Plant-based food might have started out as a niche lifestyle choice for vegans and vegetarians back in the 1970s (hello, Tofurky!), but today you can find plant-based milk, cheese, fish, meat — and so much more — in the aisles of your local grocery store. The plant-based market is even conquering fast food, appearing nationwide on menus at major chains like McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and White Castle. On this episode of Next Question with Katie Couric, Katie talks with one of the innovators behind the plant-based revolution — Ethan Brown, the CEO of Beyond Meat. They discuss the impact growing up around farms and animals had on Ethan and what finally drove him to start his business. He also shares what's really in a Beyond Meat burger and why the company isn't here to tell consumers what to eat.
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Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric and welcome to Next Question. Today we're exploring the rapidly expanding world of plant based foods with Ethan Brown, the CEO of Beyond Meat. What starts with what are the parents are gonna feel really great about feeding their kids? You can't load it up with things that aren't naturally You can't put gm os in it. People don't want that. They want all natural foods. They want to eat healthier, but they still want to feel like it's familiar to them. Plant based food might have started out as a niche lifestyle choice for vegans and vegetarians back in the seventies with tofurkey and frozen veggie burgers, but today you can find plant based milk, cheese, fish, meat, and so much more in your local grocery store. The plant based market is even conquering fast food, joining in on the plant based meat craze with their newest addition to the menu, the PLT. McDonald's will no longer just be a place for a meat lover is as it's introducing it's very own plant based burger. From McDonald's to Burger King, from Kentucky Fried Chicken to Whitecastle, beyond meat and competitors like Impossible Burger can be found in pretty much every fast food chain across North America. And for Ethan Brown, that's exactly where he wants to be. Our job is not to moralized or or to to tell people what to do, and that's why again people give bel Muscow hard time. I actually really admire what he's done because he's made it sexy to have a car that's really good for the earth, right, And that's what we have to do. I don't know if you can make a sexy burger, but it can help you look sexy. But we have to go out and do that, create something that people just as satiates and they love. So my next question, why is plant based meat having a moment? I recently have the chance to talk to Ethan for Next Question Live, our intimate business and innovation focus series that's recorded in front of a live audience in our New York offices. Thank you are coming and welcome to Next Question Live. When I asked Ethan where this seed pardon the pun of his plant based company ideas sprung from, he said his childhood and his dad were major influences. So my dad grew up in the country. Um, he grew up in Connecticut in New York, but married my mother who was from the city, and so sort of a compromise was they were going to live in the city. But but he really have you ever seen like a deer in Central Park or something like that? That would be my dad, Like you just sort of not comfortable, right, So he always wanted to be out in the in the country where he enjoyed nature, and so, um, you know, ever since I was a baby, we would go out to a farm and enjoy ourselves and associpe for recreation. But he's pretty entrepreneur himself, so he started to create a dairy operation at the farm we bought, um, as I mentioned, and and uh, that took on a life of its only that hunter ahead of Holstein cattle. And you know, he's a professor and he's very sort of cerebral as a person. Um. But this is a part of him that I think he wanted to express and bring ourselves together with. And so you know, as you become exposed to the animals that are in the food system, it becomes harder, at least it did for me as a child, to differentiate between our dog, for example, in a pig or a dog and sheep, right, because they're so similar biologically. And I didn't understand that as a child. But as I got older and started to read and understand science better, I began to understand why I felt that way. And so over time I developed a discomfort with treating one animal one way and another another way. I felt that wasn't consistent. But then I went into my own career, which was an energy and and I really was focused on climate coming out of school, and and even then it was something that people were really anxious about. And of course we haven't done much in all these years, but we're now starting to You are a vegetarian, Yes, I'm worth, I'm vegan. You're vegan? Okay, whoa? So when did you become vegan? I was totally, like like most young people, uh, you know, trying to find my way. So I wasn't completely integrated or coherent. Right. I would stop eating certain types of animals and I'd have fish instead, you know, And I said, well'm not gonna need land animals, but I have fish. Right. My daughter, when she was a vegetarian, she didn't eat meat except for bacon. Yeah, exactly. So there's bits and elements of your trying to become this integrated person. And so I would do things like that throughout my childhood, and then as I became an adult, UM, I became a vegetarian. But it's interesting even then, UM in this I think you'll see this in our work, particularly with athletes. I played basketball when I was in college, and I kept getting injured for reasons had nothing to do with diet. My knees just we're not where they needed to be, and people around me and be like, oh, you gotta eat meat. You know, you got and so I