I'm Bethany McLean. This is making a killing in this show. I cut through the hype and handwringing to reframe the stories you thought you understood and uncover the ones you didn't know were important. I love industry makers. No one sees a new industry coming and then seemingly overnight, it's a way of life. The iPhone was an industry maker for mobile smartphones. The Prius was an industry maker for hybrid cars. You can argue Elon Musk's Tesla was an industry maker for electric cars, and so on. It seems to me that there's always a cycle. After a few false starts from two early inventors, we get that one company that blows us all away and makes a new industry. Then, as fast as you can say knockoff, there are competitors, fierce competitors. After this hunger game style elimination period, the strong remains standing and make themselves part of our everyday existence. I have with me today, Mark Rampola, who has been at the forefront of not one, but two industry making companies. The first was his own company, Zico Coconut Water, which berthed in eight billion dollars alternative beverage coconut water industry. His book High Hanging Fruit tells the whole dramatic story. The next was Beyond Meat, where Mark has been involved as an investor rather than as a founder or CEO. Beyond Meat is the poster child for the plant based food revolution. I knew we had reached peak alt meat. Not when Beyond Meat had a monster IPO in May of twenty nineteen, but when a few months later Duncan Donuts rolled out the Beyond Sausage plant based breakfast sandwich in partnership with Beyond Meat. Then came the Impossible Burger. Even long established Tyson Tyson has come out with raised and rooted plant based nugget. Oh, and then there's Kellogg's morning Star Farms, which has announced a line called, wait for it, incog Meato. I can't decide if that's clever or just awful, but giggles aside, and let's say they're serious money and plant based alternatives. Currently, the market is fourteen billion dollars in the US, and Berkeley's estimates that it could balloon to one hundred and forty billion in the next decade. Mark has unique insight into what it means to be the pioneering brand that then quickly gets copied. Is there such a thing as first mover advantage? And if so, how do you hang onto it? And our meat alternatives really the way of the future. I'm recording this here in the home of the In and Out Burger, California, and I'm delighted to have Mark here with me. So what's it like, Mark, to be at the vanguard of a new industry for the second time. I really hadn't thought about it that way, and it's pretty amazing to be a part of that. When I first started launching Zico, it was just a coconut water. I had no idea. I had some dreams, some hope, some asspirations, but I had no idea. When I look back and think that it's now an eight, probably ten billion dollar global category, it's absolutely amazing and beyond meat. Similarly, it's an amazing story to be a part of this whole plant based revolution. So did you see it this time because of your experience with Zicco, did you see that beyond me it was going to be creating this industry making revolution. Is it different in that respect or was it just this is a great product it is. It's a little different I think experience during that period of having started Zco and then invest in Beyond Meat through my fund power Plant Ventures, I'd looked at a couple of thousand companies, and so I think developed a couple of thousand. Wow. Yeah, we look as a fund about one hundred a month new upstart, early staged food and beverage, food service, food tech companies. Okay, so you have to pause on that without divulging any competitive information, can you give me a feel for the weirdest idea you've heard, for the most revolutionary Yeah, so some people are really fanatical about this, but the whole insect side of things, right, I'm not buying it yet. I'm not chewing on it yet. I'm not. It's Look, it's interesting, right, there's a lot of parallels. People do eat them all across the world, all sorts of reasons. There's an environmental reason, there's a social impact reason. But at this day and time, I don't think Americans are ready for it. And so that's a little out there, and we've seen some ones that are that are pretty odd and that you have passed on. Okay, how did Beyond Me it come to you and what made you say yes? This so a couple of things. One my partners, actually empower Plant, had known Ethan Brown, the founder, from day one and had an opportunity to invest. They passed because they owned a restaurant chain called Veggie Grill and viewed it as sort of a conflict of interest. It's one of the reasons we started the fund. I was seeing a lot of deals that we thought were interesting, and so Ethan was always on our radar. He was an extraordinary founder, and that's paramount for us. We always look for the individual. You know, great founders build great companies. Rarely do great companies just happened, and so Ethan was a winner from the beginning and his co founder. But we didn't have a fund up in running. They went out and raised money, and when we finally had our fund up and reading and got a look at it, we knew this was really interesting, particularly because they had a number of products on the market that were good but not great, and they were doing okay and whole foods in other places, but not exceptional. But when they rolled out what they called the Beyond Burger, we knew. The way we knew was we have relationships at Whole Foods were in the stores. We have people that we know at the stores and through Veggie Grill. Veggie Grill was the first place that they sold the Beyond Burger, and we also literally saw the first week of sales in Whole Foods. That first week it became the best selling product in the whole store seriously and the whole Tire store right and Veggie Grill. In the first month that they rolled it out, it single handedly brought I think double digits same store sales growth. You ever, and why what made the Beyond Burger so beyond? I think it's a couple of things, a couple of vectors that came together to make this happen. Still, the statistics are, you know, maybe two to three percent of the population is true hardcore vegan. I think in general, there's moved into the zeitgeist, this plant based plant forward understanding to have more plants, you know, have meatless Monday. That sort of has happened much more broadly than just Beyond meeting that's probably been building for thirty years on three key areas. One is, so I think there's this a general awareness about health and wellness and how particularly unhealthy, highly processed meets play a negative factor in that. The other is environmental and certainly humanitarian reasons, right, So those three are coming into more common thinking, particularly among millennials. And the product was very different. Think what you want about it. Relative to nine percent of all the veggie birds that have ever been on the market. It's a very different experience. And you know, they're never going to compete with a Kobe beef burger, but relative to a lot of the crap that's on the market in McDonald's burger King and every college campus in high school around the country, those hamburgers are crap. What's the breakthrough? What makes the burger so different? What they did is they applied existing technology something it's called extrusion technology. It's used in a lot of food processes used in other arenas, but had never been really applied to something like plant proteins. And so they use very available plant proteins, predominantly p but they can use other feedstocks, and they process it in a way it sounds a little gross, but it's almost comes out like a meat grinder. Would you know where you get this this raw material that can then be formed into burgers and so you know, there's some food signs in there and engineering. A lot of chefs have been involved in creating that, and they brought something that's really amazing. And I think, for example, my wife has been plant based for twenty years. You know, she had it and she's like, yeah, I don't miss meat. I do. I've only been plant based for a few years, and so for me to get that sort of sensation and that feeling and be able to have a burger is something I miss. So that's the core thing, am I right? That makes what's going on now different than what's come before, and that what's come before veggie burgers catering to people who are already vegetarian. This is a huge expanse of the market because this is a burger that is aimed at people who are meat eaters and want something that is comparable. And so suddenly you're going from niche to every day? Is that the right idea? And I'll tell you specifically something that was fascinating when they first rolled out that product. Ethan and Seth Goldman that became chairman of the board, were adamant, we want this in the meat section of the stores. Oh really, They went to retailers and literally said, we will not sell it to you unless he goes right next to meet Wow. What was it like to try to convince retailers to do that? Because I'm always interested in this gap if you will, between great idea wow, But then the dirty work of execution, right or the gritty work is a better word than dirty work of execution. The first thing they did is they built a team that was extraordinary. So they built the sales team that had done this in the past with other categories, understands the way retailers think, what metrics they want to see, how to communicate with them. And I don't recall the exact details of the story, and I'm not sure I know all the details as an investor, but what my recollection is the way typically a company would do this is you sit down with Whole Foods, maybe a target, maybe a safe way, and you say, look, this is what we're trying to achieve, do you want to get behind it. Whole Foods has a history of sort of being a leading edge, so typically they'll take a risk. And so the team went in and said the Whole Foods, look, if we're going to do this, we want to do it big. It's got to be right next to meet it's disruptive, and Whole Foods took that risk. And once Whole Foods took the risk and you had data that you could share with other retailers, then literally the conversation is, mister retailer, do you want the product or not? Some retailers held back. There's some major retailers in the country that were late to the Beyond Burger because they didn't want to put it. They wanted to put it in the frozen section or in the veggie burger section. And what was fascinating is I know that there were hardcore vegans, sort of the vegan mafia people say that we're furious with Beyond Meat because they