Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown on sustainable food systems and the science of protein

Fresh off his IPO, Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown joins Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel to discuss the evolution of plant-based burgers, the science of protein, why his company avoids GMOs, and their mission to help create a more sustainable food system. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Sam from The Vergecast on this week's interview episode. We have a super interesting guest, Ethan Brown. He's the CEO of Beyond Meat. They're one of the big companies out there that are making meat from plants. You probably know them. You probably know Impossible Foods. Beyond Meat just IPOed. It's been a rocket ship success story. They're making burgers with Carl's Jr. You can buy Beyond Meat patties in the grocery store. We talked to Ethan really deeply about the science of how these burgers are constructed from plants, how they're different from Impossible Foods, how the company got started, where the investment's coming from, and where they're going next. And really, the future of how meat should work, which is a wild thing to say on a tech podcast. But I assure you, this is a lot of tech, a lot of science. Check it out. It's Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  So I'm here with Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown. Thank you for joining me, Ethan.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  So Beyond Meat just IPOed. It's a big inflection point for a company. You run a big public company now. But I just want to start at the beginning and then I want to go into the future. How did you start Beyond Meat? It seems like plant-based meats are having a moment. This has been a journey for you and the rest of the industry, but how did this begin for you?

• 2:35Speaker 03

  I really started thinking about this business a long time ago. And it began with the motivation for this in a broader sense. And the first area that I looked at was as a kid, was around the use of animals in agriculture. And I'd had some exposure to that. I grew up in Washington DC and in College Park, Maryland. But as a very young child, my dad bought a farm that was meant to be a recreation place for us because he didn't like living in the city and wanted to spend time in the country, which is where he grew up. And so we would spend time on the weekends and summer at this farm. And being a little bit entrepreneurial himself, he's a professor, but decided to start a

• 3:16Speaker 03

  dairy operation there. So we had about 100 Holstein cows there in a milk operation. And nothing untoward or particularly traumatizing in any way occurred. But I just began to think about that question about, you know, why are some animals part of the food system and others part of our domestic lives in our homes, you know, sleeping in our bed, taking a dog, for example. And just tucked that away and became an adult and went into the clean tech area, working in clean energy. And the motivation for that was really around carbon and around the desire to create an economy that wasn't so dependent on carbon. And so those two pieces were with me from a very early age, thinking about a career

• 3:59Speaker 03

  and how to make an impact. And as I got deeper and deeper into clean energy, it became really apparent that even though We were looking at the problem three times a day in the form of protein at the center of the plate. We were simply using that to fuel our bodies and then going on and kind of opining and wringing our hands about all the problems with fossil fuel. But as you start to look at the math and the sheer amount of greenhouse gas emissions, most carbon and methane coming from livestock, it becomes really clear that that is a major driver and in my view, one that exceeds automotive and power plant emissions globally. And so I felt that, given my earlier interest in trying to understand the right relationship

• 4:44Speaker 03

  with animals and my professional interest in climate, that it made sense for me to look at this problem. And the thing that fascinated me from the very beginning was that nobody was looking at it in the same way that you would look at an energy problem, in the sense of, okay, it's a big global problem, there are big issues at stake, sustainability of the planet's at stake. So you don't want to get two chefs together in a, you know, in a sort of side lab at a major company and try to solve this problem. You want to create an environment where you have the best scientists, the best engineers, the best managers, all together, fund them properly. Like, if this is a global problem, what would be wrong with spending two, three, four billion dollars to solve it? And give them that mandate of building meat directly from plants and then kind of get out of the way.

• 5:29Speaker 03

  So that was something that started to emerge in my thinking to the point where I couldn't put it away. I couldn't continue to do what I was doing and ignore it. And so it really wasn't courage, it was more significant discomfort with not acting on something that I was seeing so clearly. And so I began the company, shifted out of the energy sector and into food.

• 5:49Nilay Patel?

  How long ago was this?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  I started the company in early 2009, I think January of 2009. So I'd looked at the question for a number of years and I'd looked at specifically different ways to attack it, including lab-grown meat and a bunch of different approaches and settled upon this idea of essentially just taking the animal out of the process. Because if you look at what the animal's doing, they're essentially, you know, eating an enormous amount of vegetation and they're consuming a tremendous amount of water. And they're using that digestive system, their muscular system to create a piece of muscle, which we then harvest as meat. But they're starting with plants and they're starting with water. So it seemed intuitive to me, anyway, that you would see if you could just build the same thing, but directly from plants and not by trying to make a soybean masquerade

• 6:34Speaker 03

  as a steak, but rather understand the fundamentals of meat. And, and once you begin to understand that, it gets really exciting because meat is really these five things. It's those amino acids, it's lipid, it's trace minerals, it's small amount of vitamins, and it's predominantly water, just like our bodies. All of that can be sourced from plants. And so the idea was can we use science and technology and innovation and really attack this as a serious global issue and figure out a way to not use the animal to organize those inputs?

