Fake meat industry continues to plunge
The fake meat industry continues to nosedive as its flagship enterprise, Beyond Meat, continues to hemorrhage cash.
In a third-quarter earnings report last week, the company reported an 8.7% drop in net revenue year-over-year at $75.3 million. While gross profit was better than last year, it was still a loss of $7.3 million. Beyond Meat’s net loss was $70.5 million, down from $101.7 million from last year.
“We are disappointed by our overall results as we continue to experience worsening sector-specific and broader consumer headwinds,” Beyond Meat President and CEO Ethan Brown said in the report. “As we shared last week, we are conducting a review of our global operations for purposes of further and significantly reducing our operating expense base as we seek to accelerate our transition to a sustainable and, ultimately, profitable business.”
Last quarter the company’s revenues had plunged 30% compared to last year. As a result the company slashed its annual sales forecast from $375 million–$415 million to $360 million–$380 million. The continued losses persist despite the company cutting a fifth of its workforce last year as its stock dropped nearly 80%.
Beyond Meat, founded in 2009 to “fight climate change,” counts globalist billionaire 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 the company has been endorsed by several Hollywood celebrities.
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% since 2021. US fake meat company Tattooed Chef announced in June its intention to file 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, 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.
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.”
But nutrition experts have been warning against fake meat. Nutritionist and Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better Meat) author Diana Rodgers says lab-grown meat, such as that sold by Upside Foods, is still not as healthy as McDonalds.
“I’d rather eat my shoe than lab-grown meat,” Rodgers stated.
British investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman warns against even plant-based meat, which she says sometimes contain up to 30 artificial ingredients.
“Artificial plant-based proteins tend to be loaded with 'anti-nutrients' - compounds that make it harder for our guts to absorb beneficial macro and micronutrients,” Blythman wrote in an article for the Daily Mail. “Essentially, it's less digestible than real meat, and certainly less nutritious.”
While Gates and his World Economic Forum (WEF) colleagues hope to significantly reduce meat consumption by 2030 and, ideally, phase it out completely by 2050, Blythman says the global real meat industry is forecasted to rise up to 7% annually.
There are also significant concerns about fake meat’s purported contribution to the climate. Plants require fertilizer, processing and shipping, too, and lab-grown meat is also expected to be environmentally taxing.
A preprint study published in April by University of California, Davis researchers found that if fake meat becomes as widely accepted as globalists would like, it could be extremely harmful to the climate.
The researchers found that the production process for fake meat emits 246 to 1,508 kg of carbon dioxide per kilogram of fake meat, while retail meat production produces only about 60 kg of CO2 per kilogram. According to the scientists’ estimates, producing fake meat is 4 to 25 times worse for the climate than real beef.
“Currently, animal cell-based meat products are being produced at a small scale and at an economic loss, however companies are intending to industrialize and scale-up production,” the scientists opine in the study.
“Results indicate that the environmental impact of near-term animal cell-based meat production is likely to be orders of magnitude higher than median beef production if a highly refined growth medium is utilised,” they concluded.
