Front Burner - What’s the big deal about Beyond Meat?

Episode Date: July 29, 2019

Beyond Meat, the popular meat substitute, can be found in at A&W, Tim Hortons, and most grocery stores these days. The company’s stock is at an all-time high. Today on Front Burner, writer Michael Grunwald analyzes why that is, how it relates to the climate crisis, and how all of this is inspiring pushback from industry and politicians alike.

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With secret labs and expert guests, co-hosts Oz Wallachian and Cara Price, talk about how new technology is changing everything, from falling in love to diagnosing cancer. Listen to Sleepwalkers on your favorite podcast app or wherever you get FrontBurner. Hi, I'm Chris Berube sitting in for Jamie Poisson. So last year, Beyond Meat launched in Canada. It's a fake meat or a meat substitute. I actually don't totally know what to call it.

Anyhow, it hit big right away. In the first three days, A&W sold 90,000 meatless burgers. So I came in to order. I wonder if they're better than meat burgers or Beyond Meat burgers. And they don't have any left. And I'm heartbroken about it. A&W can put you on a mailing list so they can let you know when and where better than Meat Burgers or Beyond Meat Burgers, and they don't have any left, and I'm heartbroken about it. A&W can put you on a mailing list so they can let you know when and where you'll finally be able to get one.

That excitement has kept growing. You can now buy Beyond Meat products in Tim Hortons and Dunkin' Donuts and most grocery stores. And Beyond Meat's popular competitor, the Impossible Burger, is available at every Burger King in North America. So we've had veggie burgers pretty much forever. Why are these hitting right now? Today, we're going to talk about Beyond Meat, the climate crisis, and the political pushback from the right wing. Michael Grunwald is a senior writer at

Politico magazine, and he's writing a book about food and climate change. He's going to join us today. This is FrontBurger. Michael, welcome to the show. Michael O'Brien Well, thanks so much for having me, Chris. So we've had veggie burgers forever. Why is the Beyond Meat burger hitting so big right now? Michael O'Brien Well, Beyond Meat is one of those sort of overnight successes that's been 10 years in the making. The company started in 2009. And the idea was that veggie burgers are mostly pretty lame. They taste and look like hockey pucks or cup holders. But that meat is really just proteins and lipids and water and minerals, and that it's basically stuff that you can find

in plants. And you can realign those so they mimic the fiber structure of meat or animal protein in a way that's indistinguishable. And that they could, using science, essentially biomimic what's in animal-made meat and create this plant-based meat that really could not only taste better, but could really feel and chew like meat, even bleed like meat. I think as Justice Potter said about indecency, I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it. That's meat. There's something that is so ingrained in our psyche that when you bite into a piece of meat, you know, okay, this has that tear and that structure that is animal protein. These guys have been working for a long time to get it right. I mean, it was, I think,

five years ago that Bill Gates tasted some of the Beyond Meat's first chicken product and said like, oh, this is the future of food. Well, at this point, Beyond Meat has still lost confidence in that chicken product that they pulled it off the shelves. They don't think it's good enough. But the Beyond Burger, Beyond Burger's pretty decent. For A&W, it's been a runaway success and already out of stock just about everywhere. We didn't know just how popular it was going to be. We loved it ourselves.

I describe it as a bit of love at first bite when I was able to taste the Beyond Meat patty for the first time. It's funny you mention Bill Gates because I feel like part of the sell on this has been celebrity hype because Bill Gates has become a big advocate for this. Snoop Dogg has been. Tomorrow is Beyond Day. We want everybody in, have become spokespeople for Beyond Meat. How much of that is part of the appeal? where I've been. How much of that is part of the appeal? You know, when I was at Beyond headquarters a couple of weeks ago, I was in the waiting room and Chris Paul walked in. So Chris Paul, the player for the Oklahoma City Thunder. What I put in my body matters now more than ever. Yeah, so there you go. And he met the CEO and they had this funny moment where Chris Paul looked at

him and Ethan Brown is actually taller than Chris Paul and Chris Paul was kind of annoyed about that. He was like, you're not supposed to be this tall. But yeah, they, you know, Beyond Meat hired the guy who was the architect of the Got Milk campaign for dairy to come in and really try to brand Beyond Meat as a sort of delicious, but also sort of, you know, kind of something that athletes and performers consider helpful to their performance. But ultimately, I think they will admit that it's going to come down to, is the taste right? Do people care about this stuff? And is the price at a competitive price point where, you know, you're not paying a lot more for the essentially