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm looking at a quote here, uh, right from when you guys IPO'd and you say, you refer to the animals as bioreactors and your goal is to, to bypass the animal. And you call the animal agriculture's greatest bottleneck, uh, which I think is a pretty remarkable way to think about an animal, uh, in the equation. But you're saying the animal is taking plants and water and turning it into meat and I can do the same thing. That clearly was a 10-year process, right? You started in 2009, we're, we're here at IPO stage now. What did you have to invent in those 10 years? What is the actual process by which you take plants and water?

• 7:40Speaker 03

  It's many, many decades of work that are still left. So, you know, we, we have just started to scratch the surface on this. And that's the thing that's both so exciting for us. And if you're an incumbent, potentially scary for you because our target isn't moving. You know, the animal is the animal and we're day after day trying to figure out how do we recreate that muscle, that, uh, that combination of muscle, fat, water in a way that to the human sensory experience delivers the exact same satiating, delicious experience, all the great nutrition, et cetera. And so, um, you know, it, it took, uh, first changing the mindset. And, and so even beginning the company, we were using a lot of food scientists

• 8:22Speaker 03

  and they're very talented people, they're very bright. But in my view, we kept bringing the same toolkit to the problem. And, and so we said, okay, well, we have to be better. We have to understand this better. And so how do we do that? Uh, let's go out and get scientists from every discipline that might be relevant. So whether it's chemistry, biochemistry... You know, it's pick any discipline that would be able to impart even the littlest bit of knowledge about how animal protein is structured and we're going to go get that person, we're going to assemble them and bring them together with engineers and then the right managers. And so we did that and it was, it was, you know, at first a smaller amount of funding and then we were able to get more funding and I just dumped more

• 9:04Speaker 03

  and more funding into this team and gave them that clear goal. It wasn't complicated. It was here's a piece of meat, use all the imaging equipment you can find. And so they pulled stuff out of biomedical, you know, a lot of like protein chemists, for example, have come on from our team out of biomedical that really understand protein. And so they began to use this equipment to better characterize a piece of meat. And once you start to see that blueprint, that architecture, you then can go about that process of sourcing those inputs directly from plants and creating a piece of meat, truly creating a piece of meat directly from plants. And this is gets to that argument that I think is worth having, which is, do you need to define meat by its origin? You know, does meat have to come

• 9:47Speaker 03

  from a chicken, cow or pig? Or could you shift and define meat by its composition? And if you define it by its composition, it gets really exciting because there's so many different routes you can take to get to that endpoint. And that's really what we're about.

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  So, right now, you have one endpoint, right? The Beyond Burger is out. I just bought some in a grocery store a couple of weeks ago.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  It was good. You've got one in, it's Carl's Jr., I think is selling Beyond Burgers, Del Taco.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  Is that, is that all the same? Do you have different processes for the grocery store versus Carl's Jr. versus Del Taco?

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I think one of the most challenging jobs at Beyond Meat is in production and operations. It's challenging because we aren't satisfied with our current products. And so as much as I love to hear, and I really do, that you've gone out to buy the product, part of me cringes because I know that I have a product here that's so much better than that. And I want you as a consumer to have that. And so we have this program here called the Beyond Meat Rapid and Relentless Innovation Program. And it's designed to try to make the product that you just bought obsolete as quick as we can, because our rate of understanding this, and it's a wonderful discovery process when you bring Bright people together and give them a clear goal. They begin to understand things better and they begin to knock down obstacles. So our current burger that we're going to be releasing later in the summer,

• 11:04Speaker 03

  I feel is so much better than the one you just had. And so it's not only, you know, do we have different forms? So the Del Taco form is different from the one you'd have in a burger, but we're also constantly trying to upgrade and replace the products that that people today love. And that's a risky proposition. It's it's one that people have challenged me on and said, you know, why would you do that? People love this product. You're growing at a rapid clip. But it's as much as I respect the fact that people love it, we are on this mission to build a perfect piece of meat. And that product is imperfect. There are things about it that aren't exactly like meat, and that really bothers us.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  What are those things?

