The Vergecast - Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown on sustainable food systems and the science of protein

Episode Date: June 11, 2019

Fresh off his IPO, Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown joins Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel to discuss the evolution of plant-based burgers, the science of protein, why his company avoids GMOs, and their mission to help create a more sustainable food system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody. It's now from the Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have a super interesting guest. Ethan Brown, is the CEO of Beyond Meat.

They're one of the big companies out there that are making meat from plants. You probably know them. You probably know impossible foods. Beyond Meat just IPO. It's been a rocket ship success story. They're making burgers with Carl's Jr. You can buy Beyond Meat patties in the grocery store.

We talked to Ethan really deeply about the science of how these burgers are constructed from plants, how they're different from imposterous. possible foods, how the company got started, where the investments coming from, and where they're going next. And really, the future of how meat should work, which is a wild thing to say on a tech podcast, but I assure you this is a lot of tech, a lot of science. Check it out. It's Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat. So I'm here with Beyond Meat CEO, Ethan Brown. Thank you for

joining me, Ethan. Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. So Beyond Meat, just IPOed. It's a big inflection point for a company. You run a big public company now. But I just want to start at the beginning and then I want to go into the future. How did you start beyond me? It seems like plant-based meats are having a moment. This has been a journey for you and the rest of the industry, but how did this begin for you? I really started thinking about this business a long time ago, and it began with the motivation for this in a broader sense. And kind of the first area that I looked at was as a kid was around the use of, and animals in agriculture. And I had had some exposure to that. I grew up in Washington, D.C.

and in College Park, Maryland. But as a very young child, my dad bought a farm that was meant to be a recreation place for us because he didn't like living in the city and wanted to spend time in the country where, which is where he grew up. And so we would spend time on the weekends and summer at this farm. And being a little bit entrepreneurial himself, he's a professor, but decided to start a dairy operation there. So we had about 100 Holstein cows there and a man. milk operation. And, you know, nothing untoward or particularly traumatizing any way occurred, but I just began to think about that question about, you know, why are some animals part of the food system and others part of, you know, our domestic lives and our homes, you know, sleeping in our

bed, like a dog, for example, and just tucked that away and became an adult and went into the clean tech area working in clean energy. And the motivation of that was really around carbon and around the desire to create an economy that wasn't so dependent on carbon. And so those two pieces were with me from a very early age, thinking about a career and how to make an impact. And as I got deeper and deeper into clean energy, became really apparent that even though we were looking at the problem three times a day in the form of protein at the center of the plate, we were simply using that to fuel our bodies and then going on and kind of opining and wringing our hands about all the problems with fossil fuel. But as you start to

look at the math and the sheer amount of greenhouse gas, misimposed carbon and methane coming from livestock, it becomes really clear that that is a major driver. And in my view, one that exceeds automotive and power plant emissions globally. And so I felt that given my earlier interest in trying to understand the right relationship with animals, and my professional interest in climate that it made sense for me to look at this problem. And the thing that fascinated me from the very beginning was that nobody was looking at it in the same way that you would look at an energy problem in the sense of, okay, it's a big global problem. There are big issues at stake, the sustainability of the planet's at stake. So you don't want to get two chefs together

in a sort of side lab at a major company and try to solve this problem. You want to create an environment where you have the best scientists, the best engineers, the best managers, all together, fund them properly. Like, if this is a global problem, what would be wrong with spending two, three, four billion dollars to solve it? And give them that mandate of building meat director from plants and they kind of get out of the way. So that was something that started to emerge in my thinking to the point where I couldn't put it away.

I couldn't continue to do what I was doing and ignore it. And so it really wasn't courage. It was more significant discomfort with not acting. on something that I was seeing so clearly. And so I began the company shifted out of the energy sector and into food. How long ago was this? I started the company in early 2009, I think January of 2009. So I'd looked at the question for a number of years.

And I'd looked at specifically different ways to attack it, including lab grown meat and a bunch of different approaches and settled upon this idea of essentially just taking the animal out of the process. Because if you look at what the animal's doing, they're essentially eating an enormous amount of vegetation and they're consuming a tremendous amount of water. And they're using the digestive system, their muscular system, to create a piece of muscle, which we then harvest this meat. But they're starting with plants and they're starting with water.

