@BeyondMeat

What they do

Set up to develop plant based proteins and directly substitute them for meat proteins. The photo below shows their “chicken” strip in a product from Whole Foods.

Where they do it

US based (currently opening new manufacturing facility in Columbia) and currently US focused in their distribution and business development. As they are a relatively new business even that focus is limited to the West Coast with a small present on the East – see their map here.

Who are they

The business was started by Ethan Brown in 2009 (he has a background in clean energy and avoids social media as far as I can make out) and in June 2012 hit the headlines with a investment round which included Biz Stone and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. Biz is better known for Twitter but a has been a vegan the past 10 years.

On the Kleiner side this one is in their Greentech portfolio – I find that very interesting indeed.

The ethical bit?

Combines a move away from slaughtered protein with a very strong pro-environment message.

My thoughts

Like this one a lot. The last 10 years have seen enormous strides in vegetarian/vegan foodstuffs and this startup could accelerate the sector nicely.

Captured nicely in this quote from Biz Stone “These guys are coming at the meat analogue industry not as a novelty kind of thing or hippy dippy. They were coming at it from this big science, super practical, scalable angle. They were saying, ‘We want to get into the multi-billion-dollar meat industry with a plant-based meat,” says Stone.

This is where significant change happens – where a business can scale and create impact without sacrificing core principles. Would love to work with these guys and girls 🙂