Beyond Meat [BYND] is a food processing company that makes so-called “plant-based meats.” Bill Gates is a major investor. Earlier this year, Gates notoriously made public demands for Americans to stop eating meat after sinking large amounts of his fortune into soybeans, corn, onions, and various companies making plant-based and lab-grown “synthetic meats.”
Earlier this week, Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown was in the news endorsing a federal tax on meat. He made wild claims that eating meat was destroying the planet and climate. Brown failed to mention that a federal tax on meat could easily cause his net wealth to grow exponentially.
Yesterday, Ethan Brown published Q2 quarterly earnings for his company. No wonder he wants the federal government to intervene and tax his competitors. His company is faltering. BYND posted a net loss of $19.65 million, or 31 cents per share. This was far worse than what was predicted for the company. They had a net loss of $10.2 million in the same quarter last year.
The company downgraded revenue expectations for 2021 Q3 to 120-140 million, down from over $150 million. Chief Financial Officer Phil Hardin blamed the “uncertainty of Covid-19” for less than impressive revenue growth. He suggested that their restaurant partners are still coming back online.
BYND’s most prominent restaurant partner, by far, is McDonald’s. Yet, the McDonald’s corporation has been posting great earnings reports despite Covid-19. McDonald’s has been testing Beyond Meat-based McPlant menu items at select locations in the USA, Canada, and Scandinavia. Maybe people just don’t want highly processed pea and rice isolates made to look like a piece of chicken.
BYND was launched in 2009 and went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange in May 2019. Since going public, Brown’s net worth has soared to nearly a quarter billion.
Loss or gain per share:
2019 Q1: -.14
2019 Q2: -.24
2019 Q3: +.06
2019 Q4: -.01
2020 Q1: +.03
2020 Q2: -.02
2020 Q3: -.28
2020 Q4: -.34
2021 Q1: -.42
2021 Q2: -.31
The most common ingredient in BYND products is pea protein isolates. Plants lack the diversity of the proteins and fatty acids found in actual beef. Plant-based nutrients can also be significantly less bio-available than animal-based nutrients. This is why many vegans have low hemoglobin iron and need supplementation, despite the fact that plants have lots of iron presents. Some people
The attack on meat in the USA is largely driven by two things. You have fanatical vegans who simply want to force their food ideology on other people, and you have people like Brown and Gates who have a for-profit motive.