So it seemed intuitive, to me anyway, that you would see if you could just build the same thing but directly from plants and not by trying to make a soybean masquerade as a steak, but rather understand the fundamentals of meat. And once you begin to understand that, it gets really exciting because, is meat is really these five things. It's those amino acids. It's lipids. It's trace minerals.

It's a small amount of vitamins. It's predominantly water just like our bodies. All of that can be sourced from plants. And so the idea was, can we use science and technology and innovation and really attack this as a serious global issue and figure out a way to not use the animal to organize those inputs? Yeah, I'm looking at a quote here right from when you guys IPO and you say you refer to the animals as bioreactors. and your goal is to bypass the animal. And you call the animal agriculture's greatest bottleneck, which I think is a pretty remarkable way to think about an animal in the equation.

But you're saying the animal is taking plants and water and turning it into meat, and I can do the same thing. That clearly was a 10-year process, right? You started in 2009, we're here at IPF stage now. What did you have to invent in those 10 years? What is the actual process by which you take plants and water? It's many, many decades of work that are still left. So we have just started to scratch the surface on this, and that's the thing that's both

so exciting for us. And if you're an incumbent potentially scary for you, because our target isn't moving. You know, the animal is the animal. And we're day after day trying to figure out how do we recreate that muscle, that combination of muscle fat water in a way that to the human sensory experience delivers the exact same satiating delicious experience, all the great nutrition, et cetera. And so, you know, it took, first changing the mindset. And so even beginning the company, we were using a lot of food scientists and they're very talented people. They're very bright. But in my view, we kept

bringing the same toolkit to the problem. And so we said, okay, well, we have to be better. We have to understand this better. And so how do we do that? Let's go out and get scientists from every discipline that might be relevant. So whether it's chemistry, biochemistry, you know, pick any discipline that would be able to impart even the littlest bit of knowledge about how animal protein is structured, and we're gonna go get that person,

we're gonna assemble them and bring them together with engineers and then the right managers. And so we did that, and it was, you know, at first a smaller amount of funding, and then we were able to get more funding, and I just dumped more and more funding into this team. and gave them that clear goal. It wasn't complicated. It was, here's a piece of meat, use all the imaging equipment you can find. And so they pulled stuff out of biomedical.

A lot of protein chemists, for example, have come on from our team out of biomedical, that really understand protein. And so they began to use this equipment to better characterize a piece of meat. And once you start to see that blueprint, that architecture, you then can go about that process of sourcing those inputs directly from plants and creating a piece of of meat truly creating a piece of meat directly from plants. And this gets to that argument that I think is worth having, which is do you need to define meat by its origin? Does meat have to come from a chicken, cow, or pig? Or could you shift and define meat by its composition? And if you define it by its composition, it gets really exciting because there's so many different routes you can take to get

to that endpoint. And that's really what we're about. So right now, you have one endpoint. Right. The Beyond Burger is out. I just bought some in a grocery store a couple weeks ago. Thank you. It was good. You've got one in, it's Carl's Jr., I think, is selling Beyond Burgers, Del Taco. Yeah. Is that all the same? Do you have different processes for the grocery store versus Carl's Jr. versus Del Taco?

Yeah, and I think one of the most challenging jobs at Beyond Meat is in production and operations. It's challenging because we aren't satisfied with our current products. And so as much as I love to hear and I really do that, you know, you've gone out to buy the product, part of me cringes because I know that I have a product here. that's so much better than that. And I want you as a consumer to have that. And so we have this program here called the Beyond Meat, Rapid and Relentless Innovation Program. And it's designed to try to make the product

that you just bought obsolete as cook as we can because our rate of understanding this and it's a wonderful discovery process when you bring bright people together and give them a clear goal, they begin to understand things better and they begin to knock down obstacles. So our current burger that we're going to be releasing

later in the summer, I feel is so much better than the one you just had. And so it's not only do we have different forms, so the del taco form is different from the one you'd have in a burger, but we're also constantly trying to upgrade and replace the products that people today love. And that's a risky proposition. It's one that people have challenged me on and said, you know, why would you do that?

People love this product. You're growing at a rapid clip. But it's as much as I respect the fact that people love it, we are on this mission to build a perfect piece of meat. And that product is imperfect. There are things about it that aren't exactly like meat, and that really bothers us. What are those things? This is crazy for me to be saying this, and my PR person's looking at me, but she's a pro.