started to eat meat again, you know, and then I stopped after I got out of school. Um. And part of what I've done with athletes is just trying to trying to sort of dis uh, you know, disabuse that notion that you need to have animal protein to flourish. In fact, that's completely wrong. In fact, it has the opposite of fact correct. It creates inflammation in your joints and other parts of your body that inhibit your ability to recover quickly. And so therefore from a simply getting as much as you possibly can in it's better to have a plant based source of protein, and we can unpack this. But if you think about it, you know what we're trying to do is get protein into our bodies, and you have to think about the delivery mechanism for that. If you think about the animals doing, the animal is consuming a lot of vegetation and they're consuming a lot of water, and then they're using the digestive tracks and their skeletal muscular system to create muscle, which we then harvest is meat. But the purpose of that muscle is not for us to eat it. It's actually for the animal to perform work, just like it is in your body and my body. So there's lots of things in it that we don't necessarily want, right and so if we're going to start from a blank canvas, we have the opportunity now to go ahead and build a piece of meat that's free of many of those things that we don't want. And if you can do that, then you create something that really helps the human body flourish rather than has dilatorious impact in certain wis when we come back the mad scientists who help get Ethan Brown beyond eat. For Ethan spending time on the farm as a kid, had a huge impact on his personal relationship with animals and meat, but it took him a while to get there professionally. He went to Connecticut College, where he played basketball, and then got his NBA at Columbia. He had always been passionate about the environment, so after graduation he got into clean energy tech. But it wasn't until he became a father that he got the push he needed to get into the meatless meat biz. But my kids really young. One of the moments I did have was my wife und I necessarily weren't on the same page at first. Where she grew up. She grew up in the country, her father hunts and things like that, and so you know, our kids when they were really little would have animal protein. Uh And I can remember being on the Jersey Turnpike driving up to probably see my family up here, and uh um, stopping at a fast food restaurant and the kids were ordering something and I just felt so uncomfortable with right, and it was at discomfort and they were really small. So I gotta go start this business. I've been thinking about it for getting what a happy meal or something. I won't say where it was, but it really gave me. It wasn't that, but it gave me discomfort. And it's that sense of inside that if I don't express this, then I'm going to let my life go by without doing it. Let's talk about this idea that you brought to the University of Missouri. You went to a lab there and you met two kind of mad scientists, right, and they were working and they would provide the perfect recipe for the beyond meat product, so um in Layman's terms, what were they doing? It was so interesting. So I looked for years for something that would do this. I looked at lab row eat a lot, and sort of mid two thousands, someone asked about that, and I felt coming. I was in the fuel cell sector, which is a great sector for for replacing the internal combustant engine UM. But if you look at um lab ow meat, it's very difficult to see when it's going to become commercially available. But what these scientists were doing was essentially taking the protein from plants, and let's say it organizers like this in a plant, right, we need to basically break its bonds and reset it so it takes on that texture of muscle that you're so familiar with when you bite into a piece of meat. So they were doing that and they had found a way to do it better than anybody else. And so I called them up and just said, hey, can we can we work together? And they really needed an entrepreneur because they were more propos oial than entrepreneurial. And we started working together and it worked out. So what exactly is in beyond me? Sure? Sure, and it's we get a lot of questions about that, and so it's a really good opportunity me to talk about it. So it's the core parts of meat. It's protein, fat, and water. And so the protein is harvested directly from a plant. And when you when you think about this, so you have let's say a p or we can use any any lagoon really works right, and you're you're extracting the protein from it. So we millet. We have a producer millet for us, and then we separate by changing the pH level and water the protein and the fiber. We take that protein and reset those bonds so it takes on the former muscle. That's kind of it, right, And there are other things we have to add into it. There's fats and and and minerals and vite him and and things like that. But for me, it's really important. You know, I always start with mom, and that's really how I think about things. I started so early working in the stores, so I would go to whole foods and hand out our products and listen right, and and so Mom would often tell me, Hey, this is what I want. Dad would tell me this is what I want. So what else do you put in there other than the protein and the fat? And where do you get the fat? And for you, it's such a interesting subject. And so we're continuing to So the protein, let's say, comes from the I'll talk about our Dunking product, which is great. If you're walking out the city, you can see uh, you know, Duncan selling the product. I would really encourage people to go out and get that here in New York. It's so good. And so that has I bet you would love it. I literally love