said, I don't want to go near that section. I don't want to shop in that area. And to think that talk about like somebody that wants to change the world yet is worried about their own uncomfort zone versus the impact they can have to get meat eaters to eat this. There's a hypocrisy and that isn't there. That's interesting, but that was also brave on Beyond Meat's part to take the risk of alienating what would have been a very safe and secure core consumer in order to say no, no, no, we're going after the world and we're changing the world, right. I mean, there's real bravery associated with nowed it. We infuriated a lot of early Bickram yoga fanatics when we started to sell Zeco everywhere, like sort of by definition with these early adopter there's rid exceptions like perhaps the iPhone right right where by and large, these products, these categories are built by early adopters and sort of by definition, the early adopters onto the next thing, right, and so often that's the trend that happens. So is this a case of technological advancement? Is that modern technology that enables something like the beyond Burger to be produced? Or was the technology over always there and nobody had just thought about doing it this way or conceiving of it in this way the ladder. There's no earth shattering crazy new technology there. What is unique, and we're seeing this across a lot of the companies we look at is applying a tech mindset to food. And there's a lot of pluses of that, and there's some negatives, but there is a general sense that anything's possible if you put time and effort in good brain power behind it that you can come up with innovative solutions that you start with a consumer and sort of work backwards on how to solve a problem. A lot of those mindsets are really only in the last ten years or so applying in the food and we're seeing that. We're seeing One of our biggest fans or sort of supporters is the director of alumni affairs for Stanford, who came to us and said, something's going on here because ten years ago, all my top students that wanted to be entrepreneurs went in the tech. Now they all want to go in the food and it's all plant based, Like, what the hell's going on? Yeah, how long ago is that? But that's fascinating, fascinating, So you have this whole new mindset. So that's the mindset is. You know, Ethan's a wicked smart guy. Ethan Brown born ten or twenty years earlier, probably would have gone into tech, and he's going into a version of tech he is he has or gone into social impact. He's a radical, you know, animal rights activist or not the nonprofit world. But in today's day and age, there's an opportunity to sort of bridge those gaps and make a real impact through business. Before we move on, you mentioned the positives and the negatives of this ability to process plants in a different way, and that is one of the criticisms I've heard of this plan, or one of the marks of skepticism I've heard about this plant based industry, which is, wait, how does this go with the notion of an unprocessed lifestyle if these things are so heavily processed, and is that what you mean by trade offs? And how do you think about that? Absolutely? So, Look, what I'm very clear on and hope to work to myself and for our world, is that we get as close as we can to the plants, weed, that they are in clean, healthy soil, that is in a regenerative format, that the whole system is thoughtful about the soil, the forest, the ocean, and we are consuming food that is as nutrient dense and close to the source as possible. That's the solution. That's the healthiest way to live. Barn One. The reality is I don't eat that way. I have time, money, capability, I have and tried to garden for my entire life. And the reality is, how often do I do it half my eating that way of a fast paced life. I'm moving, and so the reality is we make those compromises. And so you know, Ethan Brown actually talked about this recently, I think it was I think it was Chipotle had refused to bring them in at least this was as a few months or a year ago or so. One of the comments was, well, it's too highly processed, right, And Ethan's retort was something like, yeah, have you been in an industrialized meat facility lately? Go in one of those if they even let you in the door, and then come in my plant and let's talk, because the reality is, yes, relative to a fresh picked squash and grinding your own lentils into a homemade veggie burger, like, of course, that's always going to be better relative to probably make some enemies on this. I'm not going to try to use specific names, but there's a few big food service companies that sell these patties that are everywhere right there, every college, high school, most fast food restaurants use these frozen patties that are not food. The amount of meat in them is questionable. The fillers the way they do that. Then you start to work your way down the meat supply chain. How are they treated, what kind of antibiotics are they pumped with? Where they raised? Then you talk economically, we're subsidizing the water, we're subsidizing land, we subsidize the corn that is a disaster. So you're talking about, in my mind, is a massive relative improvement. It's massive. Now. My recommendation with people it is, have it once a week, you know, have it occasionally, right, Substitute a hamburger, occasionally, substitute some fish occasionally. For this, it's a it's a delightful, healthy alternative relative to other things on one's journey to a better way of eating. That's so interesting. I think a lot about this of relative versus absolutely does something need to be perfect and solve every single problem out there? Or does it just need to move us in the right direction? Progress not perfection, Progress not perfection. I like that line on that note. Is the product as good as it could be? Yet is there room for more improvement? Can you make the beyond burke or even better? Yeah? Absolutely. I Mean these guys are tweaking day in and day out, and I think making major improvement. I know they're looking at alternative protein sources. We as a fund are working closely with them to actually use credible data to measure and think about their impact. Is you want to talk about things like carbon emissions, water utilization, land utilizations, there's no comparison. You're talking one hundred x improvement with something like that, but they're going beyond that. What's interesting is that the traditional meat industry has had a response to this that is unlike what the dairy industry did in the sense that the dairy industry didn't see this coming right and they've lost share to these alternative milk products and been caught flat footed, and the meat industry is responding differently. Do you think they learned a lesson from dairy? I have the good fortune to engage with a number of very very very senior executives at many of the food beverage companies, including some of the meat companies. They're rational, smart people. Most of them want to do the right thing and are trying to figure out how to navigate it. You know, they have a shareholder base, they have self interest. All those things are aligned, and I think they're rational. They recognize and see these trends and are afraid of getting caught flat footed, and so yeah, they've seen other industries blow up, other companies blow up, and I think they know it can happen to them too. Do you ever get out there and taste competitors products, just in knowing you're not an investor anymore? But I mean, if you eat a beyond Burger, can you tell it's not an impossible burger? Can you absolutely? And you can tell it's not an incognito whatever? Whatever? Okay, those couple ones, at least they're pretty distinct, and distinction is good. And you know, one of the points, one of our thesis in general is competition builds categories. Right, it's you know, beyond meat. A loan would not be where it is if there wasn't impossible. That's just how these things work, because one spurs the other to be better, to do better, and people talk about it. They compare retailers here about a consumers reporters. Everybody's talking about it. It sort of creates this hype in interest and they support each other's funder compete, and it just sort of creates an ecosystem. Back to this notion with Zico, you did eventually sell to Coke Beyond me. It's took an investment from Tyson, right, and so did you think and then Tyson ended up selling and launching its own competitive product. How did you think about that? Help them navigate that based on your experience, What are the pros and cons of letting your monster competitor into what you're doing, knowing that they can then take that and go off and do their own thing. It's a very delicate balance. And to be really clear, our role, in my personal role and beyond me, it has been relatively minor, you know, very very close with Seth and Ethan, but they've got some great counsel on our great advice. But I'll tell you the way we generally approach this with a variety of companies and the kind of conversations we had with them, which is, look, ultimately it's about where you're going, what's your individual and company mission and objective, and how do you define success. So we encourage entrepreneurs to be comfortable with the fact that, look, do you want to grow this and run this forever and pass it down to your kids? Do you want to scale across the world. Do you want to make some money, retire and go start a nonprofit? Do you know what do you want? What do you want to get out of this? And I think Ethan had a big vision for this from the beginning. He wanted to change the world. And so given that and given the industry and the way they were operating, it was going to take a lot of capital. And so they raised a lot of money from some big professional investors, and we felt fortunate to be able to support multiple times along the way. But this Tyson conversation, along with other strategics, is a delicate one. Yes, Typically, if an entrepreneur is expecting that relationship to solve all their problems, they're wrong. So it's not their expertise. Rarely can they bring that, And rarely do entrepreneurs have the capability or sophistication and know how to manage that right. It takes a very sophisticate entrepreneur to understand the way a corporation works and how to garner resources and engage. So every major food company on the planet right now is at this world trying to decide if they're in it. Does it make sense? Should they be in it? They have the right to be in it. Can they pull it off? They're all looking at it. It's a complicated set of issues and nuance that you then have to decide sort of pick your path forward. You