I'm not. You know, I don't like the aroma as much as I should. It's close to animal protein in certain ways, but it's, and it's, and it's, aroma is a fascinating subject. So there's well over a thousand molecules that make meat taste and have that smell that we're so accustomed to. And what we're doing is we're isolating those molecules. literally from meat, and then we're characterizing them, and then we're trying to match them

with molecules and plants that will deliver the same experience to our human sensory system. And so we're kind of, you know, we're continuing to funnel down and get closer and closer, but we're still, if it's right, if the target's right in the middle, we're still kind of coming in left sometimes, we're coming in right, we're not yet landing right on the target. And I think the one that we have today that's going to be releasing this summer is closer, so that'll be the first thing. Second is the way it transitions in color, it's still too red when it's been cooked. And that's, in one hand, that's consumers get used to it.

They're fine with it. But in the other, it bothers me because as people take it home for the first time, they maybe try to cook that out because that's what they're used to doing with animal protein. And so we need to make that better, that color transition better, and we worked a lot on that. The last is distribution of fat. I really want the fat to distribute in a way that it does in muscle, and we're still working on that.

It's distributed some muscle into pockets, and it's sort of interwoven in a way that's really, really nuanced and gives you that burst of fat when you bite into a piece of animal protein, we need to get better at that. And I think the product that we're releasing is getting closer. So I think this leads to a really interesting and big philosophical question that you touched on a little bit when you talked about defining meat by its composition. But you are right now describing, I need to replace meat. I need to one-to-one replace a hamburger patty so that your expectations of what happens with a Beyond Meatburger are exactly the same as your expectations of a hamburger patty.

Is that the right goal? I mean, it's a really big foundational question. Is it that people need hamburgers that are exactly like hamburgers of the past, or is it we need to change our food supply? My mother asked me that question a lot. She's like, why are you so focused on perfectly replicating animal protein? Why don't you just build a new source of protein

for the center of the plate that people get really excited about. I think we have to earn that right. We have to prove that we can do this, because the only thing that I know with absolute certainty about the consumer is that the consumer loves meat. Most of us do, right? You know, sort of 94 or 95% of the population

here in the United States. And so that's a really clear target for me, right? If I start to try to create a new flavor profile, a new consistency, that's really hard. And what I want to do is prove, through science, that you don't need the animal to produce a piece of meat. And then I have a ton of freedom after that.

But I feel like we need to pass through that or else we just become one of many other choices. Our hope and our dream is that we'll continue as a species to go on loving and consuming meat. It's just plant-based meat. And if I just offer an alternative to something that everyone loves, I think we'll miss that opportunity. So really just explain, like I'm five style.

How do you go from, like what are your, What are the plants you're using? And then how does that turn into a burger? Right. And this is really important for us to start to educate the public about because it's been misconstrued in a lot of ways. Our product starts with a legume or pulse or any feedstock that has a lot of amino acids in it.

And so at that stage, what's happening is the protein and the fiber are being separated. And that's done by basically putting a flour into an acquiesce mix, a water-based mix that has, and you change the pH level in the water. the protein and fat separate out. That protein is dried, and it's run through our system, which instead of being the digestive track of an animal and the muscular system of an animal, it's essentially heating, cooling, and pressure.

And that heating, cooling, and pressure resets the structure so that instead of presenting it like it would in a plant, it presents like it would in muscle. So our system, I mean, it's not exactly the same, of course. From there, then we have to add flavor in to give all the aroma and great satiating taste of meat. And we do that through that system of a system of identifying the different molecules that drive flavor, and then we work with outside vendors

to help us scale that up. And so that's pretty much it. Those are different plant-based. So you're saying we've identified a thousand molecules that create aroma and meat. We know that we can get four of those molecules from, I don't know, a grape. And you process a grape and then add those. Like, is that how that works? Yeah, and it's actually well over a thousand. And it's a process of identifying the ones that are the main drivers, but then take color, for example. We've been very strict with our team, and this has been something that has sometimes retarded the speed at which we can move, but I think it's the right long-term bet to make, and that

is to put really strict guardrails around what our scientists can do, and I think it starts with two questions, and the first is, you know, what can science do? And I think we're providing an answer to that, that over enough time and enough money, you can build a piece of meat directly from plants. But then the second question, which is really important is what should science do? And whether it's moms or dads or just customers throughout the world that I've personally interacted with, I've come to really believe that the consumer in this application does not want genetically modified ingredients. It overly complicates the story.