what they're marketing as the same product. So what actually goes into these? Because I was looking at the Beyond Meat website, it says the primary ingredient is like a pea protein extract. And one of their competitors, the Impossible Burger, they use something called heme. I don't know what heme is. Like what is in these things? Well, the short answer is plants. All right. This pea protein is that's the right now the main special sauce in the Beyond Burger. And that is essentially it's a yellow pea crop that's grown, actually, a lot of it is grown in Canada, that they then process into the sort of, you know, the patty

that you can buy in the supermarket. And again, it's a processed food. So this is not a whole food. It's not kale. And it's not really health food. But they're essentially biomimicking what you'll find in animal-based meat. The Impossible Burger is a little different. As you mentioned, its sort of special sauce is heme, which is, again, it's a plant protein. But they grow it using a genetically modified yeast that sort of then produces the protein. And that's what they say gives it the kind of bite and the chew and the color. It's highly abundant in animal muscle tissue. And if you were to eat meat raw, that bloody flavor that you get, that's heme.

But again, this is all coming from plants. These companies will point out is that, yes, this is processed food, but the meat that you eat every day is also a process. What these companies are doing is sort of skipping the cow. So I want to talk about the two benefits that I feel like people talk about when they are advocating for Beyond Meat. And one of them is the health benefit of eating less red meat, eating less beef. How much beef are people eating in North America right now, typically? Oh, gosh, it's crazy. And we're eating less beef than we did. There's been a huge rise in chicken, but we're still eating an average of three burgers a week, which is a lot of red meat. And remember, globally, as countries, particularly India and

China, start to have a much larger middle class, the first thing people do when they reach the middle class is they start to eat more meat. Public health experts right now are saying that it's not real great for us. It's linked to cancers, it's linked to heart disease, that essentially, at least in the developed world, we're eating too much red meat. That said, as I mentioned, like a Beyond Burger or an Impossible Burger is not health food. It's highly processed. Beyond Meat makes broad claims like improving human health. It states the increased cancer and heart disease risk associated with eating processed meat,

but offers no evidence backing up their own products. It's funny, red meat, it doesn't really agree with me. And just yesterday, I made Beyond Burgers for me and my kids, and I had that same sort of not so fresh feeling. It really does an excellent job of mimicking meat in every way. On the health side, the one thing is there's no cholesterol and there's much less saturated fats. But again, you don't want to go on a beyond burger diet because you're not going to get skinny. Ben Boyer, I'm an assistant professor in the food science department here at the University of Guelph. From a macronutrient standpoint, so if we think of our macronutrients being protein, carbohydrates, and fat, they're very similar in terms of their content of those three

things. The Beyond Burger would contain much more sodium than what a traditional beef burger would before the beef burger's been prepared. And I would say after you've added those seasonings and spices, we're probably at fairly comparable levels. So the second benefit that people really tout when they're talking about Beyond Meat is the climate benefit. How much is beef production actually contributing to the climate crisis? Red meat contributes to the climate problem in two ways. One is through methane, which is a greenhouse gas, which is way more potent than carbon. And you've probably heard about the cow farts. It's actually mostly cow burps.

Oh, is that right? People have the wrong end of the cow that they've been pointing fingers at. But it is a problem. And these cows, they spend a lot of time burping because it takes a long time to grow a cow from calf to meat. And they emit a lot of methane, and that's a problem. But the even worse problem is the land problem. It takes about 20 times as much land to grow a unit of beef protein as it takes to grow a unit of plant protein. And when you're using land to grow beef, that's land that's coming out of either wetlands or the forest. Institute has shown that if the population continues to grow at the current rate, which they're talking about more than 9 billion people on Earth by 2050, and meat consumption continues

to grow at the same rate, we're going to have to deforest about two additional Indias worth of land. And that would really be game over for the climate. Is there a way to farm beef more sustainably? Like, is it that we're just doing it in a really inefficient way? Or is it just part and just doing it in a really inefficient way? Or is it just part and parcel of growing cows? You need a lot of land, you need a lot of food to give to the cows? The answer is yes, we can do it more efficiently. And probably yes, beef is never going to be truly efficient. The more food you grow on the smaller with the fewer amount of resources, which is the kind of thing that sort of precision agriculture can do with these, you know, high tech devices and incredible nutritionists that does make it more efficient.

