Essay By Eric Worrall
Bill Gates’ Beyond meat, promoted as a climate friendly alternative to real meat, is struggling with consumer backlash against processed foods.
Beyond Meat’s stock collapses after debt deal
By Laurence Darmiento
Staff Writer
Oct. 16, 2025 3 AM PT
- Shares of El Segundo-based Beyond Meat fell to less than $1 after a debt deal, down from their 2019 peak of nearly $235.
- The plant-based meat maker has seen sales plunge from $465 million in 2021 to $326 million last year as consumers return to animal protein.
- Second-quarter sales dropped 20%, part of a broader 18% decline across the U.S. plant-based meat industry over the last two years.
What does it cost a company when it’s no longer in the zeitgeist? For stockholders in Beyond Meat, perhaps as much as 99% of their money, if they bought at the top of the market.
Shares of the El Segundo maker of plant-based meats, an investors’ darling a few year ago, collapsed this week to less than $1 after the company wrapped up a deal to reduce its debt burden. The deal involves issuing up to 326 million new shares to the note holders.
The stock-diluting deal was spurred by declining sales at the company, which makes pea-based foods that mimic the taste of beef, chicken and pork.
…
Read more: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-10-16/beyond-meat-fake-meat-pioneer-financial-trouble-plant-based-impossible
$235 down to $1. That has got to hurt.
Beyond Meat makes a big deal of their environmental credentials;
WE BELIEVE THERE’S A BETTER WAY TO FEED OUR FUTURE.
By shifting from animal to plant-based meat, we can positively affect the planet, the environment, the climate and even ourselves. After all, the positive choices we make every day – no matter how small – can have a great impact on our world.
…
Read more: https://www.beyondmeat.com/en-US/our-impact
I believe there is more to this story than consumer economics. I suspect Beyond Meat is a casualty of the betrayal of trust people experienced during the Covid lockdowns.
The same people who promote the climate crisis also told us Covid was so severe we all needed to endure harsh lockdowns. Since Covid claims were exposed as wild exaggerations, people appear to be asking more questions about other claims they took on faith, like the claim that eating real meat hurts the planet.
I suspect companies like Beyond Meat have been caught out by this rise in public skepticism.
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For years people have swallowed their BS. They had no reason to think people would not eat their fake meat.
I think it was a bad business model to start with. Veganism is mostly asceticism, with the adherents wanting to suffer.
As far as synthetic foods, why not saffron? Or truffles? Or morel mushrooms? Or abalone? Bad copies of ground beef or chicken have much less upside. Or even good copies, as their product was much more expensive.
That’s not really an argument for Bill Gates and friends..
Renewables were a superbad model to start with,
yet they are being pushed like crazy – and Bill Gates’ shit meat has a huge advantageover renewables.
It delivers the necessary energy and can replace it 1:1.
And once you eliminate all competition it’ll be the only option.
But, but-I love the taste of Roundup in the morning…sarc, obviously, and apologies to Apocalypse Now.
There’s no climate reason to eat bogus meat, even if you’re a believer in AGW. Real meat, the stuff that tastes great, is as renewable and sustainable as it’s possible to get. The feedstock is all plant-based. Not to mention the fact that climate sensitivities to CO2 and methane are essentially zero at current levels (Ref. the works of Lindzen, Happer and van Wijngaarden, 2024, and beyond).
There is absolutely NO REASON to eat fake meat.
Your body has been optimized for thousands of years to get along with natural food and convert it efficiently.
But it is not optimized to get along with this crap that is at best harmless but most probably as poisonous as the vaccine.
That’s why I wrote in my last sentencethat , just as with renewables,
once they eliminate the competition (and the war on food, against cattle,mass culling of birds, terminator seeds etc is in full swing and will have the same effect as shutting down power plants),
it will be the only available product.
Yet my point is valid, that from an energetical point of view it can replace the kilojoule quantities 1:1 – renewables can not do this.
From a nutrition point of view this food will most likely be a catastrophy.
There is a reason why I call it shit meat.
The elites got swelled heads and applied their lies to too many subjects at once: AGW, COVID, DEI, CRT, and wokism in general. Mattress Girl, lawfare, cancel culture, none of them helped their cause in general, and Fauci bragging about lying to Congress sure didn’t help, but I think the final straws were Kamala and Queers for Palestine in the US, the Muslim rape coverup in the UK, and the general EU election meddling.
The peasants are sick and tired of being looked down upon. Scientists hitched their wagon to the wrong cause.