It distracts from the main idea. And so we've kept GMOs out. We've kept artificial flavors out. We've kept anything that's not natural out of our product. And that does make it harder. But my challenge to the science team is to scour the earth, uncover the parts of nature that exist today that you can use to advance this mission. And so on color, as an example, we use beets, we use pomegranate, we use things like apple fiber. I mean, it's a pretty simple concept around apple fiber as an example.

You bite into an apple, you set it on a table. You come back five minutes later. It doesn't look as good, right, because it's starting to brown. That's, you know, that's oxidization going on. But we need to find every element we can in the plant kingdom to transition that product from a really nice red appearance to a black and gray appearance. And how do we do that without genetically modifying ingredients? So those are the type of plants that we'll pull from. And what I'm proud about in that regard is I can sit down at a table with my own family, my own shoulder to growing, or a family that we're having dinner with and say, you know, these are the ingredients in this product.

you can recognize them. You've had them before in your diet. We're just presenting them in a different form. So just to be clear, I mean, there's no evidence that GMOs are bad, right? You're saying this is a, well, it's great for a food CEO to say there's no evidence that GMOs are bad. So you agree with that. There's no evidence that they're bad. I was saying that in our case, we're not doing it because I have some inherent fear of GMOs. But I actually don't have an opinion really on GMOs. Like I just, I got so many other things going on. haven't focused on it enough. You know, I don't know whether there's, I do believe in this concept of unattended consequences that just time and time again we see it in our actions. But I wouldn't declaratively state that there's nothing wrong. There's no scientific risk to GMOs. I don't believe that. I just, I'm sort of agnostic on it. Right. You're already, you're already asking them to accept one kind of, one kind of big substitution.

Yeah, one element of change, and so why complicated that? The one area I would agree with is that notion of unintended consequences. I think we're pretty bad as a species about thinking through the total consequence of a given scientific change. We have example of example about that. I'm not an expert on GMOs, and I don't really intend to be. It's not our focus, but that would be my one concern. So I want to get really nerdy about pea protein for five minutes. I asked our, I asked our deputy editor, Liz Lapato, who used to be our science editor, and she requested that we get nerdy about pea protein. You said a legume is the basis. It's like the beginning of the product.

That's pea protein, right? Yeah, so pick your favorite one. Yeah, but we happen to use that today, but we don't necessarily need to be using it tomorrow. It's what's available to us. And if I like getting nerdy about proteins, I'll join you on that. Yeah. We really use that because it's available in significant quantities in a way that some other proteins aren't. But in my view, from a consumer perspective, the thing that recommends peas the most strongly is

what it's not and it's not soy. And the consumer told us very early that they wanted to avoid having additional soy in their diet. Why is that exactly? It gets back to the same thing. I mean, people have concerns about different types of ingredients and, you know, there's different conflicting medical literature about different types of ingredients. And so, you know, if there's a controversy or dis-ease, discomfort with a particular type of ingredient, I don't want to complicate my product with it. And so we looked for alternate sources of protein very early. Very funny story. We had a a massive supplier who is a big starch company, come out to meet us when I was just, I don't know, maybe three years into the business or something like that. And they flew their private jet

to the small town where our first operation was. And they came to see us. And we had like four or five people working in the business at the time. And on the day that they came, we weren't even in production. And so they like get off their private jet. They come to visit us. It's like me sitting in this dark factory talking to them. It turned out. to be a great partnership. I'm glad they suck with us. We give them a ton of business now, and they make a lot of money from us. So peas are available in this level of supply because they were scaled up for starch. This particular process of separating protein from fiber was scaled up to sort of the starch market. About 15 years ago, some folks at this company said,

well, we'll go ahead and start selling the protein into the protein space. And so that's really why we use peas and why they're available. But there's nothing magical about them. You know, You can get protein from any number of resources. And one of the products I'm really excited about is our breakfast sausage. That is protein from sunflower seeds. It has protein from mung bean. It has protein from brown rice and has pea protein in it. So you'll see us continue to diversify the number and amount of proteins that we use.

