It’s more cuddling than wrestling.

OK. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. If someone tackles you to the ground, you’re wrestling. You’ve alluded to these attack ads against plant-based meat. At a certain point that fight is coming to you, and you have to choose how to respond.

Yeah. I think we did something important a few years ago, when the attacks were extremely intense then. We just said we’re going to look inwards, and we believe our argument on the environment front is truly unassailable.

On the health side, there were routes in for people who wanted to criticize us. So we said, “How do we create a product—a platform—that is unassailable from a health perspective?”

One of the first things we did was build a coalition of leading doctors, nutritionists, and registered dieticians. We had this program with Stanford and we were showing these great results. But incredible results didn’t matter in all of the misinformation. It just didn’t register.

What we decided to do was to try to make the health benefits, relative to animal protein, absolute. That’s when we started to incorporate heart-healthy avocado oil. It’s when we started to blend in red lentils, brown rice, fava beans. It’s when we started to reduce the ingredient list.

We wanted to force the question that if you really believe this is a processed food, I want you to identify what’s bad about it.

You could reformulate your products endlessly and still never convince the people who run attack ads against you that Beyond burgers are healthy. If you let them dictate the terms of the conversation, aren’t you setting yourself a really difficult task?

It’s not a deviation in our roadmap. It’s an acceleration. We have an opportunity to build a perfect piece of meat, creating something that tastes great and is really good for your body. Ten years from now Beyond Meat will have things in it that are not only about keeping the bad stuff out, but are going to help you from a nutrition perspective, cognitively, physically.

But today it was really just about knowing we could continue to improve the health profile of our products. And to me that’s what’s intuitively fascinating about this, that if you’re being criticized for something and your response is to simply get stronger, that’s hard to beat.

In 2019, the Center for Consumer Freedom, which has a record of supporting the animal agriculture industry, ran full-page ads attacking plant-based meat in The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and so on. Presumably you must have had quite a personal response to them.

You know, I didn’t. I guess the one thing is I should have taken them much more seriously sooner. But we were doing so well at the time. And second, I knew where it was coming from and who was doing it. I almost had respect for how well they were doing.

Do you think they’re still doing a good job?

I do. I think they’ve changed the narrative. I think they’ve taken something that was a threat to them and they’ve characterized it in a way that’s negative. And I think that people believe it, so I think it was effective. Yeah.

I’m in the UK, where the McPlant burger, with a Beyond patty, has been available for a couple of years at McDonald’s. How come it was discontinued in the US?

Uhh. [Pauses.]

Without specifically commenting on McDonald’s—which I really don’t want to do—think about the structure of the United States. You have [Michigan], you have South Carolina and Tennessee as the automotive industry, right? Those three states, plus a few more, can be really powerful in Washington, DC.

Now imagine having a lobby that is in almost every state. The ag industry lobby, right? The animal protein lobby. They have such a hold on Washington. So we’re going to have a different environment here in the United States in terms of ability to communicate directly with the consumer. In general, we tend to do better with the consumer in Europe than we do in the United States.

Speaking of Washington, RFK Jr. is Trump’s candidate for Secretary of Health and Human Services. He is pretty against processed foods. How does Beyond fit into a Make America Healthy Again agenda?

Honestly, it should be at the forefront, and a couple things actually excite me about some of the viewpoints that I’m hearing.

First, you know the Nova system? That happened to include plant-based meat in the category of processed foods. That’s not happening from the Sermon on the Mount or something, it’s just a group of people putting a characterization together. And we don’t belong in that party. We don’t wanna be there. We are a food that goes through a series of steps to get to an outcome, but it’s a better process than the one people are experiencing when they consume factory-farmed meat.

If you look at the benefits to the human body and the environment, it’s a strong win. My belief is we can get that distinction across to this administration.

The second piece is something that was earlier in Kennedy’s career, the concept of restoring nature. Our ability to enable the rewilding of a significant percentage of the global landscape is unmatched. The one statistic you should pay attention to is the 93 percent less land used in the creation of our products than animal protein. You can use that land, so not only are you taking methane out, but you can use the remaining land to rewild and take carbon out of the atmosphere.

Have you reached out to RFK Jr.?

Not yet, but I expect to.