Another food giant backs away from fake meat
McDonald’s has scrapped its McPlant burger due to low demand, a company executive said last week, dealing another blow to the flailing fake meat industry.
The food giant debuted the McPlant in 2022 by offering it in 600 restaurants throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas-Fort Worth. But McDonald’s USA President Joe Erlinger says the plant-based burger has been a failed experiment in both markets.
“I don’t think the U.S. consumer is coming to McDonald’s looking for the McPlant or other plant-based proteins,” Erlinger said at the Wall Street Journal’s Global Food Forum on Wednesday.
The McPlant patty, which contains ingredients such as potatoes, rice, and peas, has been a joint collaboration between McDonald’s and fake meat manufacturer Beyond Meat.
Beyond Meat’s fall from grace
Beyond Meat is the fake meat industry’s flagship enterprise. Founded in 2009 to “fight climate change,” the company counts Bill Gates as one of its investors. On the day it went public in 2019, its stock jumped 163%, which analysts said was the best one-day performance for a major American company in two decades. It has since supplied its plant-based fake meat to McDonalds, Dunkin’ Donuts, Taco Bell, Walmart and PepsiCo. In 2013, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) named Beyond Meat “Company of the Year” and it has been endorsed by several Hollywood celebrities.
But the corporate sensation is suffering a public fall from grace amid fading demand for fake meat. On Thursday, the company was trading at just $6.66 a share — a 97% drop from $235 a share in July 2019, according to the New York Post.
In May, Beyond Meat reported an 18% drop in revenue in the first quarter compared to a year ago. The company repeatedly cited “demand softness” and “weakening demand” as reasons for the drop.
Last year, Beyond Meat was forced to slash its annual sales forecast from $375 million–$415 million to $360 million–$380 million. In 2022, the company cut a fifth of its workforce when its stock dropped nearly 80%.
In addition to McDonald’s, major restaurant chains like Dunkin’ Donuts, Del Taco, and Carl’s Jr are now scaling back purchases of Beyond Meat products or ending their relationships with the fake meat company entirely.
A dying industry: ‘We slightly believed what the press were telling us about everyone stopping eating meat’
But the industry’s woes go beyond Beyond Meat. At Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat's top competitor, shares the company distributes to employees plummeted 89% as of last June. US fake meat company Tattooed Chef last year announced it would be filing for bankruptcy. British company Meatless Farm, which had partnered with Whole Foods, narrowly avoided shutting its doors when it was acquired by VFC Foods in August. In May 2023, sausage maker Heck decided to scale back its vegan ambitions after suffering losses.
“I suppose we slightly believed what the press were telling us about everyone stopping eating meat, but that hasn’t really happened,” said Heck founder Andrew Keeble.
Bill Gates: ‘Use regulation’ to increase demand for fake meat
Even billionaire Bill Gates, who has also funded other fake meat companies such as Impossible Foods and Upside Foods, has acknowledged that government regulation may be necessary to force people to eat fake meat.
“I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat,” Gates told MIT Technology Review in 2021. “I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.”
While Gates and his World Economic Forum (WEF) colleagues hope to significantly reduce meat consumption by 2030 and, ideally, would like to phase it out completely by 2050, British investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman says the global real meat industry is forecasted to rise up to 7% annually.
