How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live Episode! Beyond Meat: Ethan Brown

Episode Date: February 16, 2017

As founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, Ethan Brown believes he can turn peas and lentils into protein that tastes — and feels – exactly like beef and chicken. He says they're not quite there yet, but after 8 years in business, their products are sold in 11,000 stores nationwide. Recorded live in Anaheim, CA. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna,

walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca I would order the stuff out of Taiwan and then I would give myself 60 days to get the money together to actually pay for it once got to the port. So sometimes it's arrived at the port and I would have the money. And then you get charged every day you're in the port and you can't pick it up. Yeah.

So you'd have to make frantic calls. But at the same time, you don't know what you're willing to do, what you're capable of doing, until your backs against the wall. And so I would put myself in that position. Yeah. Because if I didn't, I would never do it. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and today on the show, a special live recording. The story of Beyond Meat, a company that wants to take the chicken and burgers, off your plate, replace them with plants, and do it in a way where you will never know the difference. So today's show is a little different from the others. It's the story of a startup that is still in many ways a startup. The company Beyond Meat has not yet turned a profit and its CEO and founder Ethan Brown, definitely not a billionaire, at least not yet, but he is part of a movement that if it takes off could completely transform the way we think about food. Because think about it, if you are a meat eater, there is nothing more

delicious than a freshly grilled steak or a basket of fried chicken, right? Well, Ethan says you can have all of that, but the meat doesn't have to come from a cow or a chicken. It can actually come from plants, from peas and lentils and stuff like that. But here's a thing. It won't tastes like a pathetic vegetarian substitute. Ethan says that at some point in the future, maybe sooner than you think, meat eaters will not be able to tell the difference between animal meat and plant meat. And to find out how Ethan is trying to make that happen, I sat down with him in front of a live audience in Anaheim, California. Here's part of that conversation. Welcome. Thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here. So I want to start by

asking you a little bit about how you grew up because you grew up around farms, around animals, right? Right. So I have an interesting childhood in that I grew up in the city, but my father is a professor and he's at McGill now and he grew up in the country and had a love for the country. It really defines who he is. And so we spent an enormous amount of time in the countryside and he bought a farm very early on. He bought a farm just like a farm where? So we had a couple different ones, but the one that was sort of the dominant

one within my childhood was in Western Maryland. And so it became a Holstein dairy business with about 100 head of Holstein cattle. And so we spent a lot of time there when I was a child. So he was teaching at the university and on like his side hustle was milking cows? Something like that, yeah, his hobbies. So growing up around animals and did you eat the animals when you were a kid? I did. Yeah, I definitely ate a lot of meat. My favorite sandwich was the double R burger from Roy Rogers. Wow, what's that? So it would have ham, and then it would have cheese, and it would have the burger.

Ham cheese burger. Yeah, exactly. And so as I became conscious of what I was doing, though, as sort of an older teenager, I began to think about that, that this is the milk from the cow. It's the cow itself, and then it's a pig, and so it's sort of saying this kind of orgy of different animals. So how did you, when did you start to begin to think about animals differently? We should say, I should clarify, You are today a vegan. You do not eat animal products, right?

Correct, yeah. And you don't even wear animal products. I don't. So these are 35 dollars from Target. Your shoes are faux leather. They are. They are. But early on, I began to think differently about animals. I wanted to be a vet when I was a kid. I would spend time in our attic, for example, at our farm, and I would build large cages for mice.

And I would capture the mice and have a hard traps. And then I'd put them in these cages. And they were very different from the sort of docile mice you get at a pet store. They would fly across the cage, right? And it was, to me, it was this wonderful world, and I loved it, right? And so for me, the experience was about getting to know the animal and celebrate the animal versus wanting to consume it. But it took me a lot of work that out. It was not coherent. You know, I was still eating meat and was still using animal products. But that early inkling about, hey, I feel differently about animals than those around me was when

I was very young. Wow. So you You go to college? Yeah. Did you think that you would be an entrepreneur? I mean, you got an MBA. Was that your sort of vision? I worked, so for a long time I worked in the hydrogen fuel cell sector. This is after you got your MBA?

