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CORNER OFFICE

The ʻHedonistic Altruismʼ of Plant-Based Meat

Ethan Brown, the founder and C.E.O. of Beyond Meat, on his moral and environmental
priorities.

By David Gelles

Aug. 27, 2021

Ethan Brown contends there are several main benefits to consuming plant-based foods
instead of animal meat. It leads to fewer greenhouse gas emissions, it consumes fewer
natural resources and it is better for human health.

But for Mr. Brown, the founder and chief executive of Beyond Meat, there is a more personal
motivator: He would rather not be responsible for the deaths of animals.

“If you say, ‘I want to inflict pain and take someone else’s body,’” Mr. Brown said, “that is not
something I want to do.”

Mr. Brown is, of course, talking his own book. His company is now one of the biggest
producers of plant-based meat, selling burgers, sausages and more in supermarkets, and
supplying its products to fast-food restaurants like McDonald’s and Panda Express.

Yet on many fronts, the data backs up Mr. Brown’s claims. Plant-based diets are indeed
better for the environment and consume fewer natural resources. Eating more plants is
good for human health and results in less harm to animals.

Mr. Brown, who became a vegetarian in high school, started Beyond Meat in 2009, and took
the company public in 2019. In recent years, the market for plant-based meat has started
booming, with other companies, such as Impossible Foods, competing for those customers.
Last year, Beyond Meat sold some 73 million pounds of product.

But as the industry grows, it is coming under fire from the conventional meat industry,
which is trying to raise concerns about what it calls “ultraprocessed imitations.”

This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.

What made you choose to be a vegan?

My dad grew up in rural parts of the country, and wanted to have that experience. But he
married my mother, who was from New York City. The compromise was that we have a
place in the city, but they’d have a farm. My dad would work during the week, then go up to
the country. The experience of being in nature all the time and being with animals just made
me fascinated by the rest of life on Earth. And as I got older, I had trouble making a
distinction between my dog and a pig. The vegan thing came from that.

Humans are omnivores. We evolved to eat other animals.

You can talk for hours about why it makes sense for us to eat meat. We’ve always done it.
Everyone else in the animal kingdom does it. But you have this unavoidable thing — you’re
causing pain. Do you want to do that?

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What’s different between an animal and a person? To me, the one difference that I can
understand is that we can understand the consequences of our actions. While my dog can’t
make sense of inflicting pain on another animal, I certainly can.

What led you to start the company?

I struggled a lot with taking what we just talked about into my professional life. I kept it
separate, and I got into climate because I care a lot about the Earth. Coming out of college, I
had a very important conversation with my dad, where I was talking about what to do in my
life. He asked me, “So what’s the biggest problem in the world?” I thought about it a little bit
and went to climate. So I was working for a fuel cell company, and it was great. But as I
started to understand better the emissions implications of livestock, I wondered if you could
do something disruptive in agriculture.

You can focus on one thing, which is to simply change the protein, and have a real impact on
four global issues that fascinate me: the climate, natural resources, animal welfare and
human health.

How is a Beyond Burger healthier for me than a hamburger?

A No. 1 priority for us is to make sure people understand that our products are actually
better for them than animal protein.
 Daily Business Briefing

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Is this helpful?

We started working with Stanford School of Medicine, and a professor designed a study to
test what happened if people consumed three servings of animal protein a day for eight
weeks, and then switched for eight weeks to three servings of Beyond Meat. The results
were amazing, and they were expected. We saw both statistically and clinically significant
drops in LDL cholesterol, which is the bad cholesterol. The second indicator was around
TMAO, which is a compound that forms in the gut that is very closely associated with heart
disease. And we saw both clinically and statistically significant drops in TMAO levels. We
want to do more of this. We want to generate more data, with larger populations.

We also have to educate people about the cleanliness of our process. You could come to any
of our facilities at any time, knock on the door, and I’ll give you a tour. You cannot do that at
a meat-processing facility. They won’t let you. That speaks volumes.

Not everyone is so convinced that plant-based burgers are healthy. I mentioned Beyond
burgers the other day and someone started talking about all the chemicals.

If you were to list out the chemical composition of organic Kobe beef it would be a superlong
list of really long, complicated words that most of us couldn’t pronounce. All the amino acids,
all the different lactic acids, all of the components that go into having a piece of muscle stay
together in an animal’s body. We don’t have the luxury of just saying “plant-based beef.” So
we have to list out our ingredients. But it’s not like there’s more ingredients in ours than
there is in actual muscle if you break down the chemistry.

We have a very large, incumbent industry that knows this is a big issue for us. There was a
full-page ad in The New York Times that took all the products in the category and listed all
the gnarliest ingredients and said, “This is what’s in plant-based meat.” So it’s being ginned
up. Competitive interests are creating a lot of attention around this issue.
Is the meat industry out to get you?

No. Tyson owned part of our company for a while. It’s a $1.4 trillion-dollar industry, and I
think they’re doing pretty well right now. If you look at our sales this year, they’re good, but
they’re very small compared to the meat industry. So I think there are pockets that are kind
of antagonistic, but not as a whole.

How is Beyond Meat different from Impossible Foods?

It gets down to ingredient choices. I believe that everything you need to build a piece of
meat perfectly from plants is already in nature, and you just have to look hard enough to find
it. Impossible is taking a different approach. They’re genetically modifying ingredients. And
we’re just not going to do that.

How do you reconcile all your fast-food partnerships with your emphasis on health?

I love those customers, and I think it’s about making incremental gains. If it’s being fried,
obviously it’s fried. But if you look at the underlying characteristics of the product — the
cholesterol levels, the saturated fat levels — are you getting a gain? And you are, in many
cases. It’s progress.

Is it an uncomfortable alliance for you, though?

I cherish those relationships. I think there’s a changing of guard that’s occurring at a lot of
these companies, and these are people that really want to serve healthier products and want
to bring the consumer along. There’s a real genuine desire there to continue to improve the
health profile of their menus. I think it’s sincere.

You don’t lean into the climate-change angle in your marketing. But given the year we’re all
having across the world, why not?

There’s a term that we use here called “hedonistic altruism.” I’m going to try to create
products that help people feel better about themselves, but also confer benefits to the world,
versus obligating someone to eat something because it’s good for the world.

President Carter’s position on energy use was to take the bus. Elon Musk comes along, and
he’s like, “Make a sexy car that people want to drive.” That’s a solution people are going to
get behind if they can afford it. So it’s always about how do you get people to understand
that the product is going to make them feel better, look better, have a better health outcome
and, hey, there’s a halo effect with climate, natural resources, animal welfare. But trying to
get people to eat something based on climate is hard to understand.

Are there parts of being a public company that you’re trying to do differently, in the same
way that you’re interrogating our food system?
Going public is awesome, but there’s some challenges that go along with it. You make a deal,
and the deal is worth it, in my view. But the short-term pressure is real. We’re trying to build
a long-term business that someday is going to rival Tyson in jobs and in global scale, and we
also have to think about quarterly outcomes. That’s a really difficult tension.

Often, I’m just more focused on those long-term outcomes, and I have to put on blinders,
because everyone is so interested in what’s happening in a particular quarter, and it’s really
irrelevant from the perspective of long-term growth of the business. That is very real, and
something that’s wrong with our system that we need to try to fix.

There were some news reports on a bunch of patent applications recently. Are we going to
see Beyond eggs and milk and all the rest?

I can’t say, but I saw those articles, too. Once you start thinking about protein that doesn’t
have to come from an animal, you can extend that — you can go into other categories that
use animal products. And we have a broad breadth of potential categories.