it. And but that one's a really neat one. It has it has sunflower seed protein in it. Like who doesn't want to get up in the morning and have sunflowers? Like you can either have a piece of pork, you know something. It's been made from sunflower seed protein, mung bean, brown rice and peace, so that creates the protein. And by adding all this protein together, we're actually putting more protein in it than it is pork. And then you have things to create the fatty mouth feels of cocon and oil and and uh and canola and things like that. And then you have to add the minerals right, and the vitamins right. So they're giving people something that satiates but also provides nutrition for their body in the same way. But when it comes to color, for example, for our products, we have to use things like beet juice and pomegranate, and we try to find parts of algae that will transition from red to black and gray. So you know, you can rest assured that we'd have put really strict guidelines on what goes into this product, how many calories and it be on its It's really not about the calories for us. It's the calories are roughly equivalent. If you look a regular ham. Yeah, if you look at and just goes on the sausage, I'll talk about that for a second. That is less fat, it has less saturated fat, and we've taken on the nose a lot about sodium. That product is thirty seven percent less sodium than a normal pork sausage. Now you go to our burger, people like, ah, that burger has so much sodium in it. But does anyone in the audience know how much sodium is in our produ Like, given what you hear, let me just take a guess somebody, I don't know. I had to confess I didn't see that, okay. So people in the media saying, oh, you know as it so yeah, okay, So it is eighteen of daily value of your sodium, right, So that's the same that's in a half a cup of Mari narrow sauce for example, or tortilla wraps and things like that. So you know, there's an article that around the Wall Street Journal and said, oh, bee, I mean there's more sodium than a normal burger. Okay, But then you gotta unpack that a little bit. What were they comparing. They were comparing a season burger, which is ours, with an unseasoned burger. So go walk down the island the supermarket pick up or preseason burger, and you're gonna have more sodium or at least an equivalent amount, right, So, lots of games that are being played in print of position our product and were you getting a lot of pushback from you know, not only some health health food people, but you know, for example, John Mackie, the CEO of Whole Foods, who was instrumental in your early success, has said that quote, if you look at the ingredients, they are super highly processed foods, which isn't very healthy. Now, I know you want an opportunity to kind of respond to some of that. And I imagine some of this is being fueled by the cattle industry, the meat industry. Yeah, I'm gonna have a ton to say about this. How much time do you guys have? So John Mackie is giving me the great gift of like being one of my most important customers and then also saying this thing right, So I gotta figure out how to walk that line. That's a good guy for sure, And you know he has his opinion and he's free, free to share it. He's wrong for sure. Um, but you know it's it's a new day and and uh not everyone grasps us So what we what we are doing? And it's really a tale of two processes. Which process do you want? Right? So the process, in my mind is a series of steps to get to an outcome. That's what a process is, right, and so is our process better than industrial agriculture? Right? And so let me just walk through it. So we start with the plants, right. We separate the protein from the plant, and then we run it through steps of heating, cooling, and pressure which set it into that muscle structure. Right, and we present that with fat and and uh and and minerals and vitamins as a piece of meat for you. Right. Okay, you can then look at animal I your culture, right, And what's happening there is the animals consuming the product. They're also being giving antibiotics, this is industrial agriculture animal product, antibiotics, hormones, veterinary drugs right there, being raised in special conditions. Some of them are being given so much feed so quickly they can't walk uh, and then they're brought to slaughter. When they're slaughtered. There's all sorts of contentments and residual elements that are in the product that the USDA in fact has a program to try to keep those out of the food supply. So that's the process that you really need to consider. Now, it might be that Michael pollen And and Mackie live in a world where they can go to Martha's vineyard or to Marin County and they can get that grass fed hen that that most of us can't have, right, And so that's the world where I think people maybe get into trouble. They think, you know, if we can all just have this type of product, will be fine. But that's not how we eat, right, And that's not just that's not a way that we can feed the world's population. So we have to develop a better process, and that's what we do. You know, Um, I know that you're not trying to say to people, don't eat meat at all necessarily. I mean, I think you're saying you let me read a quote that you've You've said, you don't build a business telling people not to eat what they love. Um. So, so you're really asking them to supplement sort of meat if they can, right, I mean, tell me your philosophy, Like, who's your target market? How are you trying to really sell the concept to consumers who may you be curious but not that jiggy with it. As my daughter would say in seventh grade about twelve years ago, ahead Will Smith, Um, he's great. Uh So, Um, you know it's our target customer is the American consumer and the global consumer. It's somebody that