The Truth About Beyond Meat from the Man Who Built It | Ethan Brown

Great to see you.

Let's do it.

Yeah. No, look, first of all, thank you for doing what many people won't do, which is to try to understand something, you know, at its core for yourself. Um, and you know what was very frustrating to me as we lived through this kind of misinformation campaign and the counterattacks from the incumbent industries was that one of the motivating factors for the business was human health. And the first package that I ever tried to design and I failed miserably at it was I was using the outline of the Vitruvian man like Da Vinci's, you know, beautiful human body, right? And the symmetry of it and the muscular form because I understood at the time like you do that, you know, that plant-based eating can really help that body flourish. And so everything I was doing as we started the company 2009 was like, 'Oh my god, we're going to unlock the power of plants for the human body,' right? And then to have that demonized was a tough, tough thing. And I think we did get labeled, you know, with that ultraprocessed kind of overarching description and it wasn't by the folks that set up that framework. They in fact have said, you know, it wasn't intended for anything like your product. And I think there are two ways that we think about this. One is, you know, what are you trying to avoid when you're thinking about a processed food? And largely, you're trying to avoid high levels of saturated fat, high levels of sodium and additives, right? And we have such discipline about what we put in our products. You know, I'm probably other than my son and daughter probably the biggest consumers of Beyond Meat in the world. And so we're enormously careful about that and what those levels are. And as a result, you know, we have endorsements and certifications from the American Heart Association, American Diabetes Association, Clean Label Project, all these things. And so that's the first thing is sort of what are you trying to avoid, right? But the more important thing in my mind is, you know, the word process is a neutral word, right? It's a series of steps to a desired outcome. And we use a great process, one that should be celebrated. And you know, you come from the Midwest. I love the Great Plains. Like I mean I just feel like it's this thing that opens your heart and it's so fascinating. So, I love going there. And one of the things that I really love doing is meeting with the farmers that grow our crops. And the process, even at its origin, is beautiful because we're, let's say, our steak, it's grown with fava beans, right? It's made with fava beans. And that's taking the nitrogen out of the air and putting it back in the soil. And that protein is being separated from the starch in the fava bean. And that protein is being put in the form of muscle through heating, cooling, and pressure. I will argue till my last breath that's a better process than running those plants through an animal in an industrial factory farm.

Incredible. Yeah. And you look like you eat them because, you know, this is one thing that people don't know about fava beans. They literally were the preferred protein choice of gladiators. Like they say fava beans and lentils and there's historical records that went back and did all the right stuff and fossilization to understand that. But it is a very powerful source of protein.

And so I grew up during the period where, you know, there's a lot of farmers were going bankrupt and there's Farm Aid, Nelson and all that and what was happening was, you know, corn, soy, and wheat prices were just fluctuating on the global market and real challenges with pricing and so a lot went under. And one of the most gratifying things about this for me is to go meet with some of these farmers and they're saying, you know, by planting legumes which are the fava beans and lentils and things of that nature, they're bringing young people back into agriculture because they can make more money. And so folks are now making more money per acre growing those type of crops, the pulses and legumes that go into humans' mouths more directly than they are when they're growing feed that goes into an animal's mouth. Right? And so that is the beginning of our process. What happens is you take whether it's a lentil or a fava bean and you're stripping out the protein and you're doing that in a really clean way which is just like anything else. It's harvested and then milled, right? And that flour is placed in an air chamber and in that air chamber the protein and starch naturally separate. We take that protein and we run it through heating, cooling and pressure. That's called extrusion. And it's, you know, if you've had pasta, that's how they make pasta.

The most processed thing in any of our products is the fact that we separate the starch and protein. So, if you're willing to have a smoothie, right?