But that said, you're still running the plants through a cow. I talked to one guy, one guy in this business who was like, look, cows do all kinds of cow things that take energy. They walk around, they eat grass, they moo. So ultimately, there's a limit to how efficient the meat produced by these animals is ever going to be. So I feel like a lot of the coverage around Beyond Meat, around Impossible Burgers, around this, you know, replacement meat stuff tends to be really positive. Like it's saying, you know, there's all these climate benefits. It's healthier for you. But there has been a lot of pushback. And some of that pushback has been coming from cattle farmers.

So, like, what has their response been to this movement? Well, look, I think, you know, initially, they sort of blew it off. And now it's becoming a thing. So they're starting to pay attention. You look at the dairy industry, where sort of alternative non-dairy milks are now 13% of the market, right? So these almond milks and oat milks and soy milks are really cutting into the dairy business. In fact, milk consumption has fallen nearly 40 percent since 1975. Analysts say a big reason behind the shift is Americans growing more aware of milk allergies and intolerances. I mean, that's a real problem because these businesses run on the margins. So now you're starting to see a real pushback against this fake meat.

And a bunch of states are either passing or trying to pass laws that would essentially stop the beyonds and impossibles of the world as advertising their products as meat. You know, this is something they're not happy about. There was a one one guy at the Missouri Farm Bureau, actually, when the impossible whopper came to St. Louis, he went and tried one and wrote a blog post saying, like, guys, look out, this stuff is really good. We need to take it seriously. Of course, he was, you know, he was just dumped on throughout the industry, like, as you know, how dare you, this is treason. dumped on throughout the industry like is, you know, how dare you? This is treason. Look, I think realistically, people are going to be eating animal based meat for a very long time, but they see a threat to their business. There's no question about that. Beyond meats there, you know, that that IPO was the biggest IPO since the financial crisis. The beyond meat phenomenon is continuing as the stock soars a whopping 200 percent since its IPO earlier this month. But are investors too hungry for this?

And Impossible Burgers being in Burger King is really just the latest sign that this stuff is going mainstream. It's still right now less than one percent of the meat industry. But the growth rate is just spectacular compared to the to the growth rate for regular meat, which is modest, and for beef, which is really not at all. Should they be allowed to call it meat? This actually is something I've been wrestling with because it's not, right? But all the alternative terms like meat substitutes, replacement protein pack, there's no good way to describe it that doesn't use the word meat or no appealing way to describe it that doesn't use the word meat. Well, I think it's an interesting question. You say that it's not meat, but I wonder why you say that. I mean, I guess it comes down to what is meat. The guys running these companies would say, well, meat is a, you know, if you look at it under a microscope, it's a combination of proteins and lipids and amino acids and fats and, you know, with some

minerals scattered in there. And we have reproduced it. You know, this is meat. It's plant-based meat, but it's meat. Ultimately, you know, these kind of marketing questions are important, but ultimately it's going to come down to whether people like it and want to buy it. it's going to come down to whether people like it and want to buy it. But Quebec's cattle producers say animal-free products shouldn't be labeled as meat. You can't put this, squeeze it, and make a patty and call it meat. The Federation says it has filed a complaint with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, saying it should enforce its own definition of what meat is. The definition of meat is product derived of animal carcass.

It's not a plant-based meat. That doesn't fit into the definition. So as Beyond Meat is on the rise, you know, more people are buying it, people seem to like it, As Beyond Meat is on the rise, you know, more people are buying it. People seem to like it. It's also become really politicized. So tell me how Beyond Meat got caught up in the Green New Deal conversation in the States. Well, I think part of this is that at least in the U.S., I don't know your politics as well in Canada, but sort of everything has become politicized. It's kind of everywhere, though, Michael. Well, certainly in the last, you know, 10 years, sort of America's culture war has really taken over American politics, take the climate issue, which is really, it's gone beyond facts at this point. It's essentially, there's one side that wants to talk about climate change and science, and the other side who's just saying, oh, well, that's just, you know, kind of liberal lefties,