is interested in consuming meat. But it's beginning to realize that there are issues around the levels of me and something we're having and I just don't know. I love me like I love to have burgers, and I loved having fried chicken. It's one of my favorite things, right, And so I get it. I'm not in any way you love that now, well, I love our products that I was going to say, you're vegan, you can't eat that stuff? Pick me off the show. No, no, so I But but growing up, that's really what I developed a taste for and it was really good and I understand it, right, and and so this is not about, you know, vilifying that decision. It's it's simply about you think about the landline. Did anyone get into like a knockdown, drag out fight about like you know, the cell phone or placed in the landline. It just happened, right. There are people like my daddy using landline. I'm always going to use the landline, like you're not a man if you don't use a landline like that. Never Yeah, but there wasn't a whole industry at risk right, A T and T provides myself service SERVI. So that's what some of the smartest meat companies are doing. So it's really not around us versus them, it's around is there, and it's I think it's a quintessential American idea is there's something that's good, which is meat. Let's make it better. Right, Let's go ahead and create meat that doesn't have the same impact on the environment, doesn't the same impact on our bodies. So let's be honest. Those cattle farmers, you know, they want people to eat regular beef that they're you know that they're raising on their branches and they'll probably for a very long time be able to keep doing that. But well, that's not good news for you. Well, I think there's so much demand and it depends on what the consumer wants. So when we go you know, when I was I was at a Barclay's conference and the audience was probably you know, in their fifties or so, and I asked them, ten years from now, you know, what percent of the market will be plant based? The numbers were extremely low. You go to places, to universities and it's like standing them. Only the kids understand this and One of the reason to understand it is because information is being disseminated so quickly. They can see on their handheld phones stat statistic things, see videos. And I also think they care more. I hate to say it because it's embarrassing for my generation, but they're really committed to doing something about climate change. They are, and they're okay, boomerang us to death. Have you have you seen? Have you seen the stuff that's going on in Sweden with this flight shaming? Like that gives me real hope. Like so people, if you take a flight somewhere where you could have taken a train, you're sort of seen as neanderthal like kind of change. What are you doing? Yeah, And so I think there's a consciousness that's this rising, which just thrills me. It really is. It's an environmental consciousness that Ethan built into his own product. If you look at our impact, we use less water when we create a burger, I mean less land, we use half the energy, and we've fewer emissions. So from an environment of respect, if we feel great about the products, he may be flying high now, but when we come back, Ethan talks about almost hitting rock bottom. When Ethan Brown started bringing his plant based products to the masses. He thought about another mass market food campaign from his childhood, Good Milk, Got Milk, Got Milk. When I was growing up, they Got Milk campaign was a big deal. You know, started with like Bo Jackson and then Derek Jeter and and you know, Taylor Swift and all these others. And it shocked me that you could be in a school and you could advertise for a particular protein in the lunch room. And that was what the California that was what the Milk Board wasn't able to do right with these posters and things that we all grew up with. Uh, When it came time for me to build a campaign, and said, that's exactly what I want to do because I want moms and dads understand that their kids will flourish on this right. And so I hired the original architect of the Got Milk campaign, a guy named Jeff Manning is your first sponsor of California Milkboard. Great guy. We still work together, keep in touch. Um he's in the seventies now. And I said, can you help me do this? So we created a program called the Future Protein. Then we hired someone named Beth Moskowitz, who has been a rock star. She basically bought all of these NBA players into our brand and they live the brand. So Chris Paul this summer made a remark to me said, you know what, for the first time in years, I've forgot to ice after practice because my inflammation is so low. And he's running around like a kid. Now, an inflammation is such an exciting, relatively new area to really study in terms of how it might be responsible for a whole host of diseases. It's amazing. Um, if you if you look at I mean our understands things people, I think maybe miss is that our understanding of our own world and the human body is so young, right, We're still were three or four years into this where science actually had any tools to be able to truly understand. This is reading something in Scientific American over the weekend, where you know the reading. It's a great magazine, but I love that magazine. So a bird brain, this is about avian brains. The expression like we got a bird brain, like because brains are so small they're finding out is that we were wrong about the bird's brain. Up until it thousand and four. We thought they've basically had no sort of prefrontal cortex type thinking capability. It turns out that they do. It's just a different part of the brain, so they're able to recognize in the mirror themselves and things like that that many other mammals can't even do. So I just think it's so interesting