Live Episode! Beyond Meat: Ethan Brown

As founder and CEO of Beyond Meat, Ethan Brown believes he can turn peas and lentils into protein that tastes — and feels – exactly like beef and chicken. He says they're not quite there yet, but after 8 years in business, their products are sold in 11,000 stores nationwide. Recorded live in Anaheim, CA. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  I would order the stuff out of Taiwan and then I would give myself 60 days to get the money together to actually pay for it once I got to the port. So sometimes I'd arrive at the port and I wouldn't have the money. And then you get charged every day you're in the port and you can't pick it up. So you have to make frantic calls. But at the same time, you don't know what you're going to do, what you're capable of doing until your back's against the wall. And so I would put myself in that position. Yeah. Because if I didn't, I would never do it.

• 0:33Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 0:44Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and today on the show, a special live recording. The story of Beyond Meat, a company that wants to take the chicken and burgers off your plate, replace them with plants, and do it in a way where you will never know the difference.

• 1:02Guy Raz?

  So today's show is a little different from the others. It's the story of a startup that is still, in many ways, a startup. The company Beyond Meat has not yet turned a profit, and its CEO and founder, Ethan Brown, definitely not a billionaire, at least not yet. But he is part of a movement that, if it takes off, could completely transform the way we think about food. Because, think about it, if you are a meat eater, there is nothing more delicious than a freshly grilled steak or a basket of fried chicken, right? Well, Ethan says you can have all of that, but the meat doesn't have to come from a cow or a chicken. It can actually come from plants, from peas and lentils and stuff like that.

• 1:46Guy Raz?

  But here's the thing, it won't taste like a pathetic vegetarian substitute. Ethan says that at some point in the future, maybe sooner than you think, meat eaters will not be able to tell the difference between animal meat and plant meat. And to find out how Ethan is trying to make that happen, I sat down with him in front of a live audience in Anaheim, California. Here's part of that conversation.

• 2:18Guy Raz?

  Welcome.

• 2:19Speaker 00

  Thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

• 2:21Guy Raz?

  So, I want to start by asking you a little bit about how you grew up. Because you grew up around farms, around animals, right?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Right. So I have an interesting childhood in it. I grew up in the city, but my father is a professor, and he's at McGill now. And he grew up in the country and had a love for the country. It really defines who he is. And so we spent an enormous amount of time in the countryside, and he bought a farm very early on.

• 2:46Guy Raz?

  He bought a farm, just like, a farm where?

• 2:49Speaker 00

  So we had a couple of different ones, but the one that was sort of the dominant one within my childhood was in western Maryland. And so it became a Holstein dairy business with about 100 head of Holstein cattle. And so we spent a lot of time there when I was a child.

• 3:04Guy Raz?

  So he was teaching at the university and like, his side hustle was milking cows?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, something like that. Yeah, his hobbies.

• 3:12Guy Raz?

  So, so growing up around animals and did you eat the animals when you were a kid?

• 3:16Speaker 00

  I did, yeah. I definitely, I definitely ate a lot of meat. My favorite sandwich was the double R burger from Roy Rogers.

• 3:22Guy Raz?

  Wow, what's that?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it would have ham, and then it would have cheese, and it would have the burger.

• 3:27Guy Raz?

  Ham cheese burger.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And, and so as I became conscious of what I was doing though, as sort of an older teenager, I began to think about that, that this is the, you know, the milk from the cow, it's the cow itself, and then it's a pig, and so it's sort of saying this kind of orgy of different, different, different animals.

• 3:44Guy Raz?

  So, how did you, when did you start to begin to think about animals differently? I should, we should say, I should clarify. You are today a vegan. You do not eat animal products, right?

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Correct, yeah.

• 3:56Guy Raz?

  And, and you don't even wear animal products?

• 3:57Speaker 00

  I don't. So these are, these are $35 from Target.

• 4:01Guy Raz?

