By Jo Nova
Beyond Meat may be beyond saving — it turned $4b into “a dumpster fire”
Like a microcosm of the climate change debate, a group of investors thought they could make a profit while also saving animals, making people healthier, and changing the global climate all at the same time in a nifty 4 for 1. The UN recognised it as a Champion of the Earth for “science and innovation”. Bill Gates tossed money at it.
But it turns out it was hard to recreate a steak without having a cow or 100 million years to evolve something competitive, economical and tasty. Cows are very efficient factories, in that they come with their own chemical plants, filters, thermostats, and barriers to stop infection, they can transport themselves and they make more cows too. So the factory imitation was never going to be cheaper, at least not for years.
Like everything in the climate debate — everyone says they believe, but no one believes enough to spend $19.95 on fake burger meat. So it was a wildly ambitious product, not-yet-invented, not-safety-tested, and without much appeal to 99% of the population.
Financial teardown: How Beyond Meat burned $4 billion (and its reputation)
By Jason Andrew, SmartCompany
What started as Silicon Valley’s next big thing is now an absolute dumpster fire.
After raising money from Bill Gates, going public for >$4 billion, and even partnering with Kim Kardashian, Beyond Meat is now the laughing stock of the NASDAQ.
The business has lost 96% of its equity value since IPO, is burning ~$20-$30 million in cash every quarter, and has over $1 billion in debt due in 2027.
As Jason Andrew points out it was doomed from the start. Since 2009 it has never had a single year in profit, and in 2019 at the peak, it was IPO’d at a glorious 40X revenue multiple, eclipsing even Facebook which launched at 28 X.
These ratios might have worked for a silicon chip company or a tech giant, but was “ridiculous” for a food company competing on high costs and thin margins. As it happens, not only were customers not impressed with the the climate control feature on the burgers, but they weren’t too sure it was really healthier than meat. These are ultraprocessed foods, may contain seed oils, or who knows what additives? So even the super health conscious vegan climate activist might have had a dilemma.
It’s just another reminder of how a fantasy fashion swept the modern distracted world off its feet and burned up another $4 billion dollars.
It was all too easy when people could borrow up big on near 0% interest. It’s another bubble fed with a fiat currency.
There are very strong rumours Beyond Meat will have to file for bankruptcy, given that it has a billion dollars in debt. But the company seems to be trying to transition into a high protein health niche. They are even dropping the word “meat”. Perhaps it’s not a word that appeals to the core market of vegan eco-worriers?
h/t ClimateDepot
Pascal Shirley | Beyond Meat burger
I am a life long vegetarian. No vegetarian or vegan I know would touch this stuff and why would we want something that tastes like meat?
It’s baffling to see all this stuff in the supermarkets as I have no idea who would want to buy it
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Isn’t the junk chock full of salt, artificial flavours and colours and preservatives, all bad for you.
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I’m a vegetarian and I’ve had it. At a well known “high end” Australian burger chain. It was OK.
Ronin’s comment is correct about a great many of the processed protein sources marketed to vegetarians. They are best minimised or avoided. As K Keith will attest, there are a couple of vegan asian restaurants in CBR that specialise in this genre that I recommend, though presented in a more balanced way.
53
“I’m not a vegetarin but I eat animals which are”
Groucho Marx, I think
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Eats roots and leaves sounds like a kiwi. An oldie but a goodie
10
I used to think it funny when Maccas and Hungry Jacks started promoting their vegan “meat” burgers.
A true vegan would never step foot inside one of these places. They know where the meat is coming from for the regular burgers and that the vegan burgers would be cooked in close proximity to the real meat burgers.
The whole idea of eating meat and that animals are are the source would mean no way would a vegan ever contemplate supporting these burger joints where 99.999% of burgers are animal derived. It was/is a fad for those who tried them and were not vegans, like those who avoid gluten and are not suffering coeliac disease or gluten intolerance.
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I think Tonyb their market is meat eaters in the same way that makers of fake cheese and non-dairy ‘milk’ target the normal majority as it is bigger. But falling at the first hurdle of price means the issues of taste and texture do not really come into it. They are also pushing highly processed products into a market that is already under fire for UPFs, rightly or wrongly. I would not hire anyone from their market analysis department as they have clearly not seen the obvious barriers to mass take up.