that we're not only being to understand our own bodies better than microbiome, but the bodies of the rest of life we share this earth with, and as we get more understanding, we realize they're more like us than not. Make no mistake, Beef is still the most popular burger on the American menu, but more people are trying meat alternatives. According to one report commissioned by plant based organizations, in the past two years, there's been a surgeon sales of plant based foods, which of course is good for Beyond Meat. In May two th nineteen, Beyond Meat became the first plant based company to go public. It also happened to be one of the most successful I p O s in history, But Ethan says he wants to push the company further into more restaurants in more markets around the world, which is a far cry from where he was in two thousand nine when he started the company. So people thought you were crazy, you know when you came up with this idea, and I know you blew through your four oh one K your kids savings accounts. It puts a serious strain on your marriage. Uh, Entrepreneurship is hard. Was there a point when you thought, you know, this isn't worth it, I'm going to give up. Uh, you know, it sounds really like a false modesty or something. I don't I think I was smart enough to even have that thought. It was like, really, I'm just not going to fail, Like I just didn't. I didn't even just sing so my opic. Yeah, I just never occurred to me that I would fail. So there was a we started. We started this in a building that was on a hill, uh, or the town I started in, And I used to drive by it and say, I'm either gonna make it or break it in that building. And today that building has been torn down, but we're still here. So I feel good about that. And what's the best advice? I wrote a book where I kind of asked people. It really was a lazy way of me doing commencement addresses to be able to quote people on their life advice. But what do you think the best advice you've ever gotten is I've been really blessed to have some important mentors throughout my life. And the one that I've shared, I think is we're sharing is it? Um? My dad? When I was coming up, so I was also a student of my dad's at his program at Maryland and uh um, I was kind of complaining about actually said I want to be up in New York, be my friends and stuff like that, and talking about my career and he said, well, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And he said, well, what's the biggest problem in the world. And I thought a lot about that, and it was climate. I said, because of everything, you know, if we don't selve for climate, everything else gets to be at risk. And you said, that's really where you should focus your career. And so it was an idea of combining a calling in a career versus trying to approach those two things separately kind of cause right, Yeah, that that lets your life speak in not only outside of work, but at work. And I think that really helped me a lot. Well, that's great advice and hopefully we'll all be better off because of your dad's good advice and we've got actually I've never tasted one of these, ethan, so this is going to be thank you, So tell me a little bit what I'm tasting here. Sure, So this is our newest burger. It's been in the market for for a little bit, um, and every year we come out with a new new version of it. And so this one should have a slightly meteor texture and taste to it. And so where where can you get this? Any real any supermarket like hopefully it's here in the city or or uh any any supermarket Relais the a s Mr portion of the podcast. And by the way, you can get this in the meat case. That was a really important thing for us to be able to sell it in the meat case where meat is actually sold. I like the bond too. It's kind of brioche, you know. Yeah, Okay, I'm I'm being serious. It's tasty. We've worked really hard on it. So how much with this bad boy being calories I'm always especially it's January trying to be good. Now, this one looks pretty tough with the cheese and the male. You're killing me. It's pretty tough, um, But yeah, it's it's uh I mean, the key here is you're getting cleaner fats, you're getting much less fat, you're getting less sorry, less saturated fat um. And of course you're getting no cholesterol, no hem, iron, no um, you know, T M A O. All these other things that you just don't want, they're not in there. Well, good luck with everything. Thank you so much for coming in, Thank you for the breakfast sandwiches, and and that does it for this week's episode. If the plant based phenomenon interests you, keep an ear on the Next Question feed because later in the season we're going to take a closer look at the environmental impact of meat. Make sure you subscribe to Next Question on Apple podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. And if you're looking for some guidance on your daily news intake, you can subscribe to my morning newsletter. It's called Wake Up Call. Just go to Katie correct dot com. And of course you can follow me on all your favorite social media channels. Thank you so much for listening and learning with me until next time at my Next Question, I'm Katie Couric. Next Question with Katie Couric is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Currik Media. The executive producers are Katie Currik, Courtney Litz, and Tyler Klang. The supervising producer is Lauren Hansen. Our show producer is Bethan Macaluso. The associate producers are Emily Pinto and Derek Clements. Editing by Derrek Clements, Dylan Fagin and Lowell Berlante, Mixing by Dylan Fagin. Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more information on today's episode, go to Katie Couric dot com and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Katie Currik. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.