  Your shoes are faux leather.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  They are, they are. But early on, I began to think differently about animals. I wanted to be a vet when I was a kid. I would spend time in our attic, for example, at our farm, and I would build large cages for mice. And I would capture the mice and have a heart traps, and then I'd put them in these cages. And they were very different from the sort of docile mice you get at a pet store. They would fly across the cage, right? And it was, to me, it was this wonderful world, and I loved it, right? And so, for me, the experience was about getting to know the animal and celebrate the animal versus wanting to consume it. But it took me a while to work that out. It was not coherent. You know, I was still eating meat and was still using animal products. But that early inkling about, hey, I feel differently about animals than those around me was when I was very young.

• 4:47Guy Raz?

  Wow. So you go to college?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:52Guy Raz?

  Did you think that you would be an entrepreneur? I mean, you got an MBA. Was that your sort of vision?

• 4:57Speaker 00

  I worked, so for a long time, I worked in the hydrogen fuel cell sector.

• 5:02Guy Raz?

  This is after you got your MBA?

• 5:03Speaker 00

  During, yeah, yeah. So I worked there about 10 years. And I was interested in that for reasons of climate. So I was always interested in doing something that was socially oriented. So, yeah, I was in clean tech, basically.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

  So when did you, like, what sort of led you to start to think about animals, livestock?

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Right. So it was something that sort of gnawed at me. It was like, it was something that even as I was climbing the kind of corporate ladder within the clean tech space, it just kept coming back to me. It was something that I felt like I had to go do. I mean, it was literally that strong. And so I sat with that for a long time. And I began to think about it, not just in terms of my own feelings about animals from being a child, but in terms of our sustainability. That is the number one issue. And today, I still think about it this way. If you think about affecting really difficult problems all at once by changing out the protein that's on the plate, it's a pretty powerful idea. So you can affect human health, where you have, you know, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, all these things that are linked to certain types of meat consumption.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Look at climate change. You know, it's about 51% of greenhouse gases.

• 6:11Guy Raz?

  From livestock? And, I mean, to put it bluntly, we're talking about burps and farts, right?

• 6:17Speaker 00

  Well, yes, yes, some percent of it is. But something that's really interesting, this is a way to get your head around it. So we slaughter about 66 billion animals a year.

• 6:26Guy Raz?

  66 billion around the world?

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Right. All those animals are breathing. When they breathe, they respire carbon, right? So you have this growing number of livestock, shrinking number of trees. And so you have a carbon cycle that's out of balance. And so that's why this livestock issue is so important to focus on.

• 6:42Guy Raz?

  So how did you go from starting to think about livestock and climate change to saying, "You know what? I'm gonna give up this fuel cell stuff and tackle this problem."

• 6:52Speaker 00

  Right. So it's interesting. And I was in my twenties, in my sort of late twenties, I was thinking about this. And I wanted to create a plant-based McDonald's.

• 7:01Guy Raz?

  A plant-based McDonald's?

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I was in a relationship that I wanted to get out of, which I wasn't very good at getting out of. Like, I moved and all these other things and tried to end it in a way that wasn't very straightforward.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  So I went to a therapist, because I was like, I gotta figure out how to deal with my life, get out of the situation I'm in. Inevitably, I started talking about a career. And I was like, I really have this feeling I want to go start this plant-based McDonald's.

• 7:24Guy Raz?

  Huh. Did you even know how to cook?

• 7:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, pretty poorly, yeah. And so I was sitting there saying, "I really want to do this." And he said, "Oh, you gotta go do it. That's what's in your heart." I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I know." But I left and I didn't do it. And I spent like seven, eight more years, you know, working on clean tech, because that's what I was supposed to do, you know? And I had this, I've said this before. I remember seeing and reading of Mice and Men, and looking at Lenny and being like, "Well, shit, I'm a lot like Lenny. I'm like, big."

• 7:54Speaker 00

  I didn't want to be like a guy, like, just like petting a rabbit.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  You know, like, there goes like sentimental Ethan, you know? Like, I just, it wasn't serious enough for me, or something like that. You know, I was afraid to be compassionate, I think, you know? And so it's funny, when I look at guys like Wayne Pacelli from the Humane Society, right? Or Gene Barra from Farm Sanctuary. I really admire them, because like, so early on, they were like, "This is what I feel, this is what I'm gonna go act on in the world." And it took me a while to shed... The things that I thought I was supposed to be doing to go do this.