Right, because one of the, as you guys did go through IPO, one of the flags was raised is that, I think it's your major supplier, you have but a single supplier of pea protein. you count for like 79% of their revenue. Is that an imperative that you need to diversify? Is that something that worries you? No, we actually do have more. I'm not sure that was, that may have been a sort of snapshot in time,

that particular statistic. I mean, we do have more than one supplier and we use them pretty evenly as we're going forward. But there's additional ones coming on. I mean, anytime the market is working in this regard, anytime there's an opportunity, you see more and more people come into the space.

So three or four years from now, you'll see many more suppliers of different types of protein. And I like to work with the small ones. I mean, we've got people who are separating chickpea protein. We're testing that. Lupin protein. You know, I've gotten mustard seed protein sent to me.

Once you start to think about the plant kingdom as a source of protein for human consumption, you really get an enormous amount of variety. And it's a question of getting the supply chain together that can supply it to us at scale. I like the image of you in your office getting a box of random proteins from different suppliers. It's very 80s movie. Crazy stuff, but it is. And when I got the mustard seed, I actually tried to make a protein water out of it because it has like a nice translucence to it.

It didn't really work. It's very mad scientist. So what you seem to be describing to me in a very high level is you can take proteins from a huge variety of plants, run them through your process, and end up with a burger. Is that the goal that you're kind of input independent? Yes. Five years from now, you'll be able to go to a meat case and you'll be able to get sauce It's not only made from pea protein, but from lentil protein, from, you know, Lupin, as I mentioned,

you know, pick your favorite protein source, so that mom is still the CEO of the household, still the primary decision maker about what they're going to bring home. If I said, we're going to go ahead and rebuild meat from plants, we're going to offer you pea protein in five different form factors. We're going to offer it to you as a steak. We're going to offer it to you as a burger. We're going to offer you as a chicken. We're going to offer you as turkey, et cetera.

You'd say, well, I don't want to have the same protein every day. That's not how the consumer behaves. The consumer goes to the supermarket, let's say, on Sunday, and they buy salmon for the family, they buy steak, they buy burgers, et cetera. I want to make sure that we're giving the consumer a diversity of protein. So, you know, each protein is slightly different, right? Each has a different amino acid profile, et cetera. I want that diversity in my own diet, and I want the consumer to have it. This is interesting because you're talking and you started talking about defining meat by composition.

So does starting with pea protein versus mustard C protein, does that? change the flavor of the final result? Some proteins have more off flavors to them than others, but it's just a question of time and investment. Like you'll find, for any given all flavor, you can find a counter that will help you to create the right overall and result. Some are much harder than others. So yes, they're not all created equal in that regard. But when you make a burger, you're obviously targeting beef, right? You're trying to recreate what ground beef is. Can you target a chicken breast? Can you take a pee and turn it into that? Can you take a pee and turn it into that too? You can take a lot of different proteins and turn into that. And it's just a question

of finding the right flavor profile through that system we talked about before, identifying what's driving the poultry taste and then creating that with plant material. So I guess my question is, is that the right final product mix? Like you have a burger that looks like ground beef and you have a chicken breast that looks like chicken and you don't necessarily care where the protein started from? Or is it what you're describing, you know, you've got a bunch of different formats, a sausage or burger, what have you, and the consumer is picking the input protein. I think it'd be really neat to, like, if you go to the supermarket today, you can get turkey

sausage, you can get, you know, all kinds of different sausages, whether it's in pork and et cetera. I think it'd be really neat to be able to offer a variety of proteins as we build out the product offerings. But today, our focus is really on three platforms. It's on beef, poultry, and pork, and it's predominantly on beef and pork because of the way the consumer is pulling away from it. I mean, a real seminal moment, I think, in this entire shift that we're seeing was the