Yeah. You know, I knew that there was going to be some pushback obviously because we're trying to disrupt a very large industry, but I think I underestimated just how effective it would be. You know, and what's interesting is I started the company with two really good land grant universities. So the research was originally done at the University of Missouri and then I would take the underlying protein structure to the University of Maryland and we would then turn it into final products. And so using the American education system and using these great public universities we have to do something that I thought was, you know, going to be amazing for farmers and all these other things. Um and for a long time we just labored kind of in obscurity and then started to become better known and that did create this kind of backlash and it was two groups. Uh the one that is the most obvious would be the livestock industry like they didn't want this, right? Pork processors. So that makes sense, right? The one that surprised me but shouldn't have was the pharmaceutical industry. And it wasn't the pharmaceutical industry that was selling into, you know, the Walgreens and CVS, right? It was the pharmaceutical industry that was selling antibiotics to livestock, right? And so they'd rather have billions of animals in confined areas that need to be drugged to stay alive than not, right? And so they were participating in this sort of smear campaign trying to scare consumers away from our products and they were running Super Bowl, you know, this they hired a lobbying firm, they ran Super Bowl ads, they ran, this is the whole incumbent industry, not just the pharma folks. Uh and then it was, you know, the social media campaigns, then paying people to troll online. So, it became this thing, but what became so dangerous about it was it took on a life of its own because once the kind of doubt was out there, it started to self-replicate, right? And so, it took us a long time to get a hold of that and then begin to change the narrative. And that's what we're doing now.

Yeah, I mean we're helping small family farms. Like that's the I mean all of this misdirect it turns out to be sort of it's all very kind of Orwellian the different words that are used and everything else. And so, you know, these were groups that were at the heart of factory farming and, you know, if you go to meet our farmers, right, they're family farms. Yeah. You know and so there was an irony to that for sure.

It's a very shadowy thing that's going on here in the sense that again to return to the Midwest and the Great Plains. I'm wearing a shirt today that we had created with a group called Re:wild and it's of a bison. Um and you know bison are natural, right? Right. Like the auroch which is what today's cattle is, is a European animal was brought here and domesticated. And it's interesting if you read a lot of the literature around the early settlement of the United States, there at least one or two historians will say that livestock were often better colonizers than the Europeans themselves because they just would run over the corn fields of the natives. They would get in the hunting areas of the natives and create all this disruption. A lot of the settlement of the Midwest and West was about displacing all of those bison, displacing all the coyotes, displacing all the wolves, and subduing nature so that we could put livestock on top of it, right? And in some sense, nature has to die and stay dead for a system of livestock to exist. So, it's not natural in and of itself, right? And I think there's a misunderstanding that if I go back and I have some beef and I get in a cold plunge and I do all these like manly things that, you know, if you really look at what's happening right, it is an unnatural system that's been set up and so we talk about the antibiotics. So where we developed our first protein structure at the University of Missouri outside of that building just by coincidence is a field called Sam Burton Field. On that field, they took a specimen in the 40s and sent it to a lab in New Jersey and that was the first antibiotic from that specimen from that bacteria that was used in livestock to allow us to crowd all these animals together. And so the population of poultry exploded after that, right? And the whole poultry industry took off. And so this notion that we're somehow returning to nature when we consume animal protein in the United States is false, right? And what we can do is eat more directly from plants and allow nature to return. That would be real.

Yes. So we've done a lot of work. You know, we did that's one thing that we did see coming was that there would be some of this criticism and I think, you know, there's a book called The Merchants of Doubt and what the game is when you're trying to destroy an industry is to create enough doubt in the consumer's mind it doesn't have to be true, right? And so this book was written about actually some of the same people that are doing it to us were doing it back then to forestall tobacco legislation, right? Um and I'll tell a very quick story back in history around 1851. Uh this is around I think we might have talked about this before where the ice industry up in Boston and New England was making a good amount of money cutting ice from the rivers and the lakes and they were selling it, you know, door by door, but also taking it down to the south. They would ship that ice as far as India to cool the air stockers in on the train. Uh and they would do it by putting sawdust on it and putting in the hollow ship. Okay, so they're making all this money. An entrepreneur in Florida who's a doctor decides that he can figure out a way to mechanize ice to basically create what they called artificial ice, right? And he does this to cool his patients in his yellow fever clinic, right? They catch wind of this up in Boston, a guy named Frederick Tudor. They organize the industry. They create associations and they start to say mechanized ice is contaminated. It will kill you, right? And kills the industry and the entrepreneur in fact dies. Okay. Then something happens, an exogenous event, the Civil War. 1861, there's a blockade. You can't get anything down south. Some people, they end up importing two of these machines, similar machines from France into Louisiana. They start producing again artificial ice. Turns out there was contamination. It was in the rivers around Boston. Okay. And so with the inability to get that ice from the rivers down south, this industry booms and takes off, right? Our job at Beyond Meat and at the other companies working in this space is just to survive this moment because as we know, as you and I know, this factory farm system is taped together with duct tape, antibiotics, subsidies, and the lack of sunlight. Once those things give way, we're going to need an alternative, and we'll be here. We'll be here for that.