tell me how unique this is. But one fascinating dynamic to this industry to me is you almost want your competitor's products to be really good. Because if what you're trying to do is not go after a niche, but you're trying to change the way people think, mainstream consumers think about plant based alternatives, then you want everyone who picks up a plant based alternative to have a really good experience with it, because then they're a potential, they're a new customer. Whereas if they have a bad experience, even with a competitor's product, they may say, yeah, not doing this again. You kind of want your competitor's products to be good. Maybe not quite as good as yours, but good, right am I right about that? You, my friend, have the intuition of an entrepreneur, and this is something very few people get. I run into entrepreneurs that say, oh, our competitor's products are crap. Ours is so much better, And the first thing goes through my mind. Sometimes I tell them this, sometimes I don't is first of all, don't disrespect anyone there's no reason to do that, right, your mom teach you that, right. And second of all, you want them to be good because you want consumers experiences. It's all the reasons you're saying that. So absolutely, competitions builds categories. And so when you have a healthy competition and people are improving and innovating, it's good for everyone. If you're a great executor, right, If you're not a great executor, you don't deserve to win anyway. And did you learn this? And Zeco as hundreds of competitors maybe not hundreds, maybe I'm exaggerating, but a lot of competitors popped up really quickly. What did you wrestle with as that happened? What I wrestle with is, first of all, we had one major competitor out of the gate, which was vide Cooco and they launched literally within weeks of us. It was amazing. And were they already working on it or was it a quick cut? Clearly they were working on it. Yeah, it's one of these you know, when the timings right for a variety of reasons. Rarely is any one innovation just standalone. So I hated it, and my curb in the founder right of cocoa has become a good friend of mine. But I hated him. I'm sure he hated me out of the gate. Yet I don't think we realized how dependent we would wear on each other. What really frustrated me was it didn't take long. Within i'd say six or seven years, there were eighty five coconut waters on the US alone. Oh man, that's a lot of coconut and I can remember thinking, come on, people, can't you be innovative, Go do something else? Right meg nut water? Yeah? Absolutely? But the reality yeah exactly, But the reality is what I knew was from I doesn't take a lot of research to figure this out. One category that always fascinated me was energy drinks. There's one hundred plus energy drinks on the market, but Red Bull and Monster have captured this data is outdated, but probably ten years ago this data was legitimate. Eighty percent of the market of the enterprise value of the category. Wow, So you don't have to be first, but if you're not, and there's a risk of being too early, sort of bleeding edges. But typically the top two to three competitors capture the vast majority of the value of consumers retailers, strategics, exits, whatever it is. How do you stay tough If being first doesn't guarantee that you're going to stay tough, how do you stay at the top? Execution execution execution? There is no substitute for great talent, great people that just are obsessed every day with getting better and look, I plod and love and it's one of the reasons I love my job because you know, there's people that are way better than me at running businesses for five, ten, twenty years and thinking day in and day out about efficiencies and operations and marketing, innovation and sales and people and getting that whole orchestra aligned around continuing to be relevant and never getting complacence, never getting which I suppose is one good thing about competition, right, It certainly doesn't stop you from complacency. So back to be on Meat's IPO, it's obviously been just phenomenally successful. With that came short sellers, people saying the stock was overvalued. How do you think about managing that dynamic, especially for employees, where I would think it would be hard not to have some and founders not to have some sense of how you feel about the world. Tied up and how your stock price is doing, and if it goes down forty percent over something or another, how do you process that emotionally? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean we certainly lived through that even as investors, let alone you know, as as employees seeing the stock go up that you know, two hundred and back down that I think eighty five. I was giggling one headline the other day when the stock fell on worries about increased competition. Was that beyond meat stock up butchered? Yeah, there's some fun at least, there's some good puns in this. But anyway, back to back to your point, you'd have some fun with that category, There's no question about it. Yeah. Look, I think that one difference with Beyond Meat versus the tech industry has lived through this, for fortune's made or lost on paper all the time. One difference is a vast majority of people that went to work or work at Beyond Me are there in no small part because of the mission Ethan just he lives and breathes it, he communicates it, he lives this lifestyle and he created this ethos where we are on a mission. And so I know a ton of employees there and talk to them regularly during this process, and of course they're excited, you know, their motions are up. And now usiden the same thing. How is this This must be tough, how's it going? And they all had a mindset that this was all noise. It was exciting, it was interesting, but nobody believed that two hundred ars was going to hold forever. Right. Really they were able to stay rational even in the face of exuberance, to sort of mangle and a Faymoss Alan Greenspana the phrase absolutely, I think again, it starts at the top. Ethan's an amazing rational person. Seth Goldman, the chairman of the board, is amazing irrational, have lived through some up and downs. And I think, yeah. They were communicating throughout this, Hey, we're building a company that's going to laugh, asked and live forever. And you know, I don't not privy to all the inside communication they had, but stories I heard were about, look, they're building one of the next great food brands, an iconic brand. It might be the next Kellogg or Ticon or something like that. Stocks go up, stocks go down, companies live forever. That's really interesting that the mission can help you stay honest and focused in the face of a stock price that beyond meat has seen. As I thought, it's interesting because I've often repeated over the years that a company is not at stock price. They are two different things. And yet, in a weird way, beyond meat, stock price has almost been branding or furtherance of the mission in a really interesting way, in the sense that what the stock did made everybody say there's really something here and brought attention to beyond meat in a way that I think has accomplished a lot. Does that sound right? Absolutely, look, because I do think I think about the accomplishments on a couple level. One just building a new company that's amazing. Building new company that's plant based burgers is extray, right, But when it come the next Tyson Foods is amazing. But what this did is showed us and I think a lot of other investors and entrepreneurs that there's an appetite in the public markets for what people generally called ESG. We have the fortune, the deal and our fund with some massive global investors. I can tell you it's on eighty percent of them. They care about this. Many of them care about it because the people that are running the funds are forty forty five years old, right, They've come of a new generation. They also know millennials have money, are investing money in the funds. They care about these things. And so I think there's a massive shift happening in our capital markets, which is fascinating to see, and I think it can unleash massive potential because when all of a sudden you have these institutional investors that are at least asking the question and thinking about it, that's amazing and so beyond me. It was one of the first public stocks that people could point to and both say, hey, it's a cool company. It's a product that I can touch and feel, and it's a mission I can believe in, and I can invest behind it and look at the money I can make it. As it goes back to your broader point about practicality over purity and the sense that you could say, well, these people should be doing sustainability because that's the right thing to do, but yet you have this interesting confluence between sustainability because it's the right thing to do, because that's where the money is, because it's the right thing to do. You can see how the mixture of those two things can actually create a virtuous circle and exactly what I believe. And it's just I think I've come more and more to just accept that to expect people to change too radically is unreasonable. I believe we're at a point of crisis as a species on this planet and that is in part our food system, our energy system, and that the core of that is capitalism. And if we're going to change that, it's got to be aligned with the way people live. And that's possible. That makes a ton of sense. So when the CEO of Impossible Foods talks about a goal of eliminating animal products from the global food supply by twenty thirty five, does that fit into the category of realistic or is that idealistic? Let's call that ambitious. It's a bold you, it's a b hag right, Yeah, And I love those I think they're great. I think for his company, that's perfect. It's not gonna happen. There's always going to be a place. And look, I have a lot of friends that are will argue with me all the all day long about this. And you know, the reality is a small farm with well treated animals that are fed on organic food and are harvested or used in rational ways. I have a hard time arguing that it's not my choice, and I can still have an ethical question about that, but I can understand that as a model. The reality is that's not a model for the rest of the world, and if we move a modest way towards some of these goals, it's a big deal. I do think there's sometime, whether it's fifty years, one hundred years, or a thousand years, well, we will look at animals and look back and be amazed we ate them. We amazed at the way we treated them. Were There were a couple of words that have been invented to describe I think what you're