I was during, yeah, yeah. So I worked there about 10 years. And I was interested in that for reasons of climate. So I was always interested in doing something that was socially oriented. So, yeah, I was in clean tech, basically. So when did you, like, what sort of, led you to start to think about animals, livestock. Right. So it was something that sort of gnawed at me.

It was like it was something that even as I was climbing the kind of corporate ladder within the clean tech space, it just kept coming back to me. It was something that I felt like I had to go do. I mean, it was literally that strong. And so I sat with that for a long time. And I began to think about it not just in terms of my own feelings about animals from being a child, but in terms of our sustainability. That is the number one issue. And today, I still think about it this way. If you think about affecting really difficult problems all at once by changing out the protein

that's end of the plate, it's a pretty powerful idea. So you can affect human health where you have heart disease, diabetes, cancer, all these things that are linked to certain types of meat consumption. With the climate change, you know, it's about 51% of greenhouse gas emissions from last time. From last night. And, I mean, to put it bluntly, we're talking about burps and farts, right? Well, yes, yes, some percent of it is.

But something that's really interesting, this is a way to get your head around it. So we slaughter about 66 billion animals a year. 66 billion around the world. Right. All those animals are breathing. When they breathe, they respire carbon, right? So you have this growing number of livestock, a shrinking number of trees. And so you have a carbon cycle that's out of balance.

And so that's why this livestock issue is so important to focus on. So how did you go from starting to think about livestock and climate change to saying, you know what, I'm going to give up this fuel cell stuff. and like tackle this problem. Right. So it's interesting and I was, in my 20s, in my sort of late 20s, I was thinking about this. And I wanted to create a plant-based McDonald's.

A plant-based McDonald's? Yeah, and I was in a relationship that I wanted to get out of, which I wasn't very good at, getting out of it. Like, I moved and all these other things and tried to end it in a way that wasn't very straightforward. So I was, I went to a therapist, because I was like, I gotta figure out

how to deal with my life, get out of this situation. I'm in. Inevitably, we started talking about a career. And I was like, I really have this feeling I want to go start this plant-based McDonald's. Huh. Did you even know how to cook? Yeah, pretty poorly, yeah. And so I was sitting there saying, I really want to do this.

And he said, oh, you've got to go do it. That's what's in your heart. I was like, yeah, yeah, I know. But I left and I didn't do it. I spent like seven, eight more years, you know, working on clean tech because that's what I was supposed to do, you know? And I had this, I've said this before. I remember seeing and reading of mice and men and looking at life.

Lenny and being like, well, shit, I'm a lot like Lenny. I'm like big. I don't want to be like a guy like just like petting a rabbit, you know. You know, like there goes like sentimental Ethan, you know, like I just like wasn't serious enough for me or something like that. You know, I was, I was afraid to be compassionate, yeah, I think, you know. And so it's funny when I look at guys like Wayne Pacelli from the Humane Society, right, or Gene Bauer from Farm Sanctuary, I really admire them because like so early on they were like this is what I feel is what I'm going to go act on in the world and it took me a while to shed the things that I thought I was supposed to be doing to do this so how did you get the courage to

leave this stable job and start to think about making fake well right yeah yeah yeah so I guess first you know I had very small kids literally just born and this this kind of started to mount where I said I'm going to bring them into this world. And my wife grew up in the country and so we had meat in our house and we're feeding our kids meat. And I was like, I just, this is not how I want to leave this place. You know, I want to make a difference here. And so it started to kind of press on me. And we got these pet pigs that we were, we were kept up at our farm. And they were wonderful. But we'd at the same time, we'd be like on a Jersey Turnpike and the kids would need something

to eat. And my wife would be like, well, let's pull side, let's pull over, go to Subway. So we'd get like something from Subway and they'd get like a ham sandwich. I'm like, I literally could feel this disconnect in my life, right? So I really had to do something here. So it was that personal calling, and then it was sitting in these meetings working on climate through clean tech, I began to feel like we were just not getting the bigger picture. So I'd go to these conferences, and they'd be in big hotels like this, and we'd wring our hands about how do you get percent more efficiency out of a lithium-mine battery?