• 8:28Guy Raz?

  So how did you get the courage to leave this stable job and start to think about making fake?

• 8:37Speaker 00

  Well, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I guess first, you know, I had very small kids, literally just born. And this this kind of started to mount where I said, I'm gonna bring them into this world. And my wife grew up in the country. And so we had meat in our house and we're feeding our kids meat. And I was like, I just, this is not how I want to leave this place. You know, I want to make a difference here. And so it started to kind of press on me. And then we got these pet pigs that we were we were kept up at our farm. And they were wonderful. But we, at the same time, we'd be like on a Jersey Turnpike and the kids would need something to eat. And my wife would be like, well, let's pull aside, let's pull over, go to Subway. So we'd get like something from Subway and they'd get like a ham sandwich. I'm like, I literally could feel this disconnect in my life, right?

• 9:21Speaker 00

  So I was like, I really have to do something here. So it was it was that personal calling. And then it was sitting in these meetings, working on climate through clean tech. I began to feel like we were just not getting the bigger picture. So I'd go to these conferences and they'd be in big hotels like this. And we'd wring our hands about how do you get percent more efficiency out of a lithium ion battery? Right? And then everyone go have steak dinner. And I was like, this just doesn't make sense. Let's attack the real problem. Right? And that really motivated me. And finally, I just said, I gotta go do this. So I started to to work at night on it. And this is the great thing about being, you know, an entrepreneur in this time period in history is that you have the internet. I would come home, the kids would go to bed.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  I would just sit up in our living room, I was living in Capitol Hill at the time, and I would research it.

• 10:11Guy Raz?

  You would like go to Google and type in like textured soy protein meat or like?

• 10:17Speaker 00

  What I was looking for, what I was looking, what I became convinced of is that you don't need an animal to produce a piece of meat. Like, that was the core belief that I began to have was that like, I could see that you could get, the meat is really five things. It's amino acids, it's lipids, it's very small amount of carbohydrates, and it's trace minerals, also very, very small. And it's predominantly water. What's interesting about all five of those things is they're not exclusive to the animal. They're all absolutely present in the plant kingdom. So what the animal's doing, the animal's a bioreactor, right? They're taking massive amounts of plant matter. They're running it through their system and they're creating muscle. Why can't we take plant matter, run it through a system and create muscle? And that's all we're doing.

• 10:57Speaker 00

  So I began to research who's taking protein from plants and reorganizing it into the structure of muscle. And a guy, two guys at the University of Missouri were doing that.

• 11:07Guy Raz?

  You just like came across an academic paper?

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I was doing that, but I was also importing something from Asia that I thought was really good. A soy, texturized piece of soy that I thought was quite close to muscle. And so I was bringing that in, in, in from Taiwan, through Baltimore and selling it into Whole Foods in, in the mid Atlantic area.

• 11:26Guy Raz?

  At night or on the side, you were, you started a second sort of a business?

• 11:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:31Guy Raz?

  Where you were importing food?

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was hilarious too. It was, it was so I would, I would order the stuff out of Taiwan. And then I would give myself 60 days to get the money together to actually pay for it once it got to the port. And that always didn't, that didn't always work. So sometimes I'd arrive at the port and I wouldn't have the money.

• 11:46Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  And then you get charged every day you're in the port and you can't pick it up.

• 11:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  Right, so you have to, so I have to make frantic calls. But the thing about, I think one of the important things is that, and most things in history are like this, that you don't know what you're going to do, what you're capable of doing until your back's against the wall. And so I would put myself in that position.

• 12:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  Because if I didn't, I would never do it. You know, so, so you have to let go of all that safety net. And then get yourself in the position and you'll figure a way out.

• 12:13Guy Raz?

  So you, you read this academic paper by these professors at the University of Missouri, is that right? What did you, did you just call him up and say, hey? You did, you called him up. What did you say?

• 12:23Speaker 00

  I did. I introduced myself and I said, can I work with you? And he said, yeah, come on out. So we came out there and I started to, to work in his lab.

• 12:30Guy Raz?

  You just went to his lab and started hanging out there?