10
Don’t you love it – just like the rest of the sham that has been foisted on us all. The end to the rest of the sham cant come fast enough.
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I have noticed recently that a couple of bacon and ham products
show “manufactured meat” in the ingredients lists.
And WE KNOW that “manufactured meat” does not come from pigs, in this case.
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I always thought that ‘manufactured meat’ meant that they had taken real meat offcuts, run them through a blender and pressed them into a mold so that they looked like the real thing.
00
Eating less meat does not change the climate (for better or for worse). Eating less meat does not save the animals. Those animals would never have been born in the first place. Eating less meat does not make you healthier, rather the opposite. Don’t forget your B12 supplement.
Vegans do not grow older than meat eaters. They only look older.
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Meat, like Milk should both be reserved words that can ONLY be used to describe the appropriate foodstuffs. There are laws against misusing labels in advertising, these products should be closed down for that reason alone. They should be marketed for what they are, synthetic foodstuffs. I’d rather lick lead paint off the windowsills than risk a future with these as precursors.
Meat comes from live animals. Milk comes from mammals.
What next, pine tree meat, mushroom milk or Soylent green?
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A rule for one…
As an aside I read on the weekend that a large study has linked Paracetomol use during pregnancy to ADHD. Love those chemicals.
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But just about everything has been linked to ADHD …
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Yes. Like almond “milk” and soy “milk”.
There was a tragic case in Victoriastan where a baby died because its vegan / natural health practising parents and with advice from a “natural health practitioner” fed the infant almond “milk” not human or cow milk.
It shouldn’t be referred to as a milk “substitute” either.
I’m surprised that the dairy industry hasn’t been more defensive of their product.
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Yup, and the food standards code is never defended. Anyone using the word milk when it’s not milk per the definition of the food standards code should be hauled up in front of a judge. The food standards code explicitly states that milk is from the mammary secretions of a mammal! Yet all these plant milks get away with it, something about “oh we know its not milk, as does the consumer, so why do we need to bother”? A bit like the lie that renewable energy is the cheapest I guess.
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Yes, it seems we can be very special about the provenance of wine, cheese, ham etc. However it is incredibly difficult it seems to say milk and meat comes from animals.
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As far as I know, marketing laws in Australia allow the use of words like milk and meat in the context of alternatives or descriptors, so long as the true origin is in the name of the product. So soy milk-alternative being called “soy milk” is fine – “milk” describes what the product is emulating while the first word describes its origin.
00
That probably wouldn’t get past the animal cruelty laws.
It doesn’t bother cats, though.
or monotremes.
That might not be economically viable, though.
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You would like the French government’s attempts at regulating advertising: plants must not be sold under the pretense of being meat.
https://www.speciesunite.com/news-stories/france-will-no-longer-ban-meaty-labels-on-plant-based-foods
However, seems the courts are not allowing such regulation … this is odd because they are perfectly happy about other advertising restrictions. For example, you cannot call it “Champagne” unless it comes from the correct region (wherever that is). Same for Tequila and many others.
Perhaps we might see the EU buy into this argument and they will make a final decision for the whole world (including Australia) based on their sincerely held belief they do in fact rule the entire world.
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The original human vegetarians are long gone. They ate grasses and leaves. That part of the bowel atrophied, leaving only the appendix. Once they discovered meat their lives changed as they did not have to sit around 90% of their day chewing leaves, as gorillas do. Waiting for their teeth to wear out and then starve to death. What a life! Chewing for a living.
“Gorillas spend a significant portion of their day foraging and chewing, with mountain gorillas dedicating roughly half their day to eating, which includes periods of both morning and afternoon feeding. Western lowland gorillas spend approximately 14 hours total feeding and foraging each day, though this can involve intensive periods like spending up to three hours a day chewing nuts in some cases. ”
Agriculture as developed in the Fertile Crescent of Turkey was meant endless food from seeds in the cycle of seasons. A modern vegetarian eats only the best, easily digested and high energy parts of plants and discards most of the plant, but at least animals do not have to die unnaturally. Vegetarians leave that to predators. Luckily herbivores are perfect cellulose processors. Cows in particular, cellulose into milk and meat. Humans are in fact incredibly wasteful, but that’s evolution. Survival of the fattest.
