RANGEfire! | Fake meat flames out in the market

Bill Gates-Backed Fake Meat Products Having Horrible Year; 75% Stock Market Drop

By Kevin Killough for Cowboy State Daily

Plant-based Beyond Meat is having a hard year, which is raising doubts that the company’s products can in the long run compete with a thick, juicy beef steak.

Just two years ago, the alternative meat industry seemed to be making serious inroads into the food budgets of average Americans. Companies scrambled to produce their own versions of plant-based, meat-like protein and formed partnerships with major fast-food chains.

Burger King made a huge financial investment in pushing its Impossible Whopper, made with Impossible Foods-brand plant-based meat. And McDonald’s reportedly did well overseas with its McPlant, made with Beyond Meat, but discontinued it in the United States after a test run at select restaurants.

Beyond Meat has received celebrity endorsements from Snoop Dogg, Kim Kardashian and Leonardo DiCaprio, as well as Gates, who provided venture funding to the company. Gates also invested in Beyond Meat’s competitor, Impossible Foods Inc.

Overdone

Wyoming’s cattle ranchers have been monitoring the new competitors vying to please Americans’ palates for meat, and the pandemic also created a lot of turmoil for Cowboy State producers.

Big meat packers, which process 80% of the meat in America, had to shut down some plants because of COVID-19, greatly limiting processing capacity. Supply chain and labor issues also made ranchers’ jobs more difficult. The rising popularity of plant-based meat alternatives at the time was another threat to their already-slim financial margins.

“There was a lot of concern that it would take off and really go,” said Dennis Sun, a fourth-generation Wyoming rancher and publisher of Wyoming Livestock Roundup.

Jim Magagna, executive vice president for the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, said that initial popularity of plant-based products sparked a greater interest in the industry to do more advocating for itself.

“It was something that we took seriously as a concern. Maybe it’s a little stronger of a word than I would use, but as an industry that was a wake-up call to us that we needed to more aggressively discuss not only the flavor of real meat, beef or lamb, but also the nutritional values that are in the real product,” Magagna said.

Medium Staying Power

It appears that the initial interest in alternative meats is failing to grow or sustain itself.

Citing research conducted by Information Resources Inc., Bloomberg reports that sales of refrigerated meat alternatives declined more than 10% in the past year. Beyond Meat’s stock has dropped 75% since the start of the year, and according to CNBC, the company’s market value is down more than $12 billion over the last three years.

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