• 11:41Speaker 03

  This is crazy for me to be saying this and my PR person's looking at me, but she's a pro. I'm not, you know, I don't like the aroma as much as as I should. It's close to animal protein in certain ways, but it's it's and it's aroma is a fascinating subject. So there's well over a thousand molecules that make meat taste and have that smell that we're so accustomed to. And what we're doing is we're isolating those molecules literally from meat. And then we're characterizing them. And then we're trying to match them with molecules and plants that will deliver the same experience to our human sensory system. And so we're kind of, you know, we're continuing to funnel down and get closer and closer. But we're still, if it's right, if the target's right in the middle, we're still kind of coming in left sometimes. We're coming in right. We're not yet landing right on the target.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  And I think the one that we have today that's going to be releasing this summer is closer. So that'd be the first thing. Second is the way it transitions in color. It's still too red when it's been cooked. And that's one hand, that's consumers get used to it. They're fine with it. But on the other, it bothers me because as people take it home for the first time, they maybe try to cook that out because that's what they're used to doing with animal protein. And so we need to make that better, that color transition better. And we worked a lot on that. Last is distribution of fat. I really want the fat to distribute in a way that doesn't muscle. And we're still working on that. It distributes some muscle into pockets and it's sort of interwoven in a way that's really, really nuanced and gives you that burst of of fat when you bite into a piece of animal protein. We need to get better at that. And I think the product that we're releasing is getting closer.

• 13:10Nilay Patel?

  So I think this this leads to like a really interesting and big philosophical question that you touched on a little bit when you talked about defining meat by its composition. But you are right now describing, I need to replace meat. I need to one to one replace a hamburger patty so that your expectations of what happens with a Beyond Meat burger are exactly the same as your expectations of a hamburger patty. Is that, is that the right goal? I mean, it's a, is a really big foundational question. Is it that people need hamburgers that are exactly like hamburgers of the past? Or is it we need to change our food supply?

• 13:46Speaker 03

  My mother asked me that question a lot. She's like, she's like, why are you so focused on perfectly replicating animal protein? Why don't you just build a new source of protein for the center of the plate that people get really excited about? I think we have to earn that, right? We have to prove that we can do this because the only thing that I know with absolute certainty about the consumer is that the consumer loves meat. You know, most of us do, right? You know, sort of 94, 95% of the population here in the United States. And so that's a really clear target for me, right? If I start to try to create a new flavor profile, a new consistency, that's really hard. And what I want to do is prove through science that you don't need the animal to produce a piece of meat. And then I have a ton of freedom after that.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  But I feel like we need to pass through that or else we just become one of many other choices. You know, our hope and our dream is that we'll continue as a species to go on loving and consuming meat. It's just plant-based meat. And if I just offer an alternative to something that everyone loves, I think we'll miss that opportunity.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  So really, just explain like I'm five style. How do you go from, like, what are, what are your raw ingredients? What are the plants you're using? And then how does that turn into a burger?

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Right. And this is really important for us to start to educate the public about because it's been misconstrued in a lot of ways. Our product starts with a legume or pulse or any feedstock that has a lot of amino acids in it. And so at that stage, what's happening is the protein and the fiber are being separated. And that's done by basically putting a flour into, into an aqueous mix, a water-based mix that has, and you change the pH level in the water, the protein and fat separate out. The protein is dried and it's run through our system, which instead of being the digestive tract of an animal and the muscular system of an animal, it's essentially heating, cooling, and pressure. And that heating, cooling and pressure resets the structure so that instead of presenting

• 15:40Speaker 03

  it like it would in a plant, it presents like it would in muscle to our system. I mean, it's not exactly the same, of course. From there, then we have to add flavor in to give all the aroma and great satiating taste of meat. And we do that through that system of identifying the different molecules that drive flavor. And then we work with outside vendors to help us scale that up. And so that's pretty much it.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  Those are different plant based. So you're saying we've identified a thousand molecules that create aroma in meat. We know that we can get four of those molecules from, I don't know, a grape. And you process a grape and then add those. Like, is that how that works?