A diet based on seeds enabled civilization because it was fast food and chewing did not take all day. You could be satisfied in a few minutes and then go and do something else. So leisure time was invented and so the Arts and trade and writing and language and towns developed. And beer. We owe a great deal to the invention of agriculture and as much to our carnivore past, as is becoming obvious in the discovery of Gobekli Tepi in and even older sites in Eastern Anatolia, pre agriculture.
But no one likes the idea of eating animals, especially those obviously close in ancestry to humans. However it dramatically increases the food supply and your food can travel with you, as the Mongols knew.
Symptomatic of this is the animal has one name and its meat another. Cows, deer, hens, pigs become steak, venison, chicken, pork. Quite different then. There is no alternative for horse since they became essential for transport and as beasts of burden and entertainment, even companions. Westerners are appalled that Koreans and Vietnamese are very happy to eat dogs. And the French and Italians have horse meat butchers today, even in Venice.
So you would think an easily digested vegetable substitute as invented would work. Except that most humans are already totally sheltered from the production of meat unless they live on a farm, which is about 5% in modern countries like Australia
My solution is that I claim to be a second degree vegetarian. I only eat animals which don’t eat other animals. I have no time for eagle or wolf or Tyrannosaurus Rex, tasty though it might have been. Most fish are carnivores, ultimately feeding on phytoplankton, the forests of the ocean producing our food and our oxygen.
And it is quite funny that the target market for this new vegetable product is the humble hamburger. Or as Bette Middler announced in Germany, ich bin ein Hamburger.
Clearly Bill Gates’ hamburger doesn’t have any market appeal, even to vegetarians. I would put Turkish or Indian chefs in charge. With their mastery of spices they could even make a brick tasty.
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Sort off explains why chewing gum was invented. Satisfies an ancient desire to chew.
As I age I notice my teeth are not quite as long as they used to be but I still have most of the second round.
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There is a lot of chewing in raw meat too. Knives help. Flints. But some anthropologists think the mastery of fire and cooking was the transformative time saver. Cooked meat requires almost no chewing. We take it for granted.
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Isn’t that why our jaws are smaller and our teeth over-crowded too?
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With industrialisation and milling of grains people no longer needed the jaw strength to chew so evolution made changes – jaws shrunk in size but teeth didn’t, which is why you see people with crowded teeth…
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You can read a lot from jaws and teeth. With birds it’s beaks. You can tell if they eat nuts or seeds or eggs. Parrots, esagles, finches, wading birds. You only have to look at the beak.
For meat eaters like humans, the cutting incisors, the tearing canines and the grinding molars tell the story of our evolution to omnivores. Was there a time of the Sabre Tooth Human?
Have a look at killer baboons. Even lions fear them. I doubt they would be interested in Mr Gates burgers.
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“Clearly Bill Gates’ hamburger doesn’t have any market appeal, even to vegetarians.”
Especially to vegetarians. Why would we want highly processed gunk that tastes like meat?
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They should have made the fake meat out of tulips. That would never fail, mijn vrienden.
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‘My friends’. Very close to English phoenetically, based perhaps on Frisian from NE Nederlands, itself a Western Germanic dialect and the home of my Great Great Grandfather. But the tulip was in fact Persian. And the Dutch search for the black tulip was an economic folly comparable to fake hamburger based Climate Change and the infamous South Sea Bubble. Even though no one was actually ‘Dutch’. All people from the area were called Deutsch in America before the late nineteenth unification of Germany and independence of Holland and Belgium but in America it stuck to the people from Holland, part of the lower lands or Neder lands.
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Thanks TdeF
A nice and interesting digression from the main topic!
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The Dutch tulip folly is why I mentioned tulips in my comment about fake meat.
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As Vera Lynn sang –
Whale meat again, don’t know where don’t know when……………………..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5C4meGkNyc
Or maybe not.