talking about, which I liked. One is let's see if I can say them flexitarianism. On the other, which I really liked, reduced tarianism right just along the notion that progress is important rather than perfection. Have you guys struggled, either with Beyond Meat or in any of your other investments with some of the pushback from the big meat interests in this country, in the sense that they've gotten laws passed that you can't use the word meat unless it comes from an animal, and there's been pushback from other lobbying groups about the idea that this is healthy in order to just preserve their market share. And do you guys worry or get angry about that corporate power, that degree of moneyed power. Look, corporate interests in general in our country anger me and annoy me. I accept them as a reality and as a challenge. And I think most grange entrepreneurs and investors do like these guys are you know, they're spitting in the wind. It's just it's inevitable, and so time is on our side. And the challenge really is building a business in and around and twist and turn, so you change the name, so you have fun with it. And I'll give you one great example. There's a company. The company has had some challenges, but fascinating an entrepreneur, an interesting story. I just this was Hampton Creek. Yeah, so when they rolled out this mayo product, they got sued by a couple of the big mayonnaise companies. They took the social media and kids in college kids across the country adopted their cause and in a month, the big mayonnaise companies were out of numerous college campuses across the country. So it just it just bit them in the ass. Oh my god. I love this story for another reason, which is social media as a force for good instead of social media as an engine of our mutual assured destruction. Right. There are occasions, right, it's it's how it's used and they but it's an exception to every rule. Right. So have you seen anything over your career now you've come to believe more strongly and this idea of mission and economics. And I was struck by a speech you gave I think it was a couple of years of ago about doing good is good business. Are there things you've seen that counter that that make it hard for you to maintain your faith in this or have you become more of a believer that these things are both possible. I have this conflict every day, and I fight the battle, and there's days where I feel like I'm kidding myself that part of the problem flying around the world to find businesses and try to change this, and every flight I take is you know, more carbon emissions, right, investing in these great companies, and most of our investors are already very wealthy people. So I think the difference now is I can recognize those and I choose my battles. And so what I recognize is I have a choice, right I can detach from the world and you know, go on a farm somewhere and raise my own plants, try to live as low impact absolutely and live as low and impact life as possible. Or I can fight within the system. And that fight, for me is is a soft one. So what I feel is if I can talk to a young entrepreneur and ask them about their mission, ask them about their impact, ask them about their supply chain, ask them about their employees. Do you know where your food comes from? Tell me about the employees of your copacker like that, they start thinking, oh my god, and investors asking me these things, I better go figure it out. That changes things, right. That's very powerful to be the person with money asking the important questions. Yes. And then when companies are scaling, what I can ask them is, look, if you sell this company and that's party goal, how do you make sure the mission is so core to the DNA that the corporations aren't going to be able to screw it up? Because corporations are generals generally pretty small, pretty rational, filled with good people that are trying to do the right thing. If the core of the brand is so strong it will endure. I'm amazed that Zico in the coke system, the brand's phenomenal. The products are honestly, in some ways better than it was in terms of quality and sustainability and social impact. But it's because the core of the DNA, the DNA the brand was strong enough. And so if you build in checks and balances in your supply chain, most likely a strategic is going to keep a lot of those in places. It's not perfect, But so I can challenge on that front, and the other front I can challenge on is investors. I can sit in front of some of the wealthiest, most successful investors in the world and tell them why this matters, why our food system is disrupted, why it needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up, Why that creates an economic opportunity for you, and you can also improve the planet health and wellness and have some humanitarian impact all at the same time. You're giving me faith that maybe the world really is moving to a different place. Because I would have expected that Zico and the Coke coal of system that they would have started trying to save money by reducing some of the costs in the supply chain in a way that would have been problematic. Honestly, look, I'm not I'm not involved anymore, but I hear plenty and I check in, and I'll give you one one little example. I know, you know the team in Thailand that manages the supply chain. There's a woman owned farm that I developed a relationship and began sourcing from her when there was nothing like it was a teeny little shed. They were gathering some coconuts and cracking them open. She's got like three hundred employees now or something like that. And one thing I know is that when you're clear about what is non negotiable, a great strategic supply chain will look at those things and do it right now. If they're throwing coconut water into another into coke, you know, someday, you know who knows how they'll do it. But thus far, at least, the integrity of the brand is strong. And we see that generally when brands get acquired. Whether it's you do well with it or not is a totally different story. Isn't that interesting? I guess to your point about working within the system, maybe the key if you're going to work within the system is to have certain things that are non negotiable and to know what those are, and to also have your consumers absolutely understand what's non negotiable, so that if there's pressure on those points, your consumers know to push back. That's exactly right. Identifying those non negotiables are important for any entrepreneur. They're important in life, right. I'm sure you have them in your business world, in your career, and I think we all play our part. I think what I've come to terms with is part of me. Would have loved to do what you're doing. I think what you did on en Ron was absolutely amazing, and to highlight these issues in another life, I'd love to do that sort of work, be sort of a calling out from the outside, pointing out and bringing it to light these real problems we have. That's not my skill set. I can't do that. I thought maybe I would run a global corporation someday and make a big impact at that level. That's not my calling. This is my well to take something that didn't exist and have a farmer in Thailand, a woman farmer in Thailand with three hundred employees, I'd say is a pretty enormous. Even if that were it and you stopped there. That's a pretty enormous thank you, thank you, And I do want to just qualify I can't quit quote that fact that Zach well the order of magnitude is okay. Before we close, I just wanted you said this about building Zico. Be ready to spend a decade of your life to dig deeper than you ever knew was possible. To give until it hurts, and then give some more and still you may not succeed. If you are willing to go for it, then you'll be amazed at the impact you can make. Was there a moment with Zco that you felt like maybe I should quit? And how do you know? To persevere? Pretty much every day for the first five years, I woke up in the morning and had a mantra which was purely intended to keep me going, which was little things like all I ever need is inside me now. I used to I used to take runs and tell myself, everyone loves Zeke, everyone loves Zico, Everyone loves Zico. When no one in the world was drinking Zco right there were ten yoga studios in New York. I wanted to quit a lot. And one of the things I was afraid. I was terrified. I didn't think I was up to it. I had made all these excuses for myself, and and fortunately I had to a certain extent boxed myself in. I'd put every penny we had into the company. I'd moved my family to New York. I'd quit my job, I'd taken money from my sister, my mother in law, friends. I'll never forget one day. I actually went to my wife at some point and I'm like, look, if you're done, I actually got a job offer to move back to All Salvador with the corporations, run a big operation. It would have been more money, you know, moving to the same house, get our same life back. We got at it all back in a month and I said, do you want to Are you done? You want to do it? And she said, let's give it another year. Life is so much the people that surround yourself with, but also that a certain amount of perseverance is just getting in too deep to get out right, and also showing up just something half the battle, show up every day. Well, thank you so much for a great conversation, and I'm going to go have a beyond burger. You're welcome. I enjoyed it, Thank you, Bethany. I expected to talk about well meat and not meat, as well as the promise and peril of inventing a new industry. Mark and I did that, but I was even more struck by the bigger themes in this conversation, for instance, purity versus practicality. The former is for sure more ideologically appealing, and Mark's comments about how vegans were angry that Beyond Meat wanted to be sold in the meat area were indicative of the clarion call of purity. But by being practical, Beyond Meat has more of a chance to change the world. Nor is this the first time any of us have encountered the idea of working within the system. That can be code for selling out. But if you establish your non negotiables, maybe there's no such thing as selling out, even if you literally do sell out anyway, food for thought, last fun I promise. Making a Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and chalkin Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison mc clean. No relation in Making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell Engineering by Jason Rastkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and every one on the show. I'm Bethany mc clean. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.

