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Ethan Brown

Founder, President & CEO, Beyond Meat

Search every verified Ethan Brown interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, discussed the company’s second quarter 2026 financial results during an August earnings call. He described the quarter as showing “sequential progress” on top-line metrics and noted that cash used in the first six months of the year was less than half of the amount consumed in the same period a year earlier. Brown said he was “pleased with the direction” of the quarter and expressed excitement about demonstrating what the company can do in “adjacent categories” while continuing to stabilize its core business. During the same call, Brown attributed challenges in the U.S. market to what he described as “incumbent industry-funded campaigns” that he said have “tarnished” the perception of plant-based protein. He contrasted the U.S. environment with Europe, stating that the company does not face “the same very significant campaigns and misinformation” there, and that European consumers “link much more readily their food consumption choices to climate.” Brown also appeared on a podcast in July 2026, where he recounted his early work in a university lab developing plant-based meat and discussed the company’s efforts to place its products in supermarket meat cases.

Recent appearances

Notable quotes

“What drove that was not moral outrage or disgust. It was the fact that it took 3.7 cents per mile to move someone with a horse versus 2.4 cents to do it with electric street car. So what we're doing will ultimately be far cheaper than animal protein because we're skipping that step of growing a crop, feeding it to the animal, harvesting the animal.”

“I think the facade that our government is not for sale is finally fallen down. It's now clear. And so it comes down to the consumer at this point, right? And how do we as responsible companies interact for the consumer's benefit?”

“The notion that we're somehow returning to nature when we consume animal protein in the United States is false. What we can do is eat more directly from plants and allow nature to return. That would be real.”

“The pharmaceutical industry was selling antibiotics to livestock, and they'd rather have billions of animals in confined areas that need to be drugged to stay alive than not. And so they were participating in this sort of smear campaign trying to scare consumers away from our products.”

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →