March 5, 2020 • 26 mins
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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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:20):
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,
(00:41):
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
(01:04):
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
(01:26):
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?
(01:48):
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,
(02:10):
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,
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:15):
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
(03:35):
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
(03:57):
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
(04:18):
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
(04:40):
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.
(05:03):
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,
(05:23):
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
(05:43):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:33):
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.
(06:54):
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.
(07:16):
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
(07:36):
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
(08:00):
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
(08:20):
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,
(08:40):
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
(09:02):
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.
(09:23):
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
(09:44):
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
(10:05):
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,
(10:28):
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
(10:49):
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,
(11:10):
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
(11:33):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:39):
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,
(13:00):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:41):
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
(14:02):
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,
(14:27):
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
(14:53):
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,
(15:13):
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
(15:36):
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
(15:57):
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,
(16:18):
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,
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:27):
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,
(17:49):
Ethan talks about almost hitting rock bottom. When Ethan Brown
started bringing his plant based products to the masses. He
(18:11):
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
(18:32):
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.
(18:53):
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.
(19:14):
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
(19:37):
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
(19:59):
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
(20:21):
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
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
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,
(21:27):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:58):
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,
(23:19):
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
(23:41):
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,
(24:01):
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
(24:22):
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
(24:45):
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
(25:05):
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.
(25:33):
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.
(25:57):
Our researcher is Gabriel Loser. For more information on today's episode,
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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
(00:20):
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,
(00:41):
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
(01:04):
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
(01:26):
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?
(01:48):
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,
(02:10):
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,
(02:32):
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
(02:53):
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
(03:15):
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
(03:35):
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
(03:57):
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
(04:18):
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
(04:40):
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.
(05:03):
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,
(05:23):
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
(05:43):
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
(06:12):
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
(06:33):
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.
(06:54):
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.
(07:16):
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
(07:36):
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
(08:00):
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
(08:20):
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,
(08:40):
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
(09:02):
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.
(09:23):
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
(09:44):
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
(10:05):
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,
(10:28):
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
(10:49):
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,
(11:10):
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
(11:33):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:39):
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,
(13:00):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:41):
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
(14:02):
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,
(14:27):
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
(14:53):
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,
(15:13):
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
(15:36):
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
(15:57):
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,
(16:18):
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,
(16:40):
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
(17:02):
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
(17:27):
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,
(17:49):
Ethan talks about almost hitting rock bottom. When Ethan Brown
started bringing his plant based products to the masses. He
(18:11):
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
(18:32):
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.
(18:53):
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.
(19:14):
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
(19:37):
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
(19:59):
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
(20:21):
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
(20:44):
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
(21:06):
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,
(21:27):
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
(21:48):
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
(22:11):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:58):
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,
(23:19):
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
(23:41):
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,
(24:01):
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
(24:22):
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
(24:45):
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
(25:05):
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.
(25:33):
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.
(25:57):
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.
Host
Katie Couric
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