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:32Guy Raz?

  And what was he doing? He was making plant-based meats?

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. He was, he was basically taking proteins that had been extracted from plants.

• 12:39Guy Raz?

  From what, like soy or?

• 12:41Speaker 00

  In this case soy, but it could have been corn, it could have been a bunch of other things. And so it's, and he was using heating, cooling and pressure to realign them so they stitched into muscle-like fiber.

• 12:52Guy Raz?

  So you go out there and you meet him and what's it like?

• 12:55Speaker 00

  So I thought it was very good, what, what they were doing, but I didn't think it was ready for market at all. So I called up the University of Maryland and I said, I've got this technology that I'm working at the University of Missouri with. Can I work with the University of Maryland and improve it? So I've got a grant from the state to do that.

• 13:12Guy Raz?

  To continue the research?

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, to basically try to get it ready for market. And so I was funding it out of my own pocket, but I also got money from the state of Maryland.

• 13:19Guy Raz?

  So this was running on just a shoestring?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 13:23Guy Raz?

  Are you independently wealthy?

• 13:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 13:25Guy Raz?

  You had to basically...

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I sold my home, I sold my house. It's funny, you set up all these boundaries, like I'm never gonna touch that bank account. I'm never gonna sell that house, and you break through them all.

• 13:37Guy Raz?

  Wait, so you decided, you said, "I'm gonna start a business and I'm gonna sell my house" to fund it. You had kids at that point?

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:46Guy Raz?

  How old were your kids then?

• 13:47Speaker 00

  They were like super, they were like one and two or something.

• 13:49Guy Raz?

  Did your partner, was she like, "This is nuts"?

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, but she says that about everything I do. So it was like...

• 13:57Guy Raz?

  And this is what, around 2009?

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 14:01Guy Raz?

  And what are you doing for the first few years? You're just, you're going back and forth to Missouri from Maryland, experimenting with... And is it good? Does it taste good? Are you eating gross stuff too?

• 14:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was funny. So I would use Southwest to go from BWI to St. Louis. And I would take big duffel bags of this stuff back and forth. And there was a time when one of them busted open and it just fell out everywhere on the plane. It was like, it's like, it's like chicken. And people were like, "Why are you carrying all this chicken around?" I said, "Well..."

• 14:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  But I was also, though, importing this product from Asia and selling it to Whole Foods.

• 14:39Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  And I think that also gave me some credibility with the university, that I wasn't just dreaming about something. I had a going concern, it was small, but I was selling into Whole Foods. And I could say very truthfully about Whole Foods, that I wouldn't be here without them. Like, they helping hand every chance they get.

• 14:57Guy Raz?

  Here's what I don't get, though. You didn't have a background in food. I mean, you were working at a fuel cell company, but you had no training in cooking, or food, or the food industry. Like, how did you even get Whole Foods to take you seriously? How did you even begin to go to investors and tell them about this idea? And why would they have taken you seriously at that point?

• 15:18Speaker 00

  So when I got here, the producer of the show asked me, "Is this what you're wearing?" Like, this is a tough crowd.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  I don't know. No one's really asked me, why would I be doing this?

• 15:28Guy Raz?

  But you know what I mean? Like, you know, you didn't have the paper and pencil credentials. I mean, of course, but this is back then. So how did you make the case for what you were doing? And how were you able to say, I'm the guy to do this?

• 15:41Speaker 00

  That's a really fair question. I don't know. I mean, I think one thing that I did learn in business school was that, and I think they were wrong about this, you know, they would always, I took an entrepreneur class in business school, and I can remember that, first of all, they'd always bring back people who were like, super young, attractive, and very successful. Be like, I told this guy to go do this, and he did it, and you know. And I was like, where are the people that are like, living, you know, in their mom's basement?

• 16:06Guy Raz?

  Eating ramen, right?

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that like, you know, are now back to square one. But one of the things that they said was, you have to have a competitive moat around what you're doing. There has to be some barrier to entry for others in order for you to have a successful business. And I thought that was like, stupid, right? I was like, look, like Seth, for example, we know Seth, right?

• 16:23Guy Raz?