I'm Bethany McLean. This is making a killing in this show. I cut through the hype and handwringing to reframe the stories you thought you understood and uncover the ones you didn't know were important. I love industry makers. No one sees a new industry coming and then seemingly overnight, it's a way of life. The iPhone was an industry maker for mobile smartphones. The Prius was an industry maker for hybrid cars. You can argue Elon Musk's Tesla was an industry maker for electric cars, and so on. It seems to me that there's always a cycle. After a few false starts from two early inventors, we get that one company that blows us all away and makes a new industry. Then, as fast as you can say knockoff, there are competitors, fierce competitors. After this hunger game style elimination period, the strong remains standing and make themselves part of our everyday existence. I have with me today, Mark Rampola, who has been at the forefront of not one, but two industry making companies. The first was his own company, Zico Coconut Water, which berthed in eight billion dollars alternative beverage coconut water industry. His book High Hanging Fruit tells the whole dramatic story. The next was Beyond Meat, where Mark has been involved as an investor rather than as a founder or CEO. Beyond Meat is the poster child for the plant based food revolution. I knew we had reached peak alt meat. Not when Beyond Meat had a monster IPO in May of twenty nineteen, but when a few months later Duncan Donuts rolled out the Beyond Sausage plant based breakfast sandwich in partnership with Beyond Meat. Then came the Impossible Burger. Even long established Tyson Tyson has come out with raised and rooted plant based nugget. Oh, and then there's Kellogg's morning Star Farms, which has announced a line called, wait for it, incog Meato. I can't decide if that's clever or just awful, but giggles aside, and let's say they're serious money and plant based alternatives. Currently, the market is fourteen billion dollars in the US, and Berkeley's estimates that it could balloon to one hundred and forty billion in the next decade. Mark has unique insight into what it means to be the pioneering brand that then quickly gets copied. Is there such a thing as first mover advantage? And if so, how do you hang onto it? And our meat alternatives really the way of the future. I'm recording this here in the home of the In and Out Burger, California, and I'm delighted to have Mark here with me. So what's it like, Mark, to be at the vanguard of a new industry for the second time. I really hadn't thought about it that way, and it's pretty amazing to be a part of that. When I first started launching Zico, it was just a coconut water. I had no idea. I had some dreams, some hope, some asspirations, but I had no idea. When I look back and think that it's now an eight, probably ten billion dollar global category, it's absolutely amazing and beyond meat. Similarly, it's an amazing story to be a part of this whole plant based revolution. So did you see it this time because of your experience with Zicco, did you see that beyond me it was going to be creating this industry making revolution. Is it different in that respect or was it just this is a great product it is. It's a little different I think experience during that period of having started Zco and then invest in Beyond Meat through my fund power Plant Ventures, I'd looked at a couple of thousand companies, and so I think developed a couple of thousand. Wow. Yeah, we look as a fund about one hundred a month new upstart, early staged food and beverage, food service, food tech companies. Okay, so you have to pause on that without divulging any competitive information, can you give me a feel for the weirdest idea you've heard, for the most revolutionary Yeah, so some people are really fanatical about this, but the whole insect side of things, right, I'm not buying it yet. I'm not chewing on it yet. I'm not. It's Look, it's interesting, right, there's a lot of parallels. People do eat them all across the world, all sorts of reasons. There's an environmental reason, there's a social impact reason. But at this day and time, I don't think Americans are ready for it. And so that's a little out there, and we've seen some ones that are that are pretty odd and that you have passed on. Okay, how did Beyond Me it come to you and what made you say yes? This so a couple of things. One my partners, actually empower Plant, had known Ethan Brown, the founder, from day one and had an opportunity to invest. They passed because they owned a restaurant chain called Veggie Grill and viewed it as sort of a conflict of interest. It's one of the reasons we started the fund. I was seeing a lot of deals that we thought were interesting, and so Ethan was always on our radar. He was an extraordinary founder, and that's paramount for us. We always look for the individual. You know, great founders build great companies. Rarely do great companies just happened, and so Ethan was a winner from the beginning and his co founder. But we didn't have a fund up in running. They went out and raised money, and when we finally had our fund up and reading and got a look at it, we knew this was really interesting, particularly because they had a number of products on the market that were good but not great, and they were doing okay and whole foods in other places, but not exceptional. But when they rolled out what they called the Beyond Burger, we knew. The way we knew was we have relationships at Whole Foods were in the stores. We have people that we know at the stores and through Veggie Grill. Veggie Grill was the first place that they sold the Beyond Burger, and we also literally saw the first week of sales in Whole Foods. That first week it became the best selling product in the whole store seriously and the whole Tire store right and Veggie Grill. In the first month that they rolled it out, it single handedly brought I think double digits same store sales growth. You ever, and why what made the Beyond Burger so beyond? I think it's a couple of things, a couple of vectors that came together to make this happen. Still, the statistics are, you know, maybe two to three percent of the population is true hardcore vegan. I think in general, there's moved into the zeitgeist, this plant based plant forward understanding to have more plants, you know, have meatless Monday. That sort of has happened much more broadly than just Beyond meeting that's probably been building for thirty years on three key areas. One is, so I think there's this a general awareness about health and wellness and how particularly unhealthy, highly processed meets play a negative factor in that. The other is environmental and certainly humanitarian reasons, right, So those three are coming into more common thinking, particularly among millennials. And the product was very different. Think what you want about it. Relative to nine percent of all the veggie birds that have ever been on the market. It's a very different experience. And you know, they're never going to compete with a Kobe beef burger, but relative to a lot of the crap that's on the market in McDonald's burger King and every college campus in high school around the country, those hamburgers are crap. What's the breakthrough? What makes the burger so different? What they did is they applied existing technology something it's called extrusion technology. It's used in a lot of food processes used in other arenas, but had never been really applied to something like plant proteins. And so they use very available plant proteins, predominantly p but they can use other feedstocks, and they process it in a way it sounds a little gross, but it's almost comes out like a meat grinder. Would you know where you get this this raw material that can then be formed into burgers and so you know, there's some food signs in there and engineering. A lot of chefs have been involved in creating that, and they brought something that's really amazing. And I think, for example, my wife has been plant based for twenty years. You know, she had it and she's like, yeah, I don't miss meat. I do. I've only been plant based for a few years, and so for me to get that sort of sensation and that feeling and be able to have a burger is something I miss. So that's the core thing, am I right? That makes what's going on now different than what's come before, and that what's come before veggie burgers catering to people who are already vegetarian. This is a huge expanse of the market because this is a burger that is aimed at people who are meat eaters and want something that is comparable. And so suddenly you're going from niche to every day? Is that the right idea? And I'll tell you specifically something that was fascinating when they first rolled out that product. Ethan and Seth Goldman that became chairman of the board, were adamant, we want this in the meat section of the stores. Oh really, They went to retailers and literally said, we will not sell it to you unless he goes right next to meet Wow. What was it like to try to convince retailers to do that? Because I'm always interested in this gap if you will, between great idea wow, But then the dirty work of execution, right or the gritty work is a better word than dirty work of execution. The first thing they did is they built a team that was extraordinary. So they built the sales team that had done this in the past with other categories, understands the way retailers think, what metrics they want to see, how to communicate with them. And I don't recall the exact details of the story, and I'm not sure I know all the details as an investor, but what my recollection is the way typically a company would do this is you sit down with Whole Foods, maybe a target, maybe a safe way, and you say, look, this is what we're trying to achieve, do you want to get behind it. Whole Foods has a history of sort of being a leading edge, so typically they'll take a risk. And so the team went in and said the Whole Foods, look, if we're going to do this, we want to do it big. It's got to be right next to meet it's disruptive, and Whole Foods took that risk. And once Whole Foods took the risk and you had data that you could share with other retailers, then literally the conversation is, mister retailer, do you want the product or not? Some retailers held back. There's some major retailers in the country that were late to the Beyond Burger because they didn't want to put it. They wanted to put it in the frozen section or in the veggie burger section. And what was fascinating is I know that there were hardcore vegans, sort of the vegan mafia people say that we're furious with Beyond Meat because they said, I don't want to go near that