World Health Organization's mega-analysis, I think, in 2015. There were some flashy headlines that came out about it. That's actually, I think, a pretty decent overview of the literature on the connection between high levels of animal protein consumption and certain diseases that we seem to be struggling with. And so whether it was cancer, heart disease, diabetes, they did an analysis of these studies. And the problem with the studies were a lot of them were correlations versus causal, but there's enough evidence out there that suggests that, you know, high levels of processed

meat consumption and high levels of red meat consumption do have a negative impact on key health parameters. But one of the most startling headlines from that mega-analysis was that they put red meat and processed meat in the same category as smoking in terms of carcinogen. And that, I think, sent some shockwaves throughout the meat industry. They disputed it, of course. But I remember seeing we get there, we get the Meeting Place magazine publication, which the trade magazine of the meat industry, because I view myself as part of it. And that was on the front

cover. You know, so I think, I think, and what's a consumer, what's happening to consumer is whether it's that study or NIH does a study or UCLA does one or pick your favorite Northeastern University does one, they're being, consumers being bombarded with this data, that there's something going on with the high levels of animal protein consumption and these diseases that we're suffering from. And then more popular formats come out like what the health, etc. That continue to feed the unease with certain consumption patterns that we've had for years. And you're saying the sort of explosion in plant-based meat interest, if not maybe demand yet,

but there's certainly a lot of interest. Yeah, I think what's happened, and we call these the four horsemen, and I think it's really, it's sort of creating this perfect storm around animal protein. Like if you look at, you know, these human health issues that we've talked about, if you look at climate and then you look at natural resources, all the information about how much water is used, et cetera. And then finally, animal welfare. All four of those are closing in on our old perspective about animal protein. And it's demanding that we use innovation to come up with something new because I don't think people want to stop eating meat. Meat's taste great, it's satiating.

There's a nutritional benefit to it. So let's use science innovation to just get through this, come up with a new way to build meat that's healthier for us instead of debate it. and point fingers, et cetera. So you just said you're part of the meat industry, which is an interesting contention. What is that? Do the Tyson people, like, follow you around in their cars? Like, what is their reaction to you? No.

No, I have a good relationship with Tyson. And there was a negative article that came out about the relationship between Beyond Meat and Tyson, which that day, I think, I sent John Tyson a note within, you know, an hour or so he sent me note back saying the same thing. Like, no, there's no issue here. We're all trying to sustainably feed the growing global population. So for meat processors, this is something that should not be a threat because they're running protein and fat through their systems, right? They're starting with a carcass and they're ending with a foreign product. They can run our protein and fat through their system or a competitor to us. They can do that, right?

So it's not about them becoming economically impaired by this if they're willing to think outside the box a little bit. The second piece of the supply chain here is really, you know, the cattlemen themselves, yeah, that's a sticky one. But if you then go one level below and think about landowners, if you own land that is fertile and can grow crops, you're going to make more money, in my view, growing a protein crop that goes directly into a human's mouth versus growing a feed crop that goes in an animal's mouth. And if you look at, and we did this with the University of Michigan, we did an environmental analysis of our process versus ground beef, we use 93% less land. So I'm a farmer that owns,

let's say, 100 acres of arable land that I'm planting crops on. I can now make the same number of burgers and seven acres that I used to use 100 for. So I now have been given 93 acres to make more money with, right? So for me, that's about economic growth. It's about innovation. It's about continuing the American story of making something that's good, meat better, right? And so I love talking to farmers about. I love talking to feed conferences and farm bureaus because I think this is as powerful innovation for American agriculture as the digitalization of communication was for many of our urban businesses. Yeah, but you're squeezing the cattle people on both sides, right? You're saying to their feed suppliers, hey, you can make more money selling us, you know,

whatever plant-based protein you can grow here. And on the processing side, I actually want to unpack this, you're saying they can take raw beyond meat and spit out a rack of ribs. Over time. So that's the goal, right? I don't know today. Yeah, that is the goal. That is a goal. But so in the middle, the people who raise cows currently, they've got to be feeling squeezed.

I think they are. But I think there's a lot of ways to respond and I'm super respectful of that community. And I know it well. And, you know, many of them also own land. And there's a lot of things you can do with that land. Not all of it, right? Some grazing land is grazing because they're not other uses for it. But a lot of it you can't use in other ways.

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business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more than 125 categories so you can fill skill gaps, launch projects faster, and scale without committing to full-time headcount. And finding the right talent is easy. You can browse profiles, review pass work, and get help scoping the role so you can get started quickly. Seriously, you could connect with the right freelancer in just a few hours, especially when you sign up with Business Plus. Their AI powered shortlisting pairs you with the top 1% of talent in under six hours. No endless search you're required. You can visit upwork.com right now to post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's upworg.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyondmeat.