Sure, Scarecrow, some people might have climbed onto some wagon, but they would not be scientists because proper, “hard” scientists persue the advancement of science in time-honored ways like The Scientific Method. There is no need, no benefit, to join any club or bandwagon.
Geoff S
When you start with a flawed premise…a billionaire’s money can keep you afloat a lot longer than you deserve. I’d bet someone has made a lot of money and wittingly scammed Bill Gates in this ill-conceived venture.
Gates is well past his prime – he’s now just another True Believer gullible dope in the “more money than brains” crowd…
Noone “scammed” Bill Gates into it.
He may have been blackmailed at some point since his Epstein connections,
but as he has been around for way longer than Epstein , it is likely
that everything he’s been doing is being done by him on purpose.
He has been involved in everything that can be related to Agenda 2030- be it vaccines,genderism,diversity,climate change,alternative energies,NGO’s, backdoors for the main globalist tool = CiA and right now as major billionaire sponsor of the “no kings,no billionaires” protests.
Many of the ultra-wealthy think that their money gives them a licence to speak on all sorts of social, financial, religious etc matters. They imagine that they have proven special skill sets denied to ordinary folk.
In hard reality, the dominant skill that sets them apart is taking money from your wallet and mine and putting it in theirs. Why do people love them for this skill, when people should be resenting them because of their lessened money.
The size of the billionaire wealth is a recent happening. It is beyond comprehension for a person alone to manage this huge amount efficiently. So, they employ consultants, set up company structures, build diverse empires with selected people at the top to do the real management work. So, your taken monies and mine can end the up being administered in ways that we do not like, outside of past structures that gave the average Joe some say in how his taken income was spent and some processes like Courts to help force proper spending. In some ways these mega-rich structures are like an uncontrolled government.
All because of wallet transfer skills.
The trendy, modern social structure is complicated and weird.
Geoff S
” These Megarich structures” are not like an uncontrolled government.
They are the government.
They own the lobbyists who own the politicians – so much that the Princeton University/Gillens found out that “the USA is an oligarchy” after their research confirmed that the billionaires & corporations get alwayswhat they want and the people get shit.
These structures highjacked the Dollar with the FED.
( “I don’t care which puppet sits on the throne of England, as long as I control the money” MA Rothschild).
These structures have 100% picked Obamas cabinet months before he was even elected (citibank in this case)
I’ve never understood why people who don’t like eating meat (beef, bacon, pork, lamb, venison, turkey, etc) want to concoct “vegetable imitations” of the meat foods they don’t like.
I mean, I don’t much the taste or composition of liver.
But I wouldn’t waste one minute of my time thinking up ways to invent products that looked, smelled and tasted like liver, but weren’t actually liver.
I’d just go – “pass” on eating liver.
There’s lots of other items of palatable foods to eat.
It’s not a “one size fits all” kinda deal.
I have seen a number of instances where people who don’t eat meat, crave meat. At least it seems so from their reactions to the smell of cooking meat. They are not eating meat because of some set of abstractions, not because they don’t like the taste.
I am not a meat fanatic. About the only meat I actually crave is prime rib in a restaurant. But my body wants it, and if I go a week without meat during peach season or getting a deal on pumpkin pies, my body tells me to find some meat. Whether my brain really knows what nutrients it is missing, or just craves the smell and texture, doesn’t matter.
I met friends of a friend who were training their cat to be a vegetarian. Never heard how it turned out, but I bet the cat knew how to fool them.
If the friends were trying to teach a cat to be vegetarian, you should call the animal welfare people. Cats are carnivores.
Obligate carnivores in fact.
And if you shrunk to the size of a mouse- your cat would be happy to eat you.
In our case with a succession of 5 long-lived cats, the cats trained us. Geoff S
My wife was aged 11 in 1954 when she became a vegetarian (or, a piscatorian in her case, seafood for protein). This was decades before it was much labelled and discussed. What were the main consequences if her 70 years of rigid vegetarianism? It can be fussy to get food in a restaurant with a small menu, special orders for aircraft, etc, but these have been minor. Health-wise, hard to say if issues have been good or bad or even happening, certainly nothing serious has been diagnosed as caused by or helped by this diet. Money-wise, probably a little more expensive given frequent asks for crayfish, crab, prawns, selected fish. The fruit and vegetable part is not really expensive. It is no big or bad deal to be a vegetarian, so long as you do not treat it as a social media talking point or other personal attributes extending beyond merely ordering a meal that you like, an uneventful way of life. Geoff S
I’ll bet I’m not the only one who has noticed that all these incredibly wonderful fake-meat concoctions are purposely made to taste exactly like – meat. It’s almost as though vegan protein isn’t actually as wonderfully tasty as we are told.