section. I don't want to shop in that area. And to think that talk about like somebody that wants to change the world yet is worried about their own uncomfort zone versus the impact they can have to get meat eaters to eat this. There's a hypocrisy and that isn't there. That's interesting, but that was also brave on Beyond Meat's part to take the risk of alienating what would have been a very safe and secure core consumer in order to say no, no, no, we're going after the world and we're changing the world, right. I mean, there's real bravery associated with nowed it. We infuriated a lot of early Bickram yoga fanatics when we started to sell Zeco everywhere, like sort of by definition with these early adopter there's rid exceptions like perhaps the iPhone right right where by and large, these products, these categories are built by early adopters and sort of by definition, the early adopters onto the next thing, right, and so often that's the trend that happens. So is this a case of technological advancement? Is that modern technology that enables something like the beyond Burger to be produced? Or was the technology over always there and nobody had just thought about doing it this way or conceiving of it in this way the ladder. There's no earth shattering crazy new technology there. What is unique, and we're seeing this across a lot of the companies we look at is applying a tech mindset to food. And there's a lot of pluses of that, and there's some negatives, but there is a general sense that anything's possible if you put time and effort in good brain power behind it that you can come up with innovative solutions that you start with a consumer and sort of work backwards on how to solve a problem. A lot of those mindsets are really only in the last ten years or so applying in the food and we're seeing that. We're seeing One of our biggest fans or sort of supporters is the director of alumni affairs for Stanford, who came to us and said, something's going on here because ten years ago, all my top students that wanted to be entrepreneurs went in the tech. Now they all want to go in the food and it's all plant based, Like, what the hell's going on? Yeah, how long ago is that? But that's fascinating, fascinating, So you have this whole new mindset. So that's the mindset is. You know, Ethan's a wicked smart guy. Ethan Brown born ten or twenty years earlier, probably would have gone into tech, and he's going into a version of tech he is he has or gone into social impact. He's a radical, you know, animal rights activist or not the nonprofit world. But in today's day and age, there's an opportunity to sort of bridge those gaps and make a real impact through business. Before we move on, you mentioned the positives and the negatives of this ability to process plants in a different way, and that is one of the criticisms I've heard of this plan, or one of the marks of skepticism I've heard about this plant based industry, which is, wait, how does this go with the notion of an unprocessed lifestyle if these things are so heavily processed, and is that what you mean by trade offs? And how do you think about that? Absolutely? So, Look, what I'm very clear on and hope to work to myself and for our world, is that we get as close as we can to the plants, weed, that they are in clean, healthy soil, that is in a regenerative format, that the whole system is thoughtful about the soil, the forest, the ocean, and we are consuming food that is as nutrient dense and close to the source as possible. That's the solution. That's the healthiest way to live. Barn One. The reality is I don't eat that way. I have time, money, capability, I have and tried to garden for my entire life. And the reality is, how often do I do it half my eating that way of a fast paced life. I'm moving, and so the reality is we make those compromises. And so you know, Ethan Brown actually talked about this recently, I think it was I think it was Chipotle had refused to bring them in at least this was as a few months or a year ago or so. One of the comments was, well, it's too highly processed, right, And Ethan's retort was something like, yeah, have you been in an industrialized meat facility lately? Go in one of those if they even let you in the door, and then come in my plant and let's talk, because the reality is, yes, relative to a fresh picked squash and grinding your own lentils into a homemade veggie burger, like, of course, that's always going to be better relative to probably make some enemies on this. I'm not going to try to use specific names, but there's a few big food service companies that sell these patties that are everywhere right there, every college, high school, most fast food restaurants use these frozen patties that are not food. The amount of meat in them is questionable. The fillers the way they do that. Then you start to work your way down the meat supply chain. How are they treated, what kind of antibiotics are they pumped with? Where they raised? Then you talk economically, we're subsidizing the water, we're subsidizing land, we subsidize the corn that is a disaster. So you're talking about, in my mind, is a massive relative improvement. It's massive. Now. My recommendation with people it is, have it once a week, you know, have it occasionally, right, Substitute a hamburger, occasionally, substitute some fish occasionally. For this, it's a it's a delightful, healthy alternative relative to other things on one's journey to a better way of eating. That's so interesting. I think a lot about this of relative versus absolutely does something need to be perfect and solve every single problem out there? Or does it just need to move us in the right direction? Progress not perfection, Progress not perfection. I like that line on that note. Is the product as good as it could be? Yet is there room for more improvement? Can you make the beyond burke or even better? Yeah? Absolutely. I Mean these guys are tweaking day in and day out, and I think making major improvement. I know they're looking at alternative protein sources. We as a fund are working closely with them to actually use credible data to measure and think about their impact. Is you want to talk about things like carbon emissions, water utilization, land utilizations, there's no comparison. You're talking one hundred x improvement with something like that, but they're going beyond that. What's interesting is that the traditional meat industry has had a response to this that is unlike what the dairy industry did in the sense that the dairy industry didn't see this coming right and they've lost share to these alternative milk products and been caught flat footed, and the meat industry is responding differently. Do you think they learned a lesson from dairy? I have the good fortune to engage with a number of very very very senior executives at many of the food beverage companies, including some of the meat companies. They're rational, smart people. Most of them want to do the right thing and are trying to figure out how to navigate it. You know, they have a shareholder base, they have self interest. All those things are aligned, and I think they're rational. They recognize and see these trends and are afraid of getting caught flat footed, and so yeah, they've seen other industries blow up, other companies blow up, and I think they know it can happen to them too. Do you ever get out there and taste competitors products, just in knowing you're not an investor anymore? But I mean, if you eat a beyond Burger, can you tell it's not an impossible burger? Can you absolutely? And you can tell it's not an incognito whatever? Whatever? Okay, those couple ones, at least they're pretty distinct, and distinction is good. And you know, one of the points, one of our thesis in general is competition builds categories. Right, it's you know, beyond meat. A loan would not be where it is if there wasn't impossible. That's just how these things work, because one spurs the other to be better, to do better, and people talk about it. They compare retailers here about a consumers reporters. Everybody's talking about it. It sort of creates this hype in interest and they support each other's funder compete, and it just sort of creates an ecosystem. Back to this notion with Zico, you did eventually sell to Coke Beyond me. It's took an investment from Tyson, right, and so did you think and then Tyson ended up selling and launching its own competitive product. How did you think about that? Help them navigate that based on your experience, What are the pros and cons of letting your monster competitor into what you're doing, knowing that they can then take that and go off and do their own thing. It's a very delicate balance. And to be really clear, our role, in my personal role and beyond me, it has been relatively minor, you know, very very close with Seth and Ethan, but they've got some great counsel on our great advice. But I'll tell you the way we generally approach this with a variety of companies and the kind of conversations we had with them, which is, look, ultimately it's about where you're going, what's your individual and company mission and objective, and how do you define success. So we encourage entrepreneurs to be comfortable with the fact that, look, do you want to grow this and run this forever and pass it down to your kids? Do you want to scale across the world. Do you want to make some money, retire and go start a nonprofit? Do you know what do you want? What do you want to get out of this? And I think Ethan had a big vision for this from the beginning. He wanted to change the world. And so given that and given the industry and the way they were operating, it was going to take a lot of capital. And so they raised a lot of money from some big professional investors, and we felt fortunate to be able to support multiple times along the way. But this Tyson conversation, along with other strategics, is a delicate one. Yes, Typically, if an entrepreneur is expecting that relationship to solve all their problems, they're wrong. So it's not their expertise. Rarely can they bring that, And rarely do entrepreneurs have the capability or sophistication and know how to manage that right. It takes a very sophisticate entrepreneur to understand the way a corporation works and how to garner resources and engage. So every major food company on the planet right now is at this world trying to decide if they're in it. Does it make sense? Should they be in it? They have the right to be in it. Can they pull it off? They're all looking at it. It's a complicated set of issues and nuance that you then have to decide sort of pick your path forward. You tell me how unique this is. But one