Fake Meat Losses Its Sizzle

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods wanted to upend the world’s $1 trillion meat industry. But plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop

- Deena Shanker

Ever since founding Beyond Meat Inc. in 2009 with the then-fantastical 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, 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 Toronto's annual Ideacity gathering three years later, he said his goal was to replicate the "blueprint of meat." By the time he appeared at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.'s Builders & Innovators Summit 2019, he explained that his mission demanded the urgency and scale the US mustered for World War II and that his products would simultaneously help solve heart disease, diabetes, cancer, climate change, natural resource depletion and animal welfare.