Yes, and taste is always what they talk about — never nutritional equivalence.
Essential amino acids for a start
Vegetarian/vegan diet is missing Methylcobalamin, the natural form of vitamin B12 that herbivores produce and store in their muscle tissue, just sitting there for carnivores and omnivores to chow down on because they cannot produce it internally.
Most vitamin supplements have cyanocobalamin. It’s B12 but in a form that human biochemistry can only convert about 5% to methylcobalamin before it’s excreted. If your multivitamin lists thousands of mcg B12 it’s the cyano form. For methylcobalamin the recommended daily intake is 2.4 to at most 12 mcg per day.
If you eat an absolutely 100% vegan diet, zero animal sourced food, no supplements, all totally natural, unprocessed foods – your muscle tissue stores of B12 will deplete to zero. What’s bad about that is what comes next, brain and nerve damage.
Year ago I read an article in a medical journal about a Dr. in Florida who decided he should go 100% pure vegan. Then he began to exhibit symptoms that other docs diagnosed as early onset dementia. But a new Dr. fresh out of residency recognized the symptoms of vitamin deficiency. He gave Dr. Vegan a B-complex shot. That helped but there was enough permanent damage he had to retire from being a doctor.
Everyone in medical school is taught about vitamin deficiency but in the USA none of them ever expect to encounter a case due to how so much of our food is fortified with vitamins and other vital chemical compounds our biochemistry needs for proper function.
People, especially Doctors, would expect a Doctor to know about nutrition and how as omnivores humans *need* to eat meat from herbivores, especially if staying away from all artificially vitamin fortified processed food.
This is why there are several former vegans running “ethical butcher shops” where they only get their beef, pork etc from farms and ranches that treat the animals well and don’t feed them hormones etc.
That’s why I would never trust a doctor advocating a vegetarian or vegan diet. Who wants a prescription for brain damage?
The choice between wet cardboard and a meatball is not difficult at all.
Poor Bill… in that picture his face looks like that of a Galápagos tortoise.
Maybe that comes from eating his own product. ??
Vegans don’t live longer, they just look older.
Dates and sources unknown: Forty-one percent of Americans, including about half of adults younger than 50, say they have tried a plant-based meat product. 16 percent say they “regularly” use plant-based alternatives.
What is a plant based alternative ? a can of baked beans could qualify
Baked beans on toast –
my go-to breakfast when I can’t be stuffed thinking about what I want for breakfast.
More good news. I don’t trust Gates.
I find it unbelievable that lab grown steak will be anything like competitive with the real thing cost wise.
Keeping muscle cell is culture is not a cheap or easy exercise
What are you going to feed these cultures at mass, even if the cost can reduced to something remotely competitive. .
My gut feeling is that this is intended to be a bait and switch exercise with some horrid soy based concoction, if so it is fraud from the start.
Soylent Brown. Perfect for virtual humans. The Pajama Couch Cubicle People. Why be alive when you can vegetate? The weak, the loud, the enslaved.
Soviet Green – Bill Gates food line.
The Holodomor on your plate.
That lockdowns were necessary and effective is still believed by many people in UK. Even members of the Cabinet Office, two members of which I spoke to last week at a conference on cyber security. They also vehemently defended carbon dioxide emissions as causing global warming.
I know, it’s terribly sad – most Britons still believe the BBC is a credible and trustworthy source of information. Understandable for a nation whose government held a monopoly on broadcast media until the latter half of the 1900s.
Tell the Cabinet people that at the Mauna Loa Obs. in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is 425 ppmv. One cubic meter of this air has a mass of 1.29 kg and contains a mere 0.83 g of CO2. This small amount of CO2 can not absorb enough infrared light emanating from the earth’s surface to cause heating up of such a large mass of air.
In winter CO2 has no effect on air temperature. For example, the average January temperature in Winnipeg is -20° to -10° C. The really is no global
warming.
Harold, for effective presentation you should consider either changing 1.29 kg to 1290 g or changing 0.83 g to 0.00083 kg. It amplifies the difference as some people with see but not assimilate the kg versus g.
On that note Harold, you should also add, even though it gets a bit more complex for the feeble-minded (who get to vote, I might add) that we’re not comparing 425ppm CO2 with zero CO2, we’re comparing 425ppm with the baseline of 280ppm.