fascinating dynamic to this industry to me is you almost want your competitor's products to be really good. Because if what you're trying to do is not go after a niche, but you're trying to change the way people think, mainstream consumers think about plant based alternatives, then you want everyone who picks up a plant based alternative to have a really good experience with it, because then they're a potential, they're a new customer. Whereas if they have a bad experience, even with a competitor's product, they may say, yeah, not doing this again. You kind of want your competitor's products to be good. Maybe not quite as good as yours, but good, right am I right about that? You, my friend, have the intuition of an entrepreneur, and this is something very few people get. I run into entrepreneurs that say, oh, our competitor's products are crap. Ours is so much better, And the first thing goes through my mind. Sometimes I tell them this, sometimes I don't is first of all, don't disrespect anyone there's no reason to do that, right, your mom teach you that, right. And second of all, you want them to be good because you want consumers experiences. It's all the reasons you're saying that. So absolutely, competitions builds categories. And so when you have a healthy competition and people are improving and innovating, it's good for everyone. If you're a great executor, right, If you're not a great executor, you don't deserve to win anyway. And did you learn this? And Zeco as hundreds of competitors maybe not hundreds, maybe I'm exaggerating, but a lot of competitors popped up really quickly. What did you wrestle with as that happened? What I wrestle with is, first of all, we had one major competitor out of the gate, which was vide Cooco and they launched literally within weeks of us. It was amazing. And were they already working on it or was it a quick cut? Clearly they were working on it. Yeah, it's one of these you know, when the timings right for a variety of reasons. Rarely is any one innovation just standalone. So I hated it, and my curb in the founder right of cocoa has become a good friend of mine. But I hated him. I'm sure he hated me out of the gate. Yet I don't think we realized how dependent we would wear on each other. What really frustrated me was it didn't take long. Within i'd say six or seven years, there were eighty five coconut waters on the US alone. Oh man, that's a lot of coconut and I can remember thinking, come on, people, can't you be innovative, Go do something else? Right meg nut water? Yeah? Absolutely? But the reality yeah exactly, But the reality is what I knew was from I doesn't take a lot of research to figure this out. One category that always fascinated me was energy drinks. There's one hundred plus energy drinks on the market, but Red Bull and Monster have captured this data is outdated, but probably ten years ago this data was legitimate. Eighty percent of the market of the enterprise value of the category. Wow, So you don't have to be first, but if you're not, and there's a risk of being too early, sort of bleeding edges. But typically the top two to three competitors capture the vast majority of the value of consumers retailers, strategics, exits, whatever it is. How do you stay tough If being first doesn't guarantee that you're going to stay tough, how do you stay at the top? Execution execution execution? There is no substitute for great talent, great people that just are obsessed every day with getting better and look, I plod and love and it's one of the reasons I love my job because you know, there's people that are way better than me at running businesses for five, ten, twenty years and thinking day in and day out about efficiencies and operations and marketing, innovation and sales and people and getting that whole orchestra aligned around continuing to be relevant and never getting complacence, never getting which I suppose is one good thing about competition, right, It certainly doesn't stop you from complacency. So back to be on Meat's IPO, it's obviously been just phenomenally successful. With that came short sellers, people saying the stock was overvalued. How do you think about managing that dynamic, especially for employees, where I would think it would be hard not to have some and founders not to have some sense of how you feel about the world. Tied up and how your stock price is doing, and if it goes down forty percent over something or another, how do you process that emotionally? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean we certainly lived through that even as investors, let alone you know, as as employees seeing the stock go up that you know, two hundred and back down that I think eighty five. I was giggling one headline the other day when the stock fell on worries about increased competition. Was that beyond meat stock up butchered? Yeah, there's some fun at least, there's some good puns in this. But anyway, back to back to your point, you'd have some fun with that category, There's no question about it. Yeah. Look, I think that one difference with Beyond Meat versus the tech industry has lived through this, for fortune's made or lost on paper all the time. One difference is a vast majority of people that went to work or work at Beyond Me are there in no small part because of the mission Ethan just he lives and breathes it, he communicates it, he lives this lifestyle and he created this ethos where we are on a mission. And so I know a ton of employees there and talk to them regularly during this process, and of course they're excited, you know, their motions are up. And now usiden the same thing. How is this This must be tough, how's it going? And they all had a mindset that this was all noise. It was exciting, it was interesting, but nobody believed that two hundred ars was going to hold forever. Right. Really they were able to stay rational even in the face of exuberance, to sort of mangle and a Faymoss Alan Greenspana the phrase absolutely, I think again, it starts at the top. Ethan's an amazing rational person. Seth Goldman, the chairman of the board, is amazing irrational, have lived through some up and downs. And I think, yeah. They were communicating throughout this, Hey, we're building a company that's going to laugh, asked and live forever. And you know, I don't not privy to all the inside communication they had, but stories I heard were about, look, they're building one of the next great food brands, an iconic brand. It might be the next Kellogg or Ticon or something like that. Stocks go up, stocks go down, companies live forever. That's really interesting that the mission can help you stay honest and focused in the face of a stock price that beyond meat has seen. As I thought, it's interesting because I've often repeated over the years that a company is not at stock price. They are two different things. And yet, in a weird way, beyond meat, stock price has almost been branding or furtherance of the mission in a really interesting way, in the sense that what the stock did made everybody say there's really something here and brought attention to beyond meat in a way that I think has accomplished a lot. Does that sound right? Absolutely, look, because I do think I think about the accomplishments on a couple level. One just building a new company that's amazing. Building new company that's plant based burgers is extray, right, But when it come the next Tyson Foods is amazing. But what this did is showed us and I think a lot of other investors and entrepreneurs that there's an appetite in the public markets for what people generally called ESG. We have the fortune, the deal and our fund with some massive global investors. I can tell you it's on eighty percent of them. They care about this. Many of them care about it because the people that are running the funds are forty forty five years old, right, They've come of a new generation. They also know millennials have money, are investing money in the funds. They care about these things. And so I think there's a massive shift happening in our capital markets, which is fascinating to see, and I think it can unleash massive potential because when all of a sudden you have these institutional investors that are at least asking the question and thinking about it, that's amazing and so beyond me. It was one of the first public stocks that people could point to and both say, hey, it's a cool company. It's a product that I can touch and feel, and it's a mission I can believe in, and I can invest behind it and look at the money I can make it. As it goes back to your broader point about practicality over purity and the sense that you could say, well, these people should be doing sustainability because that's the right thing to do, but yet you have this interesting confluence between sustainability because it's the right thing to do, because that's where the money is, because it's the right thing to do. You can see how the mixture of those two things can actually create a virtuous circle and exactly what I believe. And it's just I think I've come more and more to just accept that to expect people to change too radically is unreasonable. I believe we're at a point of crisis as a species on this planet and that is in part our food system, our energy system, and that the core of that is capitalism. And if we're going to change that, it's got to be aligned with the way people live. And that's possible. That makes a ton of sense. So when the CEO of Impossible Foods talks about a goal of eliminating animal products from the global food supply by twenty thirty five, does that fit into the category of realistic or is that idealistic? Let's call that ambitious. It's a bold you, it's a b hag right, Yeah, And I love those I think they're great. I think for his company, that's perfect. It's not gonna happen. There's always going to be a place. And look, I have a lot of friends that are will argue with me all the all day long about this. And you know, the reality is a small farm with well treated animals that are fed on organic food and are harvested or used in rational ways. I have a hard time arguing that it's not my choice, and I can still have an ethical question about that, but I can understand that as a model. The reality is that's not a model for the rest of the world, and if we move a modest way towards some of these goals, it's a big deal. I do think there's sometime, whether it's fifty years, one hundred years, or a thousand years, well, we will look at animals and look back and be amazed we ate them. We amazed at the way we treated them. Were There were a couple of words that have been invented to describe I think what you're talking about, which I liked. One is let's