Meat and protein is good for Humans. That’s how we developed. Why regress?
It’s good to see foolish people lose their money. Serves them right.
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For me, that song is synonymous with the closing scenes of Dr Strangelove….or (in keeping with today’s thread) How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bug
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I’m not a big meat eater, but I do like the odd burger and I like sausages or steak at a barbeque as well.
I’ve asked a lot of people if they’ve tried the fake meat burgers and most haven’t and have no interest in having their first bite.
Poor Bill Gates, my heart really bleeds for him. SARC.
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So, and of relevance, some you’ve asked have had it. What did they say?
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Great article Jo, here’s some further info. It was a comment I posted a number of weeks ago. Years ago the market capitalisation of “Beyond Meat “ company was estimated at about $ 8 billion (US). Thanks to big investors like Bill Gates etc. Beyond meat were the main company developing and manufacturing the fake meat, we were all supposed to eat to save the world from CLIMATE CHANGE (had to put it in capitals to make it sound more scary). You know all that meat free Fridays stuff etc. Plus, in order to market and sell more fake meat there had to be a scare campaign. So, all those burping/farting cows were contributing significant amounts of methane to make the earth boil. Or, so we were told. One problem- no one bought the meat!! The sectors capitalisation was largely based on significant increase in uptake of the fake meat products. But it never happened. Even during COVID when people were fighting over toilet paper and cheap mince meat, the fake meat very often went unsold. In addition, the sector was also aided by US government initiatives, like the inflation reduction act. It was why I could never understand how the methane scare was re-invigorated over the last 5 years. Because that scare was virtually debunked during the 1990’s, as wise people pointed out how natural sources of methane were far and away more significant than cow farts. What was the point of decreasing your cattle herd when the world’s termites produced nearly as much methane anyway? It was completely illogical. So, the media got on board with the whole cow burp scare campaign and actively promoted fake meat. No doubt helped along with seed money from those investors in companies like “Beyond Meat”. Bill Gates himself went on many shows spruiking fake meat. Then scientific institutions got on board as well, conducting research into methane reduction technologies and products (I’m looking at your CSIRO). Plus the supermarkets in an exericise in virtual signalling. What’s happened now? Well, due to the lack of popularity of the fake meat products amongst us plebs, the big end of town have now quietly pulled their investment money from the sector. Tried to cut their losses. The market capitalisation of Beyond Meat is now only in the hundreds of $millions- not billions as before. I expect also now that the scare campaign vs methane will again slowly fade away and so it should. Because it was junk science at best.
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Ross. Thanks. I knew I’d seen a few comments on this but I couldn’t search for them. Sigh.Unplanned Internet outage for me all day today and tomorrow. Great info thank you.
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This is all the excuse the Left need to start more heavily pushing insects for the non-Elites.
The more woke, more dumbed-down countries such as Australia are already feeding this garbage to children.
That article is from 2022. Imagine what the level of consumption and indoctrination is up to now?
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And to get the woke/Left perspective from Goolag AI:
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I wonder how many lovely chemicals go into processing bugs into chips and snacks?
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“First Nations Australians have a long history of eating native insects like witjuti grubs, bogong moths, and honey ants, a tradition that can inspire modern edible insect industries.”
Equally as such starving people have a long history of cannibalism, the consumption of carrion, eating things that cannot be digested and so on. This doesn’t mean any of these things won’t be rejected if more preferred foods become available. Wichety grubs ( note the subtle spelling change ) could appeal to some people like snails appeal to some people, however I would suggest anyone interested should grab a moth and squeeze, the black gooey sh_t that comes out certainly precludes this little black duck from popping one into my mouth unless lost in the bush for weeks!
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My mother once did a tour group in outback South Australia and discussed native foods with real Aborigines, not the shills that ‘identify as’. Apparently, they prefer western food unless they’re starving.
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“First, let me make something very clear: Bugs are not food. You should not eat bugs. They are insects. They belong on the ground, or in the air, or wherever the heck they live. They do not belong on your dinner plate.”
Stop stealing the birds tucker, they need to eat too.
