Beyond Fakery: How the Decline of Beyond Meat and Meta Show the Real Limitations of Imitation

BYND, which IPO’s in 2019, saw its stock sore as high as $234 before a precipitous decline in the last year.

For most of 2021, Beyond Meat Inc’s (BYND) stock price hovered around $130. As of this writing, the stock sits around $12. Neither deals with China, McDonald’s, and Pepsi, nor new meat-like steak and sausage forms, nor endorsements by Kim Kardashian or Kevin Hart appear to be able to rescue the company from going into the economic great beyond (a human-meat-eating COO and poor processing sanitation aren’t helping stock prices, either).

While the bulk of my professional focus has been on real estate, I have more than a passing connection to Beyond. Admittedly, I’ve only endured eating a Beyond burger once (which was less satisfying than most meat substitutes), but my cousin is married to Dave Brown, brother of Beyond’s CEO, Ethan Brown. I’ve known the Browns for over twenty years. I’ve been to Dave and Ethan’s late grandmother’s sprawling Fifth Avenue coop. I’ve heard Dave’s reviews of preview Broadway shows, since he inherited a seat on the board of the Tony Awards. I’ve heard about trips to mom’s summer place in East Hampton and numerous trips abroad. I’ve seen Dave send his three kids to $55,000/year (each) grade school while he was unemployed and finding his true calling after burning out on corporate law. And of course, I’ve heard tales of Ethan and his fake meat empire (Al Gore is an investor!), which he built with a combination of pluck, insider relationships, and a huge silver spoon.

Ethan Brown, pictured at top left on his father’s cattle ranch, got Beyond Meat to its vaunted state by leveraging relationships and publicly-funded research from his super-wealthy and connected family.

I have nothing against vegetarianism and veganism and have tried to adopt meatless diets many times. My meatlessness was motivated by a desire to reduce my carbon footprint, which, speaking generally, is higher with animal-protein diets than vegetarian ones. But I always returned to eating animal products to overcome the weakness, lethargy, and sickness that accompanied long term vegetarian eating. Between my omnivorous ancestry, athletic lifestyle, and size, I am confident eating moderate amounts of responsibly-sourced animal products is a good way to get essential dietary protein and micronutrients. Different genes, activity levels, and body types may be able to function without or eating fewer animal products, but they’re not me.

Leaving aside the nuances of protein and nutrient intake-variability, I’ve observed many people treat veganism and vegetarianism as proxies for health and ecologically responsible eating. They’re not. There’s research correlating reduced animal product diets with the prevalence of obesity. One study found romaine lettuce is one of the most carbon intensive dietary sources based on factors like refrigeration and packaging. Figuring a food’s carbon footprint is more complex than measuring cow farts. The theoretical benefits of vegetarian and vegan diets are part of what fueled Beyond’s media hype, $122 million of investment dollars, and one time $12 billion market cap. But to suggest one is doing the body and earth a favor by eating industrially-made, frozen, over-packaged, nutrient-deficient fake meat made of processed and genetically-modified pea monocrops — from a company that’s bankrolled by Bill Gates, speculative investing, and deals with Pepsi, McDonald’s, and China …it’s more than a stretch.

Perhaps Beyond Meat tastes good and is satisfying in the metaverse, for what it’s worth. Image via Wealthy VC.

The precipitous decline of Beyond’s sales, stock value, and popularity has a lot in common with Meta’s recent troubles. Both companies rose to the top based on business models that depended on a steady stream of investment dollars and inflated stock values to stay afloat. More importantly, both companies are in the business of selling imitations as real. Just as Beyond wants the public to substitute real meat for their nutrient-deficient, processed pea-slop patties, Meta wants people to trade their immediate environment — face-to-face interactions, live events, etc. — for the metaverse, a digitized and ad-strewn imitative version of reality that Meta can program and control as it wishes. Selling fake as real may work when the fake stuff is free or low cost, but breaks down when the seller jacks the price up to cover overhead — which is what’s occurring at Beyond and Meta. I hope their respective declines, and hopefully demises, are indicative of a global resurgence in interest with reality — where real food, interactions, relationships, and information is valued far more than synthetic imitations.