  Seth Goldman.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Seth Goldman, founder of Honest Tea. So if he believed that, he would have looked at Snapple and said, I really can't enter that market, right? But he didn't believe that. I think passion takes you a long way. Like, I just wanted this more than anybody else.

• 16:38Guy Raz?

  That's Ethan Brown of Beyond Meat. When we come back in a moment, the things that still keep him up at night. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to a special live recording of How I Built This from NPR.

• 17:05Guy Raz?

  It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And just about a year or two after Ethan Brown founded Beyond Meat, the company started to get some pretty big investors. Bill Gates and the founders of Twitter signed on, and so did the venture capital company, Klanner Perkins.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I initially funded it out of my own pocket, and then we raised money from friends and family, and we got these grants. But I was running out of money, you know, and I needed money.

• 17:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because you had to pour the money into the research, right?

• 17:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:34Guy Raz?

  Cash, you probably need a lot of cash.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  And we had a facility we were opening up, and we took over an old hospital building. But, you know, that costs money, all that stuff. And so, you know, selling, doing research, having facilities, we ran out of money, basically. We needed to go raise money.

• 17:47Guy Raz?

  Were you getting a lot of rejections, or was it like, an easy, smooth ride? Were people like, yep, how can I sign up?

• 17:53Speaker 00

  It was hard at first, but Kleiner Perkins got involved in 2010. They started to look at the company. And at the time, it was not a popular decision. People were like, "Oh, it's fake meat. What are you doing? It's weird." And so, these guys stuck their neck out. So, I'm grateful for that. And once they got involved, then others came.

• 18:14Guy Raz?

  All right. So, let's talk a little bit about what this product started to become. How are you making it? Were you taking soy powder and gluten from wheat and putting it in a machine? And it was coming out as meat, fake meat?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  So, I think it starts with a perception issue. So, my argument is that this is meat, that it's just meat that comes from plants. And so, I think an important distinction within the company is we don't talk about people not eating meat. I don't think it's a good idea to build a brand telling people not to eat what they love. But I think what is a good idea is allowing people to eat more of what they love. And if you love meat, I can give you plant-based meat. You can make our products out of lentil protein, mustard seed. Tobacco leaves have great protein. Cotton seed has great protein. And so, today, we use soy and we use pea, but that's only because it's been scaled up. But I think the idea is let's look for the most sustainable crops and let's pull protein from that and use it to create meat directly.

• 19:16Guy Raz?

  So, when were you able to? When did you create a product that was ready to go to market? You started the company in 2009. How long did it take you before Beyond Meat was at a grocery store?

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Right. So, I started in that year, I started to import something that I sold into Whole Foods. But it wasn't until 2011 and really early 2012 that we started to put into the market this basic structure that we had licensed from the University of Missouri.

• 19:41Guy Raz?

  So, these are the chicken strips?

• 19:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:43Guy Raz?

  Which you still sell?

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, we still sell. Our product lines are in 11,000 stores today. Most of those stores carry them in the frozen section.

• 19:50Guy Raz?

  And it's chicken?

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Chicken, and it's beef.

• 19:52Guy Raz?

  Ground beef?

• 19:53Speaker 00

  Ground beef, right. And then we have a burger called the Beast Burger. And, you know, I'm probably the harshest critic of our products. I mean, I love our products, people love our products, but you can see in those products deficiencies. You can see how they're not exactly like animal protein. And that's, that to us drives us crazy, right? We have to collapse those differences. It'll get better. I mean, it's just gonna take time. We do have a moonshot in our company that's around bacon. You know, and I think bacon for me is very symbolic too, like people love bacon. So let's, let's show them that we can produce a piece of bacon, like a real piece of bacon from, from, from plants.

• 20:25Guy Raz?

  What is the hardest part of this business? I mean, are there things that keep you up at night? Do you have anxiety? Is, are you convinced this thing is gonna be huge and it's gonna be successful? Or do you think, you know, this could fail?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  I'm absolutely, there's an inevitability about what we're doing. I mean, I absolutely feel that way. Like, I think my anxiety is more around execution and, you know, just wanting to be better, wanting to be a better CEO, wanting to be a better founder, wanting to be a better, you know, just better colleague, right? And, and also, when you talk about all those people who invested, um, you know, you don't wanna let them down.