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I remember on a radio show years ago where they pranked people, they had a woman caller who insisted that “fish aren’t animals, they’re fish!”.
It’s hard to argue with the logic. LOL.
They walk among us.
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The whole “eat insects” thing is difficult to fathom.
Commercial meat chickens have a higher feed conversion efficiency than crickets, and similar CO2 and CH4 emissions per kg.
00
Bill probably has a commercial freezer full of this unsold stuff and he’ll never need to buy meat again, for breakfast, lunch or dinner. He’ll also help ascertain the risk of mad lab disease.
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and manboob issues.
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The curse of Estrogenic Soy protein products. 😎
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He’ll consider that a positive side effect in today’s non-binary leftist community 😉
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The Bill Gates Foundation can buy up the Company. What a Great Investment. LOL.
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“Cows are very efficient factories,” i would not regard that converting less than 10% of inputs into cow to be particularly efficient
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Best you stick to dried crickets
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Who cares, they turn grass into eye fillet and make great fertiliser for the roses.
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Evidence please.
Proof relies on evidence.
Otherwise, you are the same as ‘Blackout Bowen’ who tells flat out lies and misinformation.
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It’s actually less than 5% and learn how to look things up for yourself. It is hardly obscure.
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ok
while this is standard science, and is taught in high school, you can find a good explanation here
And since the quote that I referenced did not have a link, I only have to meet that standard.
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Some things taught in high school these days aint necessarily so.
I wouldn’t be too keen on citing that as a reliable source of information.
As a point of interest though, regardless of the capacity factor for turning energy into meat, livestock can replicate, creating new “factories” for producing those proteins and fats that are actually essential for our good health. If you want to talk chooks, they can not only breed/replicate, but produce highly nutritious eggs that can be preserved for quite a long time without refrigeration.
A factory for producing fake meat or processing insects into something that has a food-like appearance and flavour has to be built and maintained at considerable expense and with a high energy cost (especially if you’re relying on intermittent, weather-dependent, expensive “renewables”.)
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FCR = kg of carcass produced per kg of feed
An FCR of 4 to 8 for cattle is a result of them eating a very coarse high fibre feed: ie grass. Feed them grain and they shift down the scale.
Pigs: quoted in your article at 3.5 That’s for an entire operation including the breeding herd, and that can go as low as 3.1
An individual growing pig? 2.5 Pretty impressive, that’s 2.5 kg of grain (mainly) to make 1 kg of carcasse.
And chickens better that efficiency again.
All a great testament to selective breeding, and nutritional science.
Lab grown meat? Reported at 3.3 to 4.7 (yes, cell growth needs and wastes nutrients too).
While one could imagine that’ll get a lot better, it’s currently at the high end, and does not look much like an environment-saving technology yet.
(even ignoring the fact that the whole methane alarm is one of the most contrived of all the scare stories).
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Peter your own article … the one you linked to gives an efficiency figure for feedlot cattle at about 16% not the 10% you claim and much better than the 5% claimed by Gee Aye.
Other typical animals farmed for food at all listed as higher efficiency than beef.
The same article also points out that cattle make use of lower quality overall feed, with a much higher fiber content … and the way they can deal with this is via fermentation. Therefore, some share must necessarily go into that fermentation process.
Your article further claims, “that nearly half of all of the feed used in the beef industry is just to maintain the cowherd,” … which I believe implies that the 16% efficiency figure is for the end-to-end operation, and the number for one cow fattening up at a feeder will be higher.
I might also point out there’s usually grass feeding earlier in the cattle lifespan and grain feeding towards the end … with many variables in that. Grass only requires minimal fertilizer and a bit of water so pasture is often land which is unsuitable for more intensive farms.
Seriously though … do you ever bother to actually read the articles you link to?
Normal people, when caught out as often as you are, would become a bit cautious or I dunno, learn something, just spend five minutes checking.
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peter. So what’s the % efficiency of the lab meat. Bet if u include energy to mine and make machinery and factories and sterile conditions that the cow out competed anything artificial
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Some of those things are involved in the supply chain and processing of actual meat.
