Dead Meat

The hype on Beyond Meat was beyond reason. Note to investors: It's mashed peas.

“In the beginning there was nothing and God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was still nothing but everybody could see it.” – Dave Thomas

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Never in history did so many people get so excited about peas. Mash them into a burger patty with a little potato starch, claim you’re disrupting the meat industry, launch an initial public stock offering, and part hungry fools from their money.

Beyond Meat went public in May 2019 at $25 a share and by July of that year its stock exploded to an intraday high of nearly $234 a share.

Those privileged enough to get in on the action enjoyed the biggest IPO pop since 2000 – supercharged with endorsements and investments from and athletes and celebrities, including Shaquille O’Neal, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kim Kardashian and Snoop Dogg.

Today, Beyond Meat is trading for $1.40 in one of the biggest IPO blunders of all time

Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown talked about saving the planet by switching from cows, pigs and chickens to highly processed pea burgers. He didn’t call them pea burgers, though. It was more complex than that.

It was Beyond Money for the insiders and early investors who jumped off this gravy train before it rolled off the tracks. (Comic: ChatGPT)

Here’s the mansplaining techno-babble Brown gave to Time in 2021:

“Our process is one of pulling protein directly from plants. A cow is collecting all kinds of grass, drinking water, and then they’re consuming that, then they’re breaking it down into constituent parts, and they’re building muscle out of that. What we’re doing is starting with the same thing. We’re starting with vegetation in a field, and instead of running that through the digestive tract of an animal, we’re simply extracting directly the amino acids, extracting directly the fats and extracting directly the vitamins and minerals… Then we mix it with the flavor. The aroma and taste of meat is driven by over 4,000 molecules, but they’re identifiable. And we have all this crazy equipment that allows us to separate out the molecules, characterize them and try to match them with molecules and plants.”

Imagine a future where humans would stop killing so many animals and exhausting the resources required to raise them.

Fast food giants lined up faster than the cars idling in their drive-thru lanes.

Dunkin’ launched Beyond Sausage breakfast sandwiches. Subway tested the Beyond Meatball. McDonald’s launched the McPlant Burger. Del Taco introduced the Beyond Taco. Pizza hut went with Beyond Italian Sausage. And my favorite: KFC’s Beyond Fried Chicken.

As if that’s why people go to fast-food joints. For the mashed peas.

Predictably, sales projections proved Beyond Ridiculous. And worse, Beyond Meat lost its leading position in the plant-based meat market to Impossible Foods last year.

Impossible Foods faces the same industry challenges, but at least it’s honest with its name, Impossible. And it did not sucker retail stock investors with an overhyped IPO.

The hype around Beyond Meat’s IPO stands as cautionary tale for anyone looking to profit from fickle consumer appetites:

• “We want to make the existing product on the shelves obsolete.” – Ethan Brown.

• “We’re actually building a piece of meat directly from plants.” - Ethan Brown.

• “Alternative meat market could be worth $140 billion in 10 years, Barclays says” – MarketWatch

• McDonald’s McPlant “could add nearly $200 million to Beyond Meat’s sales.” – Oppenheimer analyst Rupesh Parikh.

• “Buy Beyond Meat Stock Because It Could Be Even Bigger Than the Hype, Analyst Says” - Barrons

But as the old Wendy’s commercial goes: “Where’s the beef?”