So where do you think your competition is? Is it traditional meat of that variety? Is it, you know, I have to ask you, like, there's impossible burger collecting as many headlines as anyone right now. Where do you see that primary competition coming from? We focus the most on the meat market itself. That's the most attractive market. It's $1.4 trillion. And so my focus is more squarely on that than any other sort of plant-based company out there. I think it's possible. We've got a lot of good people working for it and they've got the right mission. But it's going to come down to a battle place of ideas. And I think we have the stronger one in the sense that we're going to do this without genetically modifying inputs. We're going to do this without using soy. Particularly the GMO question is a really important distinction that people need to think about. And I think we've made the right call there.

So pull out of what specifically, what is the difference between you and impossible? Not in terms of the company, but in terms of the burger. Yeah, I think there's a several. And again, I don't want it. It's a big market. I hope Impossible is very successful. It's just a question of our approach versus theirs. I think the key difference in the burgers is one, you know, they've done this genetic modification

with essentially, you know, creating this heem from leg hemoglobin that they then scale and eats. And we've said we're not going to do that, right? We've said that we're going to find the inputs we need from materials that already exist in nature, right? And so that's a huge distinction right there. Second is around just listening to the consumer. You know, when I started this company, we didn't have venture money. And so I was just on the phone this morning with our earliest retail supplier, earliest retail customer, Whole Foods. And we were just talking about this, that like I waited with bated breath for the check from them through their supplier because it was being used to run and keep the business open.

And so when you're that close to the customer and the consumer, you really listen to what they have to say. And we were told time and again, no GMOs, no soy. And so we listened. And we ultimately, you know, took the route we did. and I think it'll pay off in the long run. We'll see what the market says. That's actually really interesting because you are in front of consumers, right? You can go to a grocery store and buy beyond-me products.

Impossible isn't. Is there a reason that you've chosen to sort of be in front of consumers in that way as opposed to the sort of flashy word every fast food outlet? Yeah. So I tried that approach first in 2011. So I began the business selling into Whole Foods. And man, they're a great partner. And then into universities and hospitals up and down the East Coast, like Philly Mainline,

all those hospitals, John Hopkins University. And just to tell you how different things have gotten, I mean, I would go to, I went to James Madison once and was like literally walked out of the cafeteria. They were like, you can't be in here. And the same thing happened to Ohio State. So we went with a dual approach of retail and food service. And unfortunately, for me, I went too strongly into food service before I had a brand. And I had to pull back.

And that was terrible because we had to let people. go and it just wasn't the right move at the time. We didn't have brand recognition. The market also wasn't ready. I believe the way you build a great brand is having a really strong retail presence first and then getting into food service. Now, Possible has a lot of money and they're spending a lot on PR, et cetera, so they may be able to buck that trend and do it differently.

But my own personal experience was you learn a lot for the consumer, you get great brand awareness in the retail space and then you transfer that into food service. So it strikes me about this whole conversation is you are talking, using a lot of the language when I interviewed traditional tech company executives and CEOs. So much of this language is the same, right? We've got to build a brand. We need to be sustainable. You referred to meat as a platform. There's a part of this where I'm just talking to another Google executive, which is great.

But do you think of yourself as running a tech company? Are you running a food science company? Like, what kind of company are you running here? No, I'm running a food company for sure. I mean, we use a tremendous amount of science, and I'm sitting in our research center here, what's called the Manhattan Beach Project because of where we are,

but also very early in my career became really interested in the Manhattan Project of the Second World War because of that notion of putting really bright people together from all of the world, you know, best, best scientists, best engineers, you know, got a great manager and grows, pushing them to achieve a global goal.

I love that sense of urgency and just getting it right and coming together's a team to do it. So I've asked people to behave that way here. In our case, we're doing something that I hope will be much more peaceful and impactful than what they were working on. But I don't think it was a tech company.

