Of the six executive officers listed in the company’s IPO registration statement, only one besides Brown remains in place, the company’s chief innovation officer. In 2021 alone, the company lost its chief financial officer, chief growth officer, chief operating officer, chief marketing officer and chief people officer through a mix of retirements and severance. Meanwhile, the company was experiencing an exodus in the C-suite. In 2018, A&W Food Services of Canada Inc. restaurants were selling out its Beyond Burger faster than stores could restock them by April 2020, the company was announcing its arrival in China with a splashy Starbucks Inc. partnership. Earlier this year, even as the company reported disappointing earnings, it announced multiyear partnerships with two major fast-food companies, McDonald’s Corp.
Unless otherwise noted, every description of internal business, conversations and culture at Beyond Meat in this story has been corroborated by at least three of these people, who were directly involved in the matters discussed.īeyond Meat declined to make Brown available for an interview for this story.Īs Brown successfully penetrated the mainstream food world, announcing expansions into more fast-food chains, more countries and, ultimately, more ways into consumer diets, he has also been Beyond’s outward face, an amiable, passionate advocate for his products, and an evangelist for the health benefits of plant-based eating. In reporting this story, Bloomberg News had conversations with five former employees, all of whom left the company in the past year and asked not to be named discussing private company information. He is frequently described as a visionary by both his supporters and his detractors, but some of those who have worked closely with him also say that he isn’t an effective manager of the day-to-day operations of a public company. Insiders and onlookers alike lay substantial blame at the feet of founder and Chief Executive Officer Ethan Brown.
The relatively small chicken rollout is just one of a series of instances in which the company has been unable to satiate demand for its products. Two and a half years later, the company is still struggling to turn that buzz into products on the shelf, leaving Wall Street disappointed and some customers empty-handed as the competition closes in. When Beyond Meat went public in May 2019, it held the most successful initial public offering since the 2008 financial crisis, catapulting the company, and the entire plant-based meat category, into investor portfolios. (It did, however, manage to beat Impossible, which began rolling out its nuggets in early September.) But the eventual July 8 rollout was substantially smaller than previous Beyond launches and was limited to restaurants supermarkets, where the bulk of the company’s U.S. By late April, Beyond was telling customers that its chicken would arrive this summer. all released multiple chicken products before Beyond or Impossible launched a single one. As the two were battling it out, established manufacturers as well as a handful of new entrants jumped into the race-and beat both front runners to vegan chicken. Impossible beat Beyond to a national fast-food launch, but Beyond beat Impossible to supermarket domination.
The alt-meat wars began in earnest in 2016, when Impossible Foods Inc.’s burger landed in Momofuku Nishi in New York City and Beyond Meat Inc.’s burger hit dozens of Whole Foods meat departments a few months later. (Bloomberg) - This was supposed to be the year of the fake chicken.