Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods were supposed to end the global meat industry. What happened?

Fake-meat pioneers Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods had what looked like a game-changing product. Now it appears to have been little more than a fad

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Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown speaks before ringing the opening bell at Nasdaq MarketSite in 2019 in New York City. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 4:15am, 25 Feb 2023Updated: 5:56am, 25 Feb 2023

Ever since founding Beyond Meat in 2009 with the idea of making meat without animals, Ethan Brown has been giving the equivalent of one extremely long TED Talk.

In 2013, he took the stage at the Wired Business Conference in New York, explaining that the world had a very real greenhouse gas-emitting meat problem and that venture capitalists could make a bigger impact investing in fake meat than in solar energy.

At the annual Ideacity gathering three years later in Toronto in Canada, he said his goal was to replicate the “blueprint of meat”.

By the time he appeared at Goldman Sachs’ Builders & Innovators Summit 2019, he explained that his mission demanded the urgency and scale the United States had for World War II and that his products would help solve heart disease, diabetes, cancer, climate change, natural resource depletion and animal welfare.

Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown speaks before ringing the opening bell at Nasdaq MarketSite in 2019 in New York. Photo: Getty Images

Just as technology had turned the horse-drawn carriage obsolete, he told the crowd at The New York Times’ climate conference this past autumn, his system of breaking down plants would transform the protein at the centre of the plate. “This,” he said, “is something that I feel is inevitable.”

Silicon Valley did not need much convincing that a better veggie burger could become the next world-changing disruption. Whereas the quinoa-and-bean patties of yore were aimed at the health-focused or environmentally aware, Brown’s beef facsimile – made to look and taste like the real thing – meant most meat eaters could give up their burgers without having to give up anything at all.