Yep. I think what you and I are looking for, you know, is there going to be folks in Marin County or Martha's Vineyard who can afford whatever meat they want. Yeah. But what about the rest of the world? Yeah. Right. And that's what we have to focus on is how do we feed the rest of the people in the world high quality protein? And the thing that I find so fascinating about what you just mentioned on nature is, you know, I look at the process of protein being formed in a plant, but over time just when you get into a problem and you kind of marinate it in, you let it just sort of dominate you, you know, sometimes you start to look at it in different ways. And I was looking at this issue of how protein is created in the plant. And I started to look at how it's created in the stomach of a cow. And the processes are so similar. It's really neat. Like if you look at the stomach of a cow right there, there's bacteria that's converting, you know, non-protein nitrogen into proteins. And they're getting all of that material from plants. Obviously, it's not coming out of thin air. And then you look at what's happening in say a fava bean. There's a little nodule on the root of that fava bean. And inside that nodule is a microbiome. Inside that microbiome is bacteria and it's taking the nitrogen from the air and it's doing what? Amino acids into protein. Right? So it's the same beautiful process of creating protein. One just takes it from the soil and from the air and we put it right on your plate. The other you got to run all those plants through an animal. So I'm convinced that someday this will be the dominant way of doing it. We just got to get through all of the misinformation, all the fear, right? Because there's a lot of fear about this. So and so is going to lose this that we are going to bring innovation back to the American farmer in a way that's beautiful. Like so I have a farm and I've had it most of my life. I bought it from my dad and we had when I was a child, I grew up in the city, but we spent weekends and summers out there and we had holy cows. Let's bring real work and real opportunity back to farmers through innovation. And that's what we've always done. Let's not block it. Let's embrace it. Yeah. And that's what this fear campaign is stopping.

I think it's a really interesting point and for me, you know, you've been plant-based for a long time, so have I. You obviously have discussions with people and, you know, say why do you do this and, you know, people have always done this and so on and so people always done a lot of things like and for me, you know, and I can go we can both of us right we go toe-to-toe on these things well, you know, the ancestors ate a lot of plants but they also ate animals and all these other things right? At the end of the day to me everything changed in 1859 and then later in 1880 through this period Darwin was publishing right and he was saying right that wait a minute, you know, we all come from the same place and we all have the same DNA system, same materials in our body, same infrastructure, we have the same central nervous systems maybe slightly modified. And so for me it came down to kindness. You know, if I have the opportunity to allow some other being to live, I'm going to take that opportunity and do it. Yeah. Right. I don't want to rise in the morning and go to bed at night thinking I've taken away everything someone has. And I think part of what's happened in our culture is that we have adopted so blindly this idea that you and I are subjects and the rest of life on Earth objects, right? There's no scientific basis for that view. There's a cultural basis for it. But how do we get people to think about just kindness? My view, I cannot consider myself a kind person and participate in the modern factory farm system. I just can't do it.

Opportunities around the world are coming into focus now where farmers are being paid to set aside land to sequester carbon and let biodiversity come back. And that is a sophisticated culture. That is one where we say there's more here than just us. And so I look at the United States and think we have this incredible opportunity to not only solve climate but bring back biodiversity.

There's very smart people working on this. There in this short film we did, Planting Change. And so it's not just the human health stuff that motivates us. And you know that you mentioned the swap meat study with Chris Gardner and Dr. Christopher Gardner. He did a terrific job doing that. And by the way, people are like, 'Oh, well that was funded by Beyond Meat.' You think like Stanford is going to risk the reputation for a company like us. Like it was a rigorous, rigorous study.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it was, we didn't have, you know, it was an unrestricted grant that we gave and the results could have been horrible for us. But we knew right that when you go to plants and you keep the saturated fat at the right level and you keep the sodium at the right level and you use ingredients with integrity, you're going to drive great results. So I was like, fine, go for it.

Yeah.

Coconut oil, too.