And then everyone go have steak dinner. And I was like, this just doesn't make sense. let's attack the real problem, right? And that really motivated me. And finally, I just said, I got to go do this. So I started to work at night on it. And this is the great thing about being, you know, an entrepreneur in this time period in history

is that you have the internet. I would come home, kids would go to bed. I would just sit up in our living room. I was living in Capitol Hill at the time. And I would research it. You would like go to Google and type in, like, textured soy protein meat or like? What I was looking,

I was looking for, what I became convinced of is that you don't need an animal to produce a piece of meat. Like that was the core belief that I began to have was that like, I could see that you could get, the meat is really five things. It's amino acids, it's lipids, it's very small amount of carbohydrates. And it's trace minerals, also very, very small, and it's predominantly water. What's interesting about all five of those things is they're not exclusive to the animal. They're all absolutely present in the plant kingdom. So what the animal's a bioreactor, right? They're taking massive amounts of plant matter.

They're running it through their system, and they're creating muscle. Why can't we take plant matter, run it through a system and create muscle? And that's all we're doing. So I began to research who's taking protein from plants and reorganizing it into the structure of muscle. And the guy, two guys at the University of Missouri

were doing that. You just like came across an academic paper? Papers, yeah. So I was doing that, but I was also importing something from Asia that I thought was really good. A soy, texturized piece of soy that I thought was quite close to muscle. And so I was bringing that in from Taiwan through Baltimore and selling it into whole foods in the Mid-Atlantic area. At night or on the side, you started a second sort of a business where you were importing food.

Yeah, it was hilarious too. So I would order the stuff out of Taiwan and then I would give myself 60 days to get the money together to actually pay for it once got to the port. And that always didn't always work. So sometimes it arrive at the port and I would have the money. And then you get charged every day you're in the port and you can't pick it up. Yeah. Right. So you have to make frantic calls.

But the thing about, I think one of the important things is that most things in history are like this, that you don't know what you're going to do, what you're capable of doing until your back's against the wall. And so I would put myself in that position. Yeah. Because if I didn't, I would never do it. You know, so you have to let go of all that safety net and then get yourself in the position and you'll figure a way out. So you read this academic paper by these professors at the University of Missouri, is it right? Did you just call them up and say, hey, you did, you called him up.

What did you said? I did. I did. I introduced myself and I said, can I work with you? He said, yeah, come on out. So I came out there and I started to work in his lab. You just went to his lab and started hanging out there? Yeah.

And what was he doing? He was making plant-based meats. Yeah, he was basically taking proteins that would have been extracted from plants. From what, like soy? In this case, soy, but it could have been corn. It could have been a bunch of other things. And he was using heating, cooling, and pressure to realign them, so they stitched into muscle-like fiber. So you go out there and you meet him, and what's it like?

So I thought it was very good what they were doing, but I didn't think it was ready for market at all. So I called up the University of Maryland, and I said, I've got this technology that I'm working at the University of Missouri with. Can I work with the University of Maryland and improve it? So I got a grant from the state to do that. To continue the research? Yeah, to basically try to get it ready for market. And so I was funding it out of my own pocket, but I also got money from the state of Maryland.

So this was running on just a shoestring budget. Yeah, absolutely. Are you independently wealthy? No. You had to basically... Yeah, I sold my home, I sold my house. It's funny, you set up all these boundaries. I'm never going to touch that bank account.

I'm never going to sell that house, and you break through them all. Wait, so you decided, you said, I'm going to start a business, and I'm going to sell my house. to fund it. You had kids at that point? Yeah. How old were your kids then? They were like super. They were like one and two or something. Did your partner, was she like, this is nuts? Yeah, but she says that about everything I do.

So it was like, and this is what, around 2009? Yeah. And what are you doing for the first few years? You're going back and forth to Missouri from Maryland, experimenting with, and is it good? Is it taste good? Are you eating gross stuff too? Yeah, it was funny, so I would use Southwest to go from BWI to St. Louis, and I would take big duffel bags of this stuff back and forth. And there was a time when one of them busted open and just fell out everywhere on the plane.

