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Wall Street becomes vegan. Over the next four weeks, Beyond Meat, a pioneering start-up in the meat business, will embark on Wall Street with a valuation of about $ 1.2 billion. Meanwhile, his rivals make deals with some of the biggest names in food.
Beyond Meat is the latest in a series of "unicorns" – private companies valued at over a billion dollars – to be made public. And this one is edible.
The company, based in El Segundo, California, was created 10 years ago by technology entrepreneur Ethan Brown. Legendary financiers Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers – and later Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio – then supported the commercialization of his first chicken-free product in 2013.
Now, the company goes public, at a pivotal moment, for meat-like products made from vegetable protein, mostly yellow peas, used to create a new wave of hamburgers (which "bleed" with beet), as well as poultry and sausage substitutes that taste much closer to reality than their predecessors.
The benefits of eating less meat from an ethical, environmental and health perspective have never been greater. And the business world has exploited the potential for big profits.
Two weeks ago, Beyond Meat's main competitor, Impossible Foods, launched a meatless Whopper at Burger King, and the Del Taco fast food chain announced the development of a meatless taco.
Even giant meat companies such as Tyson, the world's second largest processor of chicken, beef and pork, support alternative start-ups to meat. He invests in the meat manufacturer Future Meat Technologies, which produces meat from cells.
Memphis Meats, another company that develops cultured meats, includes the large grain company Cargill, along with Gates and Sir Richard Branson.
The interest of Wall Street does not follow from a new love of veganism. Meat production in the United States reached 52 billion pounds in 2017 and poultry production at 48 billion pounds. Beef exports alone account for more than $ 7 billion a year.
Beyond Meat's Brown aims to recreate meat with herbal inputs. "We do not want you to turn away from meat, we are just removing the animals from the equation," he said in an interview with CBS, citing figures showing that 70 million people were "deadly". Americans reduced their consumption of meat.
In a letter written by Brown and included in the prospectus of Beyond Meat's initial public offering, Brown insists: "We are not faced with a binary decision to eat or give up meat. "
He describes cattle as "a bioreactor that consumes vegetation and water and uses their digestive and muscular systems to organize these inputs in what is traditionally called meat". Beyond the meat, he says, does the same without the animal.
Up to here, beyond the meat consumes money. In 2018, she generated a net business turnover of $ 88 million and lost $ 30 million. A year earlier, revenues were close to $ 33 million and the company had a loss of $ 30 million.
But that could change quickly if alternative meat products reduced the global meat market to just $ 1.4 million, or reflected the success of non-dairy dairy products – which now represent 13% of the size of dairy products traditional. milk company.
As consumers increasingly turn to plant-based meat substitutes, the only growth limit can be the availability of plant-based proteins to make products.
Just five years after the launch of its first product, Beyond Meat products are now available in 30,000 points of sale in the United States and elsewhere, from Whole Foods and TGIF in the United States to Tesco and All Bar One in the United Kingdom. United.
According to Dan Altschuler Malek, venture capital partner at New Crop Capital, one of the first investors in Beyond Meat, the meat, dairy, egg and seafood sectors represent a trillion-dollar market dollars for large-scale disruptions.
"We believe that the global food system is down and one of the contributors is animal farming that has caused considerable damage to the environment," Malek said. "At some point, the planet will have more than 9 billion inhabitants, and the reality is that there are not enough resources to maintain current levels of protein consumption."
Malek claims that Beyond Meat is the third generation of herbal products. The first was for vegans who, for philosophical reasons, sacrificed the pleasure of believing in their refusal to obtain animal protein. The second generation has developed products with taste and flavor. In the third generation, companies like Beyond Meat have sought to develop products that are good enough to be consumed without any loss or substitution.
"It's a smooth transition for the consumer and that's what the third generation of producers is doing. Manufacturing technology has played an important role. We now have a convergence that fulfills the promise of a good taste and a beautiful texture for consumers. "
Ultimately, Malek believes that we could begin to detach ourselves from the need for plant-based proteins to look like meat products. But it's still early and consumers still want something they already know.
"You can not skip them simultaneously on two axes, changing ingredients and changing flavor. We will eventually arrive at a place where the products should not look like chicken, beef or lamb. They will be simply delicious and herbal. "
And the money money.
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