Yeah.

Does it all.

Why would you need to do that?

I love this idea that you can take all the energy that's coming at you and you can use it to be stronger. Like you can just like chisel, you know, just keep stripping it down, stripping it down, stripping it down. And so that's kind of what we did is we said, 'Okay, all these things are coming at us like, you know, okay, how can we just get better, right? How can we take out anything that could be of concern?' And so, you know, we had this really longstanding program with Stanford and so I had access to all their doctors and stuff. And so I was talking, what can we do here? Like how do we make this unassailable? And so we started, you know, switching out the oils and so took out coconut oil, put in avocado oil, you know, started to dramatically simplify the ingredient list. Started to vary up the proteins. Like when I started the company, there was a lot of soy stuff out there. I don't want to use soy, I want to use peas, right? And soy is terrific. I drink a ton of soy milk. Love soy. It's complete protein, all that stuff. But I wanted to use something different. So, we started using peas. And then peas became pretty dominant. And I think people like variety. They want to have different types of things. So, we said we're going to start using a blend of lentils, peas, brown rice, fava beans, things like that. So, we diversified the protein base, brought in the avocado oil, and that's when we started getting all these endorsements, right? All these certifications rather. And then we launched what we call Beyond Four, which was the sort of newest line of products. And that together with things like our steak, they're just, you can't, there's nothing to attack, right? And so now it's a marketing thing. How do we get the message out there?

Yeah. Thank you.

It's going to be tough. Yeah. Yeah. That is a very rigorous process where they test for all kinds of contaminants. They disallow certain ingredients to begin with and then, you know, it's this process of how do you, you know, because our system is overrun as an agriculture system with toxins and chemicals and things of that nature. So you got to be very careful. What I love about fava beans and about things like lentils that are regenerative, actually regenerative, right, is you don't need to use so much fertilizer, right? And so we just keep a very clean process. And even the separation process we use, talking about the fava beans, you know, you're literally blending, you're milling it into flour and you're placing that flour in an air chamber. There's no caustic chemicals or anything. It's separating because the density and particle sizes are different.

Yes. It's just so neat to me. And it's like, and again, like it's not the eating meat, you know, when that was the way to aggregate. Like I always think about sun beating down on the plains and there's all this grass that's growing and how do you access that grass if you're a native or someone who just arrives there, right? Let's say the 1600s. Well, you access that grass through bison, right? Because bison are aggregating all that in their bodies and they're converting it into protein you can use. Okay. Well, fast forward to today. There's a process that we can use that's beautiful and clean that takes a protein right from the plant and aggregates it for you so you don't need to use the animal anymore. Seems like a better idea to me, right? And that's all we're doing.

The death step. So they've already done that process. So okay, if you look at nature, you learn from nature. One of my greatest teachers said, 'Observe nature. Nature will show you how it's going.' So in this instance, the bison was exactly watching it. So you're just doing that process to make that bioavailable for a human without having the land, the drugs, the animal killing and all of that stuff. That's right. And so people need to understand, like listen, if I had a wand of common sense or openness maybe is a better term, if people were to listen...

Most aren't.

No, not at all. But this is a highly valued clean food, proven. Yeah.

We've had to do it. And you know, it's a personal journey for me. It's one for you, too. And I think both of us are alike in this regard where this is just our story. It's our effort to try to understand the world and produce something that we think is valuable. It's not, if someone doesn't want it, that's okay, but let's make sure they understand it. Yeah. And then they can make a decision. And for me, that's the most important and next step of our journey. And by the way, we're having fun doing this. Like you and I were talking before the podcast started around, you know, we've got a new product that we showed you in a different form a while ago and it continues to evolve and it's four ingredients and it's made from fava bean protein, potato protein and psyllium husk, a great fiber. And then the last ingredient is water and it's got 27 grams of protein. It's got only 140 calories. It has, you know, like no saturated fat and it's just a new form of center of the plate protein that it comes like a ground piece of ground meat, right? And so we're going to keep doing things like that. It's not trying to be beef, pork, or poultry. It's just trying to be a great source of protein, right? And I think the work that we can do together is, right, how do we create an even better piece of meat from that?

Right. And so let's use ingenuity, innovation to improve human health, help the farmer, help the earth, help the animals.