It was like this like, just like chicken. And people were like, why are you carrying all this chicken around? Yeah. But I was also, though, importing this product from Asia and selling it to Whole Foods. Right. And I think that also gave me some credibility with the university that I wasn't just sort of dreaming about. something I had a go and concern. It was small, but I was selling into Whole Foods. And I could say very truthfully about Whole Foods that I wouldn't be here without them. Like they help in hand

every chance they get. Here's what I don't get though. You didn't have a background in food. I mean, you were working at a fuel cell company, but you had no training in cooking or food or the food industry. Like, how did you even get Whole Foods to take you seriously? How did you even begin to go to investors and tell them about this idea and why would they have taken you seriously at that point So when I got here the producer of the show asked me is this what you're wearing? Like this is a tough crowd I don't know, you know, no one's really asked me why would I be taking seriously? But you know what I mean like you know you didn't have the paper and pencil credentials

I mean of course No, no no, but this is back then so how did you make the case for what you were doing and how did you how are you able to say I'm the guy to do this? That's a really fair question. I don't know. I mean, I think one thing that I did learn in business school was that, and I think as they were wrong about this, you know, they would always, I took an entrepreneur class in business school, and I can remember that, first of all, they'd always bring back people who are like super young, attractive, and very successful.

Be like, I told this guy to go do this and he did it, and, you know. And I was like, where are the people that are living, you know, in their mom's basement? Eating ramen, right? Yeah, like, you know, are now back to square one. But one of the things that they said was, you know, you have to have a competitive moat around what you're doing. There has to be some barrier to entry for others in order for you to have a successful business. And I thought that was like stupid, right? I was like, like Seth, for example.

We know Seth, right? Seth Goldman. Seth Goldman, founder of Honestty. So if he believed that, he would have looked at Snapple and said, I really can't enter that market, right? But he didn't believe that. I think passion takes you a long way. Like, I just wanted this more than anybody else. That's Ethan Brown of Beyond Meat.

When we come back in a moment, the things that still keep him up at night. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to a special live recording of How I Built This from NPR. It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And just about a year or two after Ethan Brown founded Beyond Meat, the company started to get some pretty big investors. Bill Gates and the founders of Twitter signed on. And so did the venture capital company, Klaner Perkins. Yeah. So I initially funded it out of my own pocket.

and then we raised money from friends and family and we got these grants. But I was running out of money, you know, and I needed money. Yeah, because you had to pour the money into the research, right? Yes, I was going to cash. You need a lot of cash. Yeah, we had a facility where we were opening up, and we took over an old hospital building. But it cost money, all that stuff. And so, you know, selling, doing research, having facilities, we ran out of money, basically.

We needed to go raise money. Were you getting a lot of rejections or was it like an easy, smooth ride? Are people like, yep, how can I sign up? It was hard at first, but Kleiner Perkins got involved in 2010. They started to look at the company. And at the time, it was not a popular decision. People were like, how it's fake meat? What are you doing?

It's weird. And so these guys stuck their neck out. So I'm grateful for that. And once they got involved, then others came. All right, so let's talk a little bit about what this product started to become. How are you making it? Were you taking like soy powder and gluten for you? gluten from wheat and like putting in a machine and it was coming out as meat, fake meat?

Right. So I think it starts with a perception issue. So my argument is that this is meat, that it's just meat that comes from plants. And so I think an important distinction when the company is we don't talk about people not eating meat. I don't think it's a good idea to build a brand telling people not to eat what they love. But I think what is a good idea is allowing people eat more of what they love. And if you love meat, I can give you plant-based meat. You know, you can make our products out of, you know, lentil protein, mustard seed, tobacco leaves have great protein. Cotton seed has great protein. And so today we use soy and we use pea, but that's only because it's been scaled up. But I think the idea is let's look for the most sustainable crops and let's

pull protein from that and use it to create meat directly. So when were you able to, when did you create a product that was ready to go to market. You started the company in 2009. How long did it take you before Beyond Meat was it was it a grocery store? Right. So I started in that year I started to import something that I sold into Whole Foods. But it wasn't until 2011 and really early 2012 that we started to put into the market this basic structure that we had we had licensed from from the nurses. So these are the chicken strips. Yeah. Yeah. So we still so our product lines are in 11,000 stores today. Most of those stores carry them in the frozen section. And it's chicken. Chicken and it's beef. And ground beef.