see if I can say them flexitarianism. On the other, which I really liked, reduced tarianism right just along the notion that progress is important rather than perfection. Have you guys struggled, either with Beyond Meat or in any of your other investments with some of the pushback from the big meat interests in this country, in the sense that they've gotten laws passed that you can't use the word meat unless it comes from an animal, and there's been pushback from other lobbying groups about the idea that this is healthy in order to just preserve their market share. And do you guys worry or get angry about that corporate power, that degree of moneyed power. Look, corporate interests in general in our country anger me and annoy me. I accept them as a reality and as a challenge. And I think most grange entrepreneurs and investors do like these guys are you know, they're spitting in the wind. It's just it's inevitable, and so time is on our side. And the challenge really is building a business in and around and twist and turn, so you change the name, so you have fun with it. And I'll give you one great example. There's a company. The company has had some challenges, but fascinating an entrepreneur, an interesting story. I just this was Hampton Creek. Yeah, so when they rolled out this mayo product, they got sued by a couple of the big mayonnaise companies. They took the social media and kids in college kids across the country adopted their cause and in a month, the big mayonnaise companies were out of numerous college campuses across the country. So it just it just bit them in the ass. Oh my god. I love this story for another reason, which is social media as a force for good instead of social media as an engine of our mutual assured destruction. Right. There are occasions, right, it's it's how it's used and they but it's an exception to every rule. Right. So have you seen anything over your career now you've come to believe more strongly and this idea of mission and economics. And I was struck by a speech you gave I think it was a couple of years of ago about doing good is good business. Are there things you've seen that counter that that make it hard for you to maintain your faith in this or have you become more of a believer that these things are both possible. I have this conflict every day, and I fight the battle, and there's days where I feel like I'm kidding myself that part of the problem flying around the world to find businesses and try to change this, and every flight I take is you know, more carbon emissions, right, investing in these great companies, and most of our investors are already very wealthy people. So I think the difference now is I can recognize those and I choose my battles. And so what I recognize is I have a choice, right I can detach from the world and you know, go on a farm somewhere and raise my own plants, try to live as low impact absolutely and live as low and impact life as possible. Or I can fight within the system. And that fight, for me is is a soft one. So what I feel is if I can talk to a young entrepreneur and ask them about their mission, ask them about their impact, ask them about their supply chain, ask them about their employees. Do you know where your food comes from? Tell me about the employees of your copacker like that, they start thinking, oh my god, and investors asking me these things, I better go figure it out. That changes things, right. That's very powerful to be the person with money asking the important questions. Yes. And then when companies are scaling, what I can ask them is, look, if you sell this company and that's party goal, how do you make sure the mission is so core to the DNA that the corporations aren't going to be able to screw it up? Because corporations are generals generally pretty small, pretty rational, filled with good people that are trying to do the right thing. If the core of the brand is so strong it will endure. I'm amazed that Zico in the coke system, the brand's phenomenal. The products are honestly, in some ways better than it was in terms of quality and sustainability and social impact. But it's because the core of the DNA, the DNA the brand was strong enough. And so if you build in checks and balances in your supply chain, most likely a strategic is going to keep a lot of those in places. It's not perfect, But so I can challenge on that front, and the other front I can challenge on is investors. I can sit in front of some of the wealthiest, most successful investors in the world and tell them why this matters, why our food system is disrupted, why it needs to be rebuilt from the bottom up, Why that creates an economic opportunity for you, and you can also improve the planet health and wellness and have some humanitarian impact all at the same time. You're giving me faith that maybe the world really is moving to a different place. Because I would have expected that Zico and the Coke coal of system that they would have started trying to save money by reducing some of the costs in the supply chain in a way that would have been problematic. Honestly, look, I'm not I'm not involved anymore, but I hear plenty and I check in, and I'll give you one one little example. I know, you know the team in Thailand that manages the supply chain. There's a woman owned farm that I developed a relationship and began sourcing from her when there was nothing like it was a teeny little shed. They were gathering some coconuts and cracking them open. She's got like three hundred employees now or something like that. And one thing I know is that when you're clear about what is non negotiable, a great strategic supply chain will look at those things and do it right now. If they're throwing coconut water into another into coke, you know, someday, you know who knows how they'll do it. But thus far, at least, the integrity of the brand is strong. And we see that generally when brands get acquired. Whether it's you do well with it or not is a totally different story. Isn't that interesting? I guess to your point about working within the system, maybe the key if you're going to work within the system is to have certain things that are non negotiable and to know what those are, and to also have your consumers absolutely understand what's non negotiable, so that if there's pressure on those points, your consumers know to push back. That's exactly right. Identifying those non negotiables are important for any entrepreneur. They're important in life, right. I'm sure you have them in your business world, in your career, and I think we all play our part. I think what I've come to terms with is part of me. Would have loved to do what you're doing. I think what you did on en Ron was absolutely amazing, and to highlight these issues in another life, I'd love to do that sort of work, be sort of a calling out from the outside, pointing out and bringing it to light these real problems we have. That's not my skill set. I can't do that. I thought maybe I would run a global corporation someday and make a big impact at that level. That's not my calling. This is my well to take something that didn't exist and have a farmer in Thailand, a woman farmer in Thailand with three hundred employees, I'd say is a pretty enormous. Even if that were it and you stopped there. That's a pretty enormous thank you, thank you, And I do want to just qualify I can't quit quote that fact that Zach well the order of magnitude is okay. Before we close, I just wanted you said this about building Zico. Be ready to spend a decade of your life to dig deeper than you ever knew was possible. To give until it hurts, and then give some more and still you may not succeed. If you are willing to go for it, then you'll be amazed at the impact you can make. Was there a moment with Zco that you felt like maybe I should quit? And how do you know? To persevere? Pretty much every day for the first five years, I woke up in the morning and had a mantra which was purely intended to keep me going, which was little things like all I ever need is inside me now. I used to I used to take runs and tell myself, everyone loves Zeke, everyone loves Zico, Everyone loves Zico. When no one in the world was drinking Zco right there were ten yoga studios in New York. I wanted to quit a lot. And one of the things I was afraid. I was terrified. I didn't think I was up to it. I had made all these excuses for myself, and and fortunately I had to a certain extent boxed myself in. I'd put every penny we had into the company. I'd moved my family to New York. I'd quit my job, I'd taken money from my sister, my mother in law, friends. I'll never forget one day. I actually went to my wife at some point and I'm like, look, if you're done, I actually got a job offer to move back to All Salvador with the corporations, run a big operation. It would have been more money, you know, moving to the same house, get our same life back. We got at it all back in a month and I said, do you want to Are you done? You want to do it? And she said, let's give it another year. Life is so much the people that surround yourself with, but also that a certain amount of perseverance is just getting in too deep to get out right, and also showing up just something half the battle, show up every day. Well, thank you so much for a great conversation, and I'm going to go have a beyond burger. You're welcome. I enjoyed it, Thank you, Bethany. I expected to talk about well meat and not meat, as well as the promise and peril of inventing a new industry. Mark and I did that, but I was even more struck by the bigger themes in this conversation, for instance, purity versus practicality. The former is for sure more ideologically appealing, and Mark's comments about how vegans were angry that Beyond Meat wanted to be sold in the meat area were indicative of the clarion call of purity. But by being practical, Beyond Meat has more of a chance to change the world. Nor is this the first time any of us have encountered the idea of working within the system. That can be code for selling out. But if you establish your non negotiables, maybe there's no such thing as selling out, even if you literally do sell out anyway, food for thought, last fun I promise. Making a Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and chalkin Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Laura Hyde. My executive producers are Alison mc clean. No relation in Making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell Engineering by Jason Rastkowski. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and every one on the show. I'm Bethany mc clean. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve and let me know which episodes you've most enjoyed.