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's actually well over a thousand. And it's a process of identifying the ones that are the main drivers. But then take color, for example. We've been very strict with our team, and this has been something that has sometimes retarded the speed at which we can move. But I think it's the right long term bet to make. And that is to put really strict guardrails around what our scientists can do. And I think it starts with two questions. And the first is, you know, what can science do? And I think we're providing an answer to that, that over enough time and enough money, you can build a piece of meat directly from plants. But then the second question, which is really important, is what should science do? And whether it's moms or dads or just customers

• 17:00Speaker 03

  throughout the world that I've personally interacted with, I've come to really believe that the consumer in this application does not want genetically modified ingredients. It overly complicates the story. It distracts from the main idea. And so we've kept GMOs out. We've kept artificial flavors out. We've kept anything that's not natural out of our product. And that does make it harder. But they, my challenge to the science team is to scour the earth, uncover the parts of nature that exist today that you can use to advance this mission. And so on color, as an example, we use beets, we use pomegranate, we use things like apple fiber. I mean, it's a pretty simple concept around apple fiber as an example. You bite into an apple, you set it on a table, you come back five minutes

• 17:43Speaker 03

  later, it doesn't look as good, right? Because it's starting to brown. That's oxidization going on. But we need to find every element we can in the plant kingdom to transition that product from a Really nice red appearance to a black and gray appearance. And how do we do that without genetically modifying ingredients? So, so those are the type of plants that we'll pull from. And what I'm proud about in that regard is I can sit down at a table with my own family, my own children are growing, or a family that we're having dinner with and say, you know, these are the ingredients in this product. You can recognize them. You've had them before in your diet. We're just presenting them in a different form.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  So, just to be clear, I mean, there's no evidence that GMOs are bad, right? You're saying this is a... Well, it's, it's great for a food CEO to say there's no evidence that GMOs are bad. So, you agree with that? There's no evidence that they're bad?

• 18:35Speaker 03

  I was saying that in our case, we're not doing it because I have some inherent fear of GMOs. But I actually don't have an opinion really on GMOs. Like, I just, I got so many other things going on, I haven't focused on it enough. You know, I don't know whether there's... I do believe in this concept of unintended consequences, that just time and time again, we see it in our actions. But I wouldn't declaratively state that there's nothing wrong, there's no scientific risk to GMOs. I don't believe that. I just, I'm sort of agnostic on it.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. You're already, you're already asking them to accept one kind of sub, one kind of big substitution.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, one element of change, and so why complicate it? The one area I would agree with is that notion of unintended consequences. I think we're pretty bad as a species about thinking through the total consequence of a given scientific change. I think we have, we have example of example about that. I'm not an expert on GMOs, and I don't really intend to be. It's not, not our focus, but that would be my one concern.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  So, I want to get really nerdy about pea protein for five minutes. I asked, I asked our, our deputy editor, Liz Lopato, who used to be our science editor, and she, she requested that we get nerdy about pea protein. So, you, you said a legume is the basis, it's like the beginning of the product. That's pea protein, right?

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so pick your favorite one. Yeah, but we happen to use that today, but we, we don't necessarily need to be using it tomorrow. It's what's available to us. And if you like getting nerdy about proteins, I'll, I'll join you on that.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  We really use that because it's available in significant quantities in a way that some other proteins aren't. But in my view, from a consumer perspective, the thing that recommends peas the most strongly is what it's not, and it's not soy. And the consumer told us very early that they wanted to avoid having additional soy in their diet.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  Why is that exactly?

• 20:23Speaker 03

  It gets back to the same thing. I mean, people have concerns about different types of ingredients and, you know, there's different conflicting medical literature about different types of ingredients. And so, you know, if there's a controversy or dis-ease, discomfort with, with a particular type of ingredient, I don't want to complicate my product with it. And so, we looked for alternate sources of protein very early. Very funny story, we had a massive supplier who is a big starch company come out to meet us when I was just, I don't know, maybe three years into the business, something like that. And they flew their private jet to the small town where our first operation was, and they came to see us. And we had like four or five people working in the business at the time. And,

• 21:05Speaker 03

  and on the day that they came, we weren't even in production. And, and so, they get off their private jet, they come to visit us. It's like me sitting in this dark factory talking to them. It turned out to be a great partnership. I'm glad they stuck with us. We give them a ton of business now and they make a lot of money from us. But, so peas are, are available in this level of supply because they were scaled up for starch. This particular process of separating protein from fiber was scaled up to, to sort of the starch market. About 15 years ago, some folks at this company said, well, we'll go ahead and start selling the protein into the protein space. And so, that's really why we use peas and why they're available. But there's nothing magical about them. You can get protein from a number of sources. And one of the products I'm really excited about is our breakfast

• 21:50Speaker 03

  sausage. That is protein from sunflower seeds, it has protein from mung bean, it has protein from brown rice, and it has pea protein in it. So you'll see us continue to diversify the number and amount of, of proteins that we use.

• 22:02Nilay Patel?

  Right, because one of the, as you guys did go through IPO, one of the flags was raised was that, I think it's Your major supplier, you have but a single supplier of pea protein. You count for like 79% of their revenue. Is that imperative that you need to diversify? Is that something that worries you?

• 22:19Speaker 03

  No, we actually do have more. I'm not sure that was, that may have been a sort of snapshot in time, that particular statistic. I mean, we do have more than one supplier and we use them pretty evenly as we're going forward. But there's additional ones coming on. I mean, anytime the market is working in this regard, anytime there's an opportunity, you see more and more people come into the space. So three or four years from now, you'll see many more suppliers of different types of protein. And I like to work with the small ones. I mean, we've got people who are separating chickpea protein. We're testing that lupin protein. You know, I've got mustard seed protein sent to me. Once you start to think about the plant kingdom as a source of protein for human consumption, you really get an enormous amount of variety. And it's a question of getting the supply chain together that can supply it to us at scale.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  I like the image of you in your office getting a box of random proteins. It's very 80s movie.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Crazy stuff. It is. And when I got the mustard seed, I actually tried to make a protein water out of it because it has like a nice translucence to it. It didn't really work.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  It's very mad scientist. So what you seem to be describing to me at a very high level is you can take proteins from a huge variety of plants, run them through your process and end up with a burger. Is that the goal that you're kind of input independent?

• 23:36Speaker 03

  Yes. Five years from now, you'll be able to go to a meat case and you'll be able to get sausage that's not only made from pea protein, but from lentil protein, from lupin, as I mentioned. Pick your favorite protein source so that mom, still the CEO of the household, still the primary decision maker about what they're going to bring home. If I said, well, we're going to go ahead and rebuild meat from plants. We're going to offer you pea protein in five different form factors. We're going to offer it to you as a steak. We're going to offer it to you as a burger. We're going to offer it to you as chicken. We're going to offer it as turkey, et cetera. You'd say, well, I don't want to have the same protein every day. That's not how the consumer behaves. The consumer goes to the supermarket, let's say on Sunday, and they buy salmon for the family, they buy steak, they buy burgers, et cetera.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  I want to make sure that we're giving the consumer a diversity of protein. So, you know, each protein is slightly different, right? Each has a different amino acid profile, et cetera. I want that diversity in my own diet and I want the consumer to have it.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  This is interesting because you're talking and you started talking about defining meat by composition. So does, starting with pea protein versus mustard seed protein, does that change the flavor of the final result?

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Some proteins have more off flavors to them than others, but it's just a question of time and investment. Like you will find, for any given off flavor, you can find a counter that will help you to create the right overall end result. Some are much harder than others, so yes, they're not all created equal in that regard.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  But when you make a burger, you're obviously targeting beef, right? You're trying to recreate what ground beef is. Can you target?

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  A chicken breast? Is that, can you take a pea and turn it into that too?

• 25:11Speaker 03

  You can take a lot of different proteins and turn it into that, and it's just a question of finding the right flavor profile through that system we talked about before, identifying what's driving the poultry taste and then creating that with plant material.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  So I guess my question is, is that the right final product mix? Like you have a burger that looks like ground beef and you have a chicken breast that looks like chicken and you don't necessarily care where the protein started from? Or is it what you're describing, you know, you've got a bunch of different formats, a sausage or burger, what have you, and the consumer is picking the input protein?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  I think it'd be really neat to, like if you go to the supermarket today, you can get turkey sausage, you can get, you know, all kinds of different sausages, whether it's pork and et cetera. I think it'd be really neat to be able to offer a variety of proteins as we build out the product offerings. But today, our focus is really on three platforms. It's on beef, poultry and pork, and it's predominantly on beef and pork because of the way the consumer is pulling away from it. I mean, a real seminal moment, I think, in this entire shift that we're seeing was the World Health Organization's mega-analysis, I think in 2015. And there are some flashy headlines that came out about it. It's actually, I think, a pretty decent overview of The literature on the connection between high levels of animal protein consumption

• 26:26Speaker 03

  and certain diseases that we seem to be struggling with. And so they, whether it was cancer, heart disease, diabetes, they did an analysis of these studies. And the problem with the studies were a lot of them are correlations versus causal, but there's enough evidence out there that suggests that, you know, high levels of processed meat consumption and high levels of red meat consumption do have a negative impact on key health parameters. But one of the most startling headlines from that mega-analysis was that they put red meat and processed meat in the same category as smoking in terms of carcinogen. And that, I think, sent some shockwaves throughout the meat industry. They disputed it, of course. But I remember seeing, we get the Meeting Place magazine publication, which is the trade magazine of the meat industry, because I view myself as part of it. And that was on the front cover.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  You know, so I think, and what's happening to the consumer is that whether it's that study, or NIH does a study, or UCLA does one, or pick your favorite northeastern university does one, they're being, consumers are being bombarded with this data, that there's something going on with high levels of animal protein consumption and these diseases we're suffering from. And then more popular formats come out like What the Health, et cetera, that continue to feed the unease with certain consumption patterns that we've had for years.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  And you're saying that the sort of explosion in plant-based meat, interest, if not maybe demand yet, but there's certainly a lot of interest.

• 27:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what's happened, and we call these the four horsemen, and I think it's really, it's sort of creating this perfect storm around animal protein. Like, if you look at, you know, these human health issues that we've talked about, if you look at climate, and then you look at natural resources, all the information about how much water is used, et cetera, and then finally, animal welfare. All four of those are closing in on our old perspective about animal protein. And it's demanding that we use innovation to come up with something new, because I don't think people want to stop eating meat. Meats taste great, it's satiating, there's nutritional benefit to it. So let's use science innovation to just get through this, come up with a new way to build meat that's healthier for us, instead of debate it and point fingers, et cetera.

• 28:33Nilay Patel?

  So you just said you're a part of the meat industry, which is interesting contention. What is that? Do the Tyson people, like, follow you around in their cars? Like, what is their reaction to you?

• 28:44Speaker 03

  No, I have a good relationship with Tyson and there was a negative article that came out about the relationship between Beyond Meat and Tyson, which that day, I think I sent John Tyson a note within, you know, an hour or so, he sent me a note back saying the same thing, like, no, we've got no issue here. We're all trying to sustainably feed the growing global population. So for meat processors, this is something that should not be a threat because they're running protein and fat through their systems, right? They're, they're starting with a carcass and they're ending with a form product. They can run our protein and fat through, through their system or, or a competitor to us, you know, they can, they can do that, right? So it's, it's not about them becoming economically impaired by this

• 29:25Speaker 03

  if they're willing to think outside the box a little bit. The second piece of, of the supply chain here is really, you know, the cattlemen themselves. Yeah, that's a sticky one. But if you then go one level below and think about landowners, if you own land that is fertile and can grow crops, you're going to make more money, in my view, growing a protein crop that goes directly into a human's mouth versus growing a feed crop that goes in an animal's mouth. And if you look at, and we did this with the University of Michigan, we did an environmental analysis of our process versus, versus ground beef. We use 93% less land. So if I'm a farmer that owns, let's say 100 acres of arable land that I'm planting crops on, I can now make the same number of burgers in seven

• 30:08Speaker 03

  acres that I used to use 100 for. So I now have been given 93 acres to make more money with, right? So for me, that's about economic growth, it's about innovation, it's about continuing the American story of making something that's good meat better, right? And so I love talking to farmers about, I love talking to feed conferences and, and farm bureaus because I think this is as powerful an innovation for American agriculture as the digitalization of communication was for, for many of our urban businesses.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you're squeezing the, the cattle people on both sides, right? You're, you're saying to their feed suppliers, hey, you can make more money selling us, you know, whatever plant-based protein you can grow here. And on the processing side, I actually want to unpack this, you're saying they can take raw Beyond Meat and spit out a rack of ribs?

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Over time.

• 30:55Nilay Patel?

  So that's the goal, right?

• 30:58Speaker 03

  I don't know today. Yeah, that is the goal. That is the goal.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  But, but so in the middle, the people who raise cows currently, they've got to be feeling squeezed.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  I think they are, but I think there's a lot of ways to respond and I'm super respectful of that community and I know it well. And, you know, many of them also own land and there's a lot of things you can do with that land. Not all of it, right? Some grazing land is grazing because there are not other uses for it, but a lot of it you can use in other ways.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a quick break for an ad. We'll be right back.

• 31:35Speaker 01

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• 32:20Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat. So what do you think your competition is? Is it? Traditional meat of that variety, is it, you know, I have to ask you, like, there's Impossible Burger collecting as many headlines as anyone right now. Is that, is it, where do you see that primary competition coming from?

• 33:11Speaker 03

  We focus the most on the meat market itself. That's the most attractive market. It's 1.4 trillion dollars. And, uh, and so my focus is more squarely on that than any other sort of plant-based company out there. I think Impossible's got a lot of good people working for it, and they've got the right mission. But it's, it's gonna come down to a panel place of ideas. And I think we have the stronger one, in the sense that we're gonna do this without genetically modifying inputs, right? We're gonna do this without using soy. Particularly GMO question is a really important distinction that people need to think about. And I think we've made the right call there.

• 33:43Nilay Patel?

  So pull that up. What is, specifically, what is the difference between you and Impossible? The burger, um, not in terms of the company, but in terms of the burger?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's, there's several. And again, I don't want to admit it's a big market. I hope Impossible's very successful. It's just a question of, you know, our approach versus theirs. I think the key difference in, in the burgers is one, you know, they've, they've done this genetic modification, uh, with essentially, you know, creating this, this heme from legeme globin that they then scale and eat. And we've said we're not gonna do that, right? We've said that we're gonna find the inputs we need from materials that already exist in nature, right? And so that's a huge distinction right there. Um, second is around just listening to the consumer. You know, when I started this company, we didn't have venture money. And so I was just on the phone this morning with our earliest retail supplier, uh, earliest retail customer, Whole Foods. And we were just talking about

• 34:31Speaker 03

  this, that like, I waited with bated breath for the check from, from them, uh, through their supplier, uh, because it was being used to, to run and keep the business open. And so when you're that close to the customer and the consumer, you really listen to what they have to say. And we were told time and again, no GMOs, no soy. And so we listened. And we ultimately, you know, took the route we did. And I think it'll pay off in the long run. We'll see what the market says.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  That's actually really interesting, because you are in front of consumers, right? You can go to a grocery store and buy Beyond Meat products. Impossible isn't. Is there a reason that you've chosen to sort of be in front of consumers in that way as opposed to the sort of flashy word every fast food outlet?

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I tried that approach first in 2011. So I began the business selling into Whole Foods and man, they're a great partner. And then into universities and hospitals up and down the East Coast, like Philly, Main Line, all those hospitals, John Hopkins University. And just to tell you how different things have gotten, I mean, I would go to, I went to James Madison once and was like, literally walked out of the cafeteria. They were like, you can't be in here. And the same thing happened to Ohio State. So we went with a dual approach of retail and food service. And unfortunately for me, I went too strongly into food service before I had a brand and I had to pull back and that was terrible because we had to let people go and it just wasn't the right move at the time. We didn't have brand recognition. The market also wasn't ready. I believe the

• 35:55Speaker 03

  way you build a great brand is having a really strong retail presence first and then getting into food service. I just learned that the hard way. Now, Possible has a lot of money and they're spending a lot on PR, et cetera. So they may be able to buck that trend and do it differently. But my own personal experience was you learn a lot from the consumer, you get great brand awareness in the retail space and then you transfer that into into food service.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  So what strikes me about this whole conversation is you are talking, using a lot of the language when I interview traditional tech company executives and CEOs, so much of this language is the same, right? We've got to build a brand, we need to be sustainable. You referred to meat as a platform. There's a part of this where I'm just talking to another Google executive, which is great. But do you, do you think of yourself as running a tech company? Are you running a food science company? Like, what kind of company are you running here?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  No, I'm running a food company for sure. I mean, we use a tremendous amount of science and I'm sitting in our research center here, what's called the Manhattan Beach Project because of where we are. But also, very early in my career, became really interested in the Manhattan Project of the Second World War because of that notion of putting Really bright people together from all over the world. You know, best, best, best scientists, best engineers, you know, got a great manager and grows, pushing them to achieve a global goal. I love that sense of urgency and, and just getting it right and, and coming together as a team to do it. So I've asked people to behave that way here. In our case, we're doing something that I hope will be much more peaceful and impactful than what they were working on. But I don't think it was a tech company.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I mean, we, we use science for a very human end here to allow the materials that we're going to put in our body in the form of food to be better for us and better for the planet. And you can't get away from science in order to accomplish that in terms of what we're doing, but I don't think it was a tech company, no.

• 37:51Nilay Patel?

  That's really, I mean, that's honestly, from my perspective, it's refreshing because everyone just tells me they run a tech company, so.

• 37:58Speaker 03

  Well, here's how real it is. I have a close, I have a good friend, Thomas Middleditch, I like him a lot, who stars in Silicon Valley. It got to the point where I couldn't watch it anymore because it was so close to some of the stuff that I was dealing with.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  Did you ever watch that show? I mean, it's a great show.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  It's a great show and it is uncomfortably close to the truth, I think.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  When like everyone, everyone's talking about saving the world and they're like making a, you know, some new app, you're just like, oh my gosh.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  I'm ever like, well, I'm, I'm doing it.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  I'm trying.

• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  So give me some big predictions about the future of where this is going. I mean, it is an inflection point, right? Your company, you started it, you were small, you have IPO, the IPO went great, at least. This is going to come out a few weeks from when we're talking. So the IPO went great in this timeframe. It looks like things are going to progress well. You are announcing, you know, expansion. What, what is the, five years from now, 10 years from now, what does this look like to you?

• 38:51Speaker 03

  So I'm going to give a frustrating answer, but it's truth. I don't know. All I know is that every time I make the product better and better, the consumer, you know, just comes in droves. And so it's this relationship that we have with the consumer that I'm most focused on. And I really love pleasing, you know, a family that was skeptical, right? Getting them to transition. And that seems to be happening at such an alarming rate that, you know, it's. Unclear, you know, just, just how high is high? We don't know. I, I don't know about five to 10 years. I do know that 20, 25 years from now, plant-based meat will absolutely be the norm. Like, there's no question in my mind about that. I think that lab-grown meat is a really interesting idea.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  I think there's some great people working on it, particularly Uma over at Memphis Meats. Great, great guy, great company. My concern about that is the cost structure and scaling that to a cost that consumers can't afford. I mean, my goal is really three, is to, to hit three things and, and watch the rest unfold. The first is, you know, get the taste exactly right and the sensory experience exactly right. That's the first thing. Get the nutrition exactly right, so we deliver all the benefits of meat, but strip out anything that's bad. Right? And that's hard, right? That's really hard. So, we, you know, strip out or minimize is a better way to say it. And then the third is price. So if we can do the first two, taste great, satiates, gives you all the nutrition,

• 40:17Speaker 03

  and then we drop the price below animal protein, I think it's going to be amazing to see what happens.

• 40:23Nilay Patel?

  You don't think you can drop the price until you finish the, the flavor profile stuff, though, right?

• 40:29Speaker 03

  It really has to do with the scale of our supply chain. Our supply chain is, is pulled from different industries today. It's, it's not purposeful around plant-based meat. It's starting to take on that form in certain charac- certain parts of the supply chain, but not fully. And so, we really need a supply chain that is focused on harvesting protein directed from plants and getting it to us in the form that we can use. You know, if you think about our size, too, despite the, the, the, you know, the growth rate, we're still pretty small. If we were, you know, even a 10th of the size of Tyson, for example, we'd be able to exert much more pressure on our supply chain and get much, much lower costs

• 41:11Speaker 03

  that I'll pass on to the consumer, because I want to get this product to be lower cost than animal protein.

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, Ethan Brown, thank you so much. We're, we've gone way over your time and very generous with us. Where can people find Beyond Meat? Is it just every grocery store now? What's, what's the story?

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're continuing to to expand on the retail side of things in a way that's very satisfying. And then, of course, you know, don't forget the the food service organizations we're in. You know, we've got great partnerships with Del Taco, with Carl's Jr., with Fridays, up in Canada with A N W and Tim Hortons. I mean, those are just great experiences. My son made me stop on the way to school today to pick him up burritos from from from Del Taco with Beyond Meat and him because he just loves them so much and wanted for his lunch. So it's exciting. It's a great time.

• 41:58Nilay Patel?

  Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, man. We'll talk to you soon. All right. That was Ethan Brown, CEO of Beyond Meat. To be honest, I'm just hungry now. Really interesting conversation, but I want a burger of some kind. So that's gonna happen. You can listen on why just push that button. They're doing a new series this week called Death Online, a three part series about death and the internet. We're actually really excited about that. It's not as dire as you think. It's really just about how no one's thought about it yet. And now we have to think about it a lot because the internet's been around for long enough. Check that out. Ashlyn and Caitlin are doing great work on that show. You can subscribe to the Verge Cast free on your favorite podcast app. Tap the link in the show notes to get new episodes. And please, the producers remind me, they want you to rate us on Apple Podcasts. So go there if you're gonna rate us and review us. You can hit me up on Twitter. I'm at Reckless.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  I'd love to know who you want me to talk to. We've been having a great time going out and finding people. So let me know. I'm at Reckless. And we'll be back Friday, the chat show, Dieter and Paul. See you then.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.