I mean, we use science for a very human end here to allow the materials we're going to put in our body in the form of food to be better for us and better for the planet. And you can't get a way. from science in order to accomplish that in terms of what we're doing. But I don't think of a tech company, no. That's really, I mean, that's honestly, from my perspective, it's refreshing because everyone just tells me they run it's a company. So, I appreciate it. Well, here's how real

it is. I have a close, I have a good friend, Thomas Middle Ditch. I like him a lot, who stars in Silicon Valley. It got to a point where I couldn't watch it anymore because it was so close to some of the stuff that I was dealing with. Do you ever watch that show? I mean, it's a great show. It's a great show. And it is uncomfortably close to the truth, I think. When everyone's talking about saving the world and they're like making a, some new app, you're just like, oh, my gosh. I've ever like, well, I'm doing that. I'm trying. So give me some big predictions about the future of where this is going.

I mean, it is an inflection point, right? Your company, you started it, you were small, you've IPO. The IPO went great, at least this is going to come out a few weeks from when we're talking. So the IPO went great in this time frame. It looks like things are going to progress well. you are announcing expansion. What is the five years from now, 10 years from now, what does this look like to you? So I'm going to give a frustrating answer, but it's the truth.

I don't know. All I know is that every time we make the product better and better, the consumer just comes in droves. And so it's this relationship that we have with the consumer that I'm most focused on. And I really love pleasing, you know, a family that was skeptical, right? getting them to transition. And that seems to be happening in such an alarming rate that, you know, it's unclear, you know, just how high is high. We don't know. I don't know about five to 10 years. I do know that 20, 25 years from now, plant-based meat will absolutely be the norm. Like, there's no question of my mind about that. I think the lab-grown meat is a really interesting idea.

I think there's some great people working on it, particularly OMA over at Memphis Meets. great, great guy, great company. My concern about that is the cost structure and scaling that to a cost that consumers can afford. I mean, my goal is really three, is to hit three things and watch the rest unfold. The first is, you know, get the taste exactly right and the sensory experience exactly right. That's the first thing. Get the nutrition exactly right. So we deliver all the benefits of meat, but strip out anything that's bad, right? And that's hard, right? That's really hard. So, you know, strip out or minimize is a better way to say it. And then the third is price.

So if we can do the first two, taste great, satiates, gives you all the nutrition, and then we drop the price below animal protein. I think it's going to be amazing to see what happens. You don't think you can drop the price until you finish the flavor profile stuff, though, right? It really has to do with the scale of our supply chain. Our supply chain is pulled from different industries today. It's not purposeful around plant-based meat. it's starting to take on that form in certain parts of the supply chain, but not fully. And so we really need a supply chain that is focused on harvesting protein directed from plants

and getting it to us in the form that we can use. You know, if you think about our size too, despite the growth rate, we're still pretty small. If we were even a tenth of the size of Tyson, for example, we'd be able to exert much more pressure on a supply chain and get much, much lower cost that I'll pass on to the consumer because I want to get this product to be lower cost than animal protein. All right. Ethan Brown, thank you so much. We've gone way over your time and very generous with us.

Where can people find beyond meat? Is just every grocery store now? What's the story? Yeah. We're continuing to expand on the retail side of things in a way that's very satisfying. And then, of course, don't forget the food service organizations we're in. We've got great partnerships with Del Taco with Carl's Jr. with Fridays, up in Canada, with A&W and Tim Hortons. I mean, those are just great experiences. My son made me stop on the way

to school today to pick him up burritos from Del Taco with Beyond Meat in him because he just loves him so much and wanted him for his lunch. So it's exciting. It's a great time. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, man. We'll talk to you soon. All right. That was Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat. To be honest, I'm just hungry now. Really interesting conversation, but I want to bird. of some kind. So that's going to happen. You can listen to Watch Push That Button. They're doing a new series this week called Death Online, a three-part series about death in the internet. We're actually really excited about that. It's not as dire as you think. It's really just about how no one's thought about it yet. And now we have to think about it a lot because the internet's been around

for long enough. Check that out. Ashley and Caitlin are doing great work on that show. You can subscribe to the Verstcast free on your favorite podcast app. Tap the link in the show notes to get new episodes. And please, the producers remind me, they want you to rate us an Apple podcast. So go there if you're going to rate us and review us. You can hit me up on Twitter. I'm at Reckless. I'd love to know who you want me to talk to. We've been having a great time going on fighting people. So let me know. I'm at Reckless.

And we're back Friday at the chat show, Deeter and Paul. See you then.