tree huggers. The people who hate real America are the same people who hate real beef. They want to take your pickup truck. They want to rebuild your home. They want to take away your hamburgers. This is what Stalin dreamt about, but never achieved. And certainly when the Green New Deal came out, which is, you know, was put out by some real lefties, most notably AOC, who has become a real sort of target for the right. That's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Today is the day that we truly embark on a comprehensive agenda of economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America. So when the Green New Deal came out and and really took on meat production as a climate problem,

the right has really seized on that as a symbol for how basically trying to do anything about climate change means getting rid of all cows and getting rid of all burgers. And you hate Americans and you're going to try to stop them from going to Burger King. And to be clear, it doesn't there's no ban on meat in the Green New Deal. It is just a suggestion that part of getting the emissions reduction to occur would involve eating less meat. Like that might be part of the solution. It's not to say we're going to force everybody to go vegan or anything crazy like that. But it's to say, listen, we've got to address factory farming. Maybe we shouldn't be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Like, let's keep it real.

That's right. And in fact, it actually talked about incentives for farmers to sort of store more carbon in their fields and produce meat more efficiently. But again, right now, the Green New Deal is really just a symbol. It's a plan to have a plan. And for President Trump, who has said he plans to run against the Green New Deal. How do you take a train to Europe? You have to spend $100 trillion. And remember this, no other country except us is going to do it. That's a little problem, too. And, you know, right-wingers in Congress who held press conferences

as they chomped on burgers and, you know, and said sort of take that, AOC. You know, they love this as a sort of cultural symbol because if, you know, if the election came down to, you know, and said sort of take that AOC. You know, they love this as a sort of cultural symbol, because if, you know, if the election came down to, you know, people who like beef versus people who don't, the beef eaters are going to win because beef is delicious. And very popular. And when you say Republicans who are doing press conferences and chomping on burgers, like that's not a metaphor. Like there is a Republican congressman named Rob Bishop who did a press conference talking about the Green New Deal and ate a burger on stage as kind of an act of defiance. So since they still in this Green New Deal want to control my life,

let me go to President Obama's favorite place and realize that if this goes through, his favorite place and realize that if this goes through, this will be outlawed. Yeah, it was like he was some kind of freedom fighter. And of course, the irony is that Ethan Brown, the CEO of Beyond Meat, Pat Brown, No Relation, the CEO of Impossible Foods, these guys are both vegans, but their whole business model is all about meat eaters. And in fact, Beyond did a they did a study where they kind of watched people in the supermarkets where their products are being sold. And they found that 93 percent of the consumers who are buying Beyond Meat are also buying meat products in their same shopping cart. shopping cart. So you've been writing a book about food and climate change. How has that actually been changing your own eating habits? Yeah, it's a great question. Because, you know,

I have, you know, I have solar panels, I have an electric car, you know, I like to think myself as very smug and green. You've become that guy. I'm a little bit that guy. Although, again, I looked into solar 10 years ago and it made no sense. So I didn't do it. So I'm not I'm not quite, you know, I'm not quite as good for the earth as I'd like to be. You know, realistically, I'm still a hypocrite. I'm still going to eat meat. But I've almost entirely cut out red meat.

Again, not 100 percent because I'm a fallen human being like the rest of us. And I freaking love this stuff. But I'm trying to eat less. And I think that's true of a lot of consumers who are not necessarily going to become vegans and are not necessarily going to become climate activists, but are going to try to eat a little better and try and live their lives a little bit less antagonistically towards the planet. Michael Grunwald, it's been great talking to you. Thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it, Chris. OK, some other news for you. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was in Canada on Sunday with a group of diabetes patients.

Sanders was here to highlight how hard it is for many Americans to access affordable medicine and to promote the idea of importing cheaper insulin and other pharmaceuticals from Canada. Look, at the end of the day, at the end of the day, it is an embarrassment for those of us who are Americans. We love our Canadian neighbors and we thank them so much. But we should not have to come to Canada to get the medicine we need for our kids to stay alive. We can do that in America. A number of Democrats running for president want to import Canadian drugs to the U.S. as a way of lowering drug costs, because right now it's illegal. But there's opposition to the plan here. Critics say Canada is already experiencing drug shortages, and that making imports legal could make the whole problem much worse and actually increase the cost of drugs for Canadians. increase the cost of drugs for Canadians.

Jamie Poisson is back tomorrow. I'm Chris Berube. Thanks a lot for listening to FrontBurner. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe.

As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.