Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat

          I am intrigued.  Beyond Meat, the California start-up that launched its highly successful IPO a few months ago, now trades at over 100X sales.  What’s especially interesting is that the concept of an alternative protein that provides a substitute for meat products (beef, pork and chicken) is hardly new.  Where is tofu with its patent infringement claims?  How upset must the ubiquitous veggie burger be at this turn of events?  Even Bacos and their questionably salty, vaguely bacon taste must find it offensive that beyond Meat is knocking the cover off the ball.

          I will be moving to California in six months, so I am trying to get up to speed on the local culture I must assimilate.  I am the last guy to go to a vegan restaurant.  Don’t get me wrong, I can live with less animal protein.  In fact, I never met a carbohydrate I didn’t like.  It really has to do with look feel and texture and maybe a bit of smell and taste.  I guess I may be the perfect potential client for Beyond Meat.  I care less about what comprises what I eat and more about how it looks, tastes and feels.  Beyond Meat seems to make products that directly address these needs.  They package faux sausages like real sausages.  That alone is a fanciful statement since the mere existence of a sausage is to accept the notion that packaging is key.  Someone will stuff all kinds of nasty things that on their own would be wholly unpalatable, into a casing (I cannot fathom that those were once organic, intestinal casings) and thereby make them more interesting and tastier. 

          Also interesting is that sausages were man’s answer to the shortage of good meat.  I am reminded of that moment in National Lampoon’s Vacation where Chevy Chase stops to visit his wife’s cousin and enjoys a barbeque with cousin-in-law Randy Quaid in all his white-belted glory.  He serves us faux burgers and declares, “I don’t know why they call it Hamburger Helper…I think it does fine all by itself!”  I dare Beyond Meat to use Randy Quaid as their spokesmodel.  He might not be a great fit for their array of hipster and athlete endorsers evident on their website, but if you want us older consumers, he’s your man.

          Since Beyond Meat is clearly more interested in the younger, more enlightened consumer markets, I turn to my two granddaughters for guidance.  Charlotte (Charlie) is six and Evelyn (Evie) is three, and damn proud of it. They are a study in contrasts.  Charlie is studious, quiet and sweet.  Evie is not.  Charlie is polite and considerate.  Evie not so much. Charlie is a devoted meat-eater.  Evie is much less so.  Evie will eat bacon but given that she likes dipping it into maple syrup, I’m not sure it is really the meatiness that she likes. Like lobster with butter, bacon as a transport medium for syrup doesn’t really count as eating meat.  Otherwise, Evie is meatless.  It worries her mother a good deal, since Evie is at about the 50^th percentile in size and yet prone to the stocky, where Charlie, with her meaty appetite, is 97^th percentile, tall, lean and full of energy.  Mom is forever trying to get quality calories into Evie and the absence of meat makes it a constant challenge.  I can easily imagine Evie growing up to be a vegan or a vegetarian at least.  Both Evie and Charlie love animals (the chants of “petting zoo, petting zoo…” still ring in my ears from our recent vacation together), so I don’t think these preferences are ethical animal cruelty based.  Unless we take them for a slaughterhouse tour, I’m guessing that the meat/pet juxtaposition will not factor into food preferences for a while.

          My wife Kim is increasingly becoming an anti-meat person.  She already has greatly depleted the salmon population of the world.  She seems to care a lot about animal rights and while she enjoys her salmon, she will not eat a fish that is delivered to her on a plate with its head on.  We even went to a restaurant last week that had famous “dancing shrimp” as a coconut-laden specialty, and when she realized the shrimp still possessed their heads, she went to her salad.  Kim rarely, if ever, orders or makes meat for herself, though her midwestern roots still allow her to take a bite of my plated meat.

          As for me, I have had that lap-band for a dozen years installed around my stomach opening.  It restricts quantities of food I can or want to eat.  But what it also does is significantly reduce my appetite for meat.  I recently ordered a 5 oz. Wagyu steak (presumably sold in such a small quantity due to its high price-point) and found it was the perfect amount of beef for me.  I always order the smallest non-filet steak (I do not care for the added meaty flavor of filet mignon) on offer and rarely finish more than half of it.  Chicken is even more impacted.  For some reason, no matter how well masticated the meat, both beef and white-meat chicken do not go down through the lap-band with ease.  I’m thinking that the marketing department at Beyond Meat needs to take note of this.  The list of bariatrically-modified humans, like me, that are focused on what they can get through their stomachs without pain or reflux, just gets bigger and bigger as they get smaller and smaller.

          When I was in college and sharing half a house with five other guys, we split up the week with one of us responsible for one of the six non-Saturday night dinners.  When it was Rob’s turn (God rest his soul), we would get our meal with his skinny-guy lectures about why we all ate way too much meat.  He said that a meal with a meat portion larger than a pack of cards, was both wasteful and unhealthy.  Come to think of it, I believe he used to say the limit was five ounces.  Of course, all of us meat-eaters are still going strong while Rob is not.  I’m not sure there is a cause and effect aspect to that observation, but it is, interestingly, a data point.

          Getting back to Beyond Meat, I think it is more likely that I will buy their products than their grossly over-priced stock.  I’m not sure that marketing and branding alone can make a low barrier-to-entry product like meatless faux meat products so interesting that they can maintain that sort of multiple. I also wonder about that scene from About a Boy with Hugh Grant when his date declares she is a Fruitarian who believes that vegetables and fruit have feelings too.  How does Beyond Beyond Meat sound for a name of the next Fruitarian market rocket.