The concentration of CO2 before 1900 is usually stated as 280 ppmv (0.458 g CO2/cu. m.). By 2025, it has increased to 425 ppmv (0.835 g CO2/cu. m.), an increase of about 50%.
Since 1900, enormous amounts of fossil fuels have been consumed but little of the huge amounts of the CO2 produced remains in the atmosphere. Where does all of this CO2 go?
Most of it is absorbed by the oceans where it used by the aquatic plants ranging alga to sea weeds and grasses. Since the oceans are slightly basic with a pH of ca. 8.1, the CO2 is converted to bicarbonate and carbonate anions. These are used by corals to make their calcium carbonate structures and by shellfish to make their shells of calcium carbonate.
Much CO2 is fixed by plants on the land especially by weeds. Mother Nature has developed a very efficient carbon capture and utilization system. We really do not any of these carbon capture from the air plants. Most of these are living off huge amounts of governments subsidies.
Actually, I once consider using 0.00083 kg for the mass of CO2, but I decided to stick with grams. However, for future comments using 1,290 g for the mass of atmosphere is a good idea.
Any reader of my comment with minimal math skills can see that CO2 ls greatly out numbered by air molecules by over 1,000 to 1 and does not have enough “molecular muscle” to heat up the large mass of air.
Your assumption of minimal math skills does not include everyone. 🙂
Where I live during Covid, the only shelves which were regularly still full were those with vegetarian and vegan foods on them. This is not new where I come from. Meat tastes so much better.
Healthier too
Yeah, my local and excellent grocery store has a half aisle of refrigerated vegetarian food, including lots of bogus meat. I happen to (and laugh all you want) like tofu, especially the silken stuff, which I cook in Asian-style soups. Whenever I’m there, I never see anyone also buying from that section, never. I’m expecting the store to abandon that section altogether soon. I’ll take more notice of progress, but I think it’s already shrinking.
Beyond Meat’s products are ultra processed junk food. How could anybody think that these products are healthy? When I saw how these products were manufactured, I wondered about the sanity of the people behind Beyond Meat. I knew that sales would be disastrous.
I ate a Beyond Meat burger once, out of curiosity. It was in fact rather nice, but it had been chargrilled and nicely presented with all the condiments. It was also expensive. My curiostity satisfied, I’ve not had another.
The point of Beyond Meat is not to give vegans a way to enjoy meat though. It’s intended to ease resistance to militant vegans’ longed-for ban on other people eating meat. It’s a trojan horse-burger.
Ditto on trying it, and I agree with y.our other point
I used to eat Boca Burgers. Then I read up on what they do to the metabolism (mostly negative) and what they do not provide for the body. No more.
People have short attention span. We had the climate protests, a lot of fuzz about how the planet was dying and we need to save it. 5 years later nothing happend, so people forget about it. Also government started tot ax progress foods as making them bad, so fake meat doesn’t sound healthy suddenly.
I wouldn’t touch such rubbishy “food” with somebody else’s bargepole.
There exists a very efficient factory making high quality proteins from plant material. It’s called a ‘cow’.
Or steer
Apparently not enough people wanted to eat a product from a company with the initials BM.
Hopefully Gates will suffer numerous 99% write downs in the field of ‘non-food’-based food; geoengineering; vaccines; etc etc.
“Schadenfreude”…no more need to be said…sarc_sincere_sarc
Is this from the playbook of excuses, like the wind did not blow as expected or the sky was cloudier than expected?
Did they or even could they claim that their protein slurry was “non GMO”?
What the saying that is appropriate here?
“Just because you’re rich, it doesn’t mean that . . .”
But their products are so appetising… </sarc>
Bill Gates started Beyond Meat because he was led to believe by the IPCC and the unscrupulous collaborating scientists that since methane exhaled by beef cattle is greenhouse gas 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. However, the calculation of this value, which was based on IR spectroscopic data, is flawed because methane has no absorption bands in earth’s thermal emission spectrum.
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration is currently 1.93 ppmv. The reason for the low concentration of methane in air is due to the initiation of its combustion by discharges of lightning. Everyday there are millions of discharges of lightning (See Wikipedia). Discharges of lightning generate ozone which would oxidize methane to carbon dioxide and water.
Methane slightly soluble in cold water. One liter of cold water can contain up to 35 mls of methane. In the cold polar waters, methane diffuses to the ocean floor where under high pressure it is converted to a clathrate known as methane ice.
We really do not to worry about methane.