• 20:58Guy Raz?

  But does that cause anxiety?

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh yeah, sure.

• 21:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I mean, it must because they believe in you, they've taken a chance on you. Although they're so rich anyway, it doesn't matter. I mean, let's face it, right?

• 21:11Guy Raz?

  I mean, when do you think, for example, like, when do you think that you guys will be profitable?

• 21:16Speaker 00

  So we actually have turned a really big corner just recently in terms of, um, everything we're doing, the kind of, the progression of facilities went from kitchen to a, to a kind of a quasi-kitchen slash factory, to a factory in Missouri. And we just opened up a brand new facility, which is beautiful. I was there twice this week in Dallas, Texas. You know, in this new facility at that scale, we get really, really good margins, right? And so, and that's a new thing for us.

• 21:40Guy Raz?

  Because the, the cost of production's gone down?

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and just, and, and everything's more streamlined, and we're out of kind of the prototyping, proving out stage and into, into actually scale production.

• 21:50Guy Raz?

  Is there a chance that this company could be profitable in five years?

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Oh my goodness, yeah.

• 21:54Guy Raz?

  And B, does it matter? I mean, is that, is that, is it important or is it, is it enough to be sustainable?

• 22:00Speaker 00

  It's a good question. It's a very good question. It is important. And I wrestle with this question a lot because I believe so strongly in the research program we have. And I would fund that at the sacrifice of almost anything else in the company. Because... I want to be part of that group of people that separate meat from animals. You know, when it's all said and done, I want to look back on this effort and all the people working there. And again, we've got these PhDs that are remarkable people, and I want to say, you guys did this. You know, you guys, for 200,000 years as humans, for 2 million years as humans, plus our predecessors, we've been consuming meat from animals. You guys were born and you died, and in between that time, you basically separated meat from animals and you put us on a sustainable path.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  And it's not about feeding the pesky 13-year-old girl at the dinner table or boy who said, "Mom, I'm not going to eat meat anymore." It's about creating a new form of meat for the center of the plate that people will love, and they don't have to sacrifice to have it.

• 22:54Guy Raz?

  In 50 years or 100 years, you think, or let's say 200 years, will we look back on who we are today and say, "Wow, that was so weird. We ate animal meat." Like, we look back on bloodletting or, you know, or witchcraft?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  That's a good question. So, there's part of us that's always going to do this, right? Hunt people who hunt, you know? Like, I go back to our farm and stuff, like, it's just part of who we are. But I think in the main, you know, it will be viewed as something that we used to do, and I think more and more it'll be viewed as a, like, when you go to Central Park and you ride in a horse-drawn carriage, but everyone else is driving, it'll be kind of like that, I think. There's no way around it. And our job, our obligation, is to make that protein great. We can't ask you to go out there and have, like, a veggie dog you don't like, because you're just not going to do it. You know, it's like, we're just hard-wired to enjoy meat. We have to create meat from plants, so there's no trade-off. And we're trying to do that, and the thing is that if you come to our lab, you see it's possible.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  Now, you've got to scale it up, you've got to continually improve it. But it is possible, and that's the exciting thing.

• 23:56Guy Raz?

  Ethan Brown, thank you.

• 24:03Guy Raz?

  Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat. I spoke to him at the NOW Here This Podcast Festival in Anaheim, California. And by the way, last summer, Beyond Meat came out with something called the Beyond Burger. It's made with pea protein and actually looks, and even bleeds a little, like a cow burger. The bloody stuff actually comes from beets. And unlike other veggie burgers, Ethan has negotiated with supermarkets to display the Beyond Burger in the meat case, right next to the chicken and the steak.

• 24:36Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks for listening to this special live recording of the show this week. This episode was produced by Niva Grant and Randa Abdel Fattah, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Sanaz Meshkhanpour and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 25:04Speaker 02

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• 25:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  It's just me and you, right?

• 25:12Guy Raz?

  Well, sure. Let's say it is.

• 25:14Speaker 02

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