Ground beef, right. And then we have a burger called the Beast Burger. And, you know, I'm probably the harshest critic of our products. I mean, I love our products. People love our products. But you can see in those products deficiencies. You can see how they're not exactly like animal protein. And that's, that to us drives us crazy. We have to collapse those differences. And it'll get better. I mean, it's just going to take time. We do have a moon shot in our company that's around bacon. You know, and I think bacon for me is very symbolic to, like, if people love bacon. So let's show them that we can produce a piece of bacon, like a real piece of bacon from plants. What is the hardest part of this business? I mean, are there things that keep you up

at night? Do you have anxiety? Are you convinced this thing is going to be huge and it's going to be successful? Do you think, you know, this could fail? I'm absolutely, there's an inevitability about what we're doing. I mean, I absolutely feel that way. Like, I think my anxiety is more around execution and just wanting to be better, wanting to be better CEO, wanting to be better founder, wanting to be better, you know, just better colleague, right? And also, when you talk about all this people who invest it, you know, you don't want to let them down, you know. But does that cause anxiety? Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah, I mean, it must because they believe in you. They've taken a chance on you. Although they're so rich anyway. It doesn't matter. I mean, let's face it, right?

I mean, when do you think, for example, like, when do you think that you guys will be profitable? So we actually have turned a really big corner just recently in terms of everything we're doing. The kind of progression of facilities went from kitchen to a quasi-kitchen slash factory to a factory in Missouri. And we just opened up a brand new facility. We did beautiful stuff. I was there twice this week in Dallas, Texas. You know, in this new facility at that scale, we get really, really good margins, right? And so, and that's a new thing for us.

Because the cost of production has gone down. Yeah, and just, and everything's more streamlined. And we're out of kind of the prototype improving outstage and into actually scale production. Is there a chance that this company could be profitable in five years, A, and B, does it matter? I mean, is that, is it important or is it enough to be sustainable? It's a very good question.

It is important. And I wrestle with this question a lot because I believe so strongly in the research program we have. And I would fund that at the sacrifice of almost anything else in the company. Because I want to be part of that group of people that separate meat from animals. You know, when it's all said and done, I want to look back on this effort and all the people working there. And again, we've got these PhDs that are remarkable people. And I want to say, you guys did this.

You know, you guys, for 200,000 years as humans, for 2 million years as humans, plus our predecessors, we've been consuming meat from animals, you guys were born and we died. and in between that time, you basically separated meat from animals, and you put us on a sustainable path. And it's not about feeding the pesky 13-year-old girl at the dinner table or boy who said, Mom, I'm not going to eat meat anymore. It's about creating a new form of meat for the center of the plate that people will love, and they don't have to sacrifice to have it.

In 50 years or 100 years, let's say 200 years, well, we look back on who we are today and say, wow, that was so weird, we ate animal meat like we look back on bloodletting or witchcraft? That's a good question. So there's part of us that's always going to do this, right? Hunt people who hunt, you know, like I go back to our farm and stuff. Like, it's just part of who we are.

But I think in the main, you know, it will be viewed as something that we used to do. And I think more and more it'll be viewed as a, like when you go to Central Park and you ride in a horse-drawn carriage, but everyone else is driving, it would be kind of like that, I think. I just, there's no way around it. And our job, our obligation is to make that protein great. We can't ask you to go out there and have like a veggie dog you don't like because you're just not going to do it. You know, it's like we're just hardwired to enjoy meat.

We have to create meat from plants so there's no trade-off. And we're trying to do that. And the thing is that if you come to our lab, you see it's possible. And you've got to scale it up. You've got to continually improve it. But it is possible and that's an exciting thing. Ethan Brown, thank you. Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat.

I spoke to him at the Now Here This, podcast festival in Anaheim, California. And by the way, last summer, Beyond Meat came out with something called the Beyond Burger. It's made with pea protein and actually looks and even bleeds a little like a cowburger. The bloody stuff actually comes from beets. And unlike other veggie burgers, Ethan has negotiated with supermarkets to display the Beyond Burger in the meat case, right next to the chicken and the steak. Hey, thanks for listening to this special live recording of the show this week. This episode was produced by Neva Grant and Rund Abdel Fata with music composed by Ramtin Arablui.

Thanks also to Sanaz Mechkampur and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. Life Kit is like your friend with really good advice. So, can I really be truthful? Yeah. It's just me and you, right? Well, sure, let's say it is. Three times a week, Life Kit is in your feeds with episodes on health, personal finance, personal growth, and so much more.

Listen to Life Kit from NPR.