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The cattle and cows process everything the way that Mother Nature intended.
Some humans think that they can beat Mother Nature. LOL.
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Correct Johnny: you can’t beat producing meat from grass that was going to dry off and burn, or going to die off and rot.
Going through a cow, or either of the above pathways, that blade of grass will eventually free up the same amount of CO2.
And the same applies to grain.
Surely that is all renewable.
Another greatly contrived concern by the dooom-mongers.
20
Not sure about your 10% figure but the lower efficiency is partly because cows are warm blooded and use some energy to produce heat. And insects are low on the food chain. Humans are apex predators and so can take tastier food from higher up the food chain.
But who cares?
Cow, sheep, poultry etc. meat is delicious and fully sustainable.
You stick to your ground-up or whole insects as is your right but don’t dictate food choices to others.
Incidentally I have read that chickens have about the same feed conversion ratio as insects.
Not surprisingly, the Left, who push insect consumption for non-Elites, overstate the feed conversion efficiency of insects.
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They have spent a generation spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt over the perfectly healthy practice of eating eggs. Then, using bird flu as an excuse, they demand many birds pointlessly slaughtered … massively driving down the efficiency of an otherwise very efficient industry.
If you want to see how nutty this can get … check out the story about the ostrich farm in Canada. They did indeed have bird flu go through their flock and a number of ostriches did die. That was around January/February this year. The bird flu has long gone through the flock, the remaining birds are fine … nothing whatsoever wrong with them … but the fruit loop authorities are still determined to eradicate all of this farmer’s stock.
It’s not about health.
What’s more, avian flu is widespread amongst wild birds and even has mutated already and moved onto other wild animals … exactly what evolutionary theory would predict. Killing off the ostriches has no effect on containment of bird flu, because bird flu simply cannot be contained. The entire exercise is for no reason beyond proving the authority of the state and putting farmers out of business.
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Peter always forgets the temporal context.
Do you calculate efficiency over the life of a cow or just it’s last few days?
It’s kinda like the efficiency of EVs – over it’s life or just a single trip?
Should temporal analysis extend out till 2100 when believers think it will all end?
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Oh Peter, have you ever been amongst some lovely hereford cows? They’re beautiful animals, very quiet, easy to handle and produce lovely meat.
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No, as Peter and the others are sheep. Easily led.
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Actually, beef cattle produce around 40% edible protein and they take 25kg feed and around 110 litres of water to produce 1kg beef.
Bugs are way more efficient at 80% protein, 2kg feed and 2 litres water per 1kg protein output.
But if you think I’m eating bugs, you’ve got another thing coming.
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Beef cattle convert at a ratio of about 4.5 to 8. (carcass) Depends on breed and feed.
So at worst 8 kg of feed to produce 1 kg of beef carcass.
With a saleable meat yield of about 60% of carcass: so at worst 13.3 kg of feed per kg of meat.
At best, 7.5 kg of saleable meat per kg of food.
And yes;
Insects: a house cricket (Acheta domesticus) has an FCR around 1.7 to 2.4, with a dry weight protein yield 48% to 76%.
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I suggest that you, Peter, try to emulate what the cow can do. In fact, if you come to cattle country, I’ll provide both green and dry grass for a year. Then we can check how efficient you have been.
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He does emulate them. He produces tons of it.
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Yeh, l thought he’d be happy with 10% of his blog inputs being particularly efficient…
20
PF, pandas have to eat up to 38kgs of bamboo a day to survive. Why don’t you sink the boot into those critters for their inefficient diets?
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The inconvenient fact for the vegans is that100% of what a cow produces from anywhere between the extremities is 100% plant derived!
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Silly comment, everything is derived from plants at some point and this has nothing to do with why people become vegan or even its definition. Not sure that vegans should start eating each other.
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But leftists and the green blob *are* slowly eating themselves because they use conflicting extreme ideologies to drive their silly actions.
And “everything is derived from plants at some point” is kinda like just another extreme ideological perspective.
Like “saving the planet”, “everyone deserves equal share”, “governments should do more”, “capitalism is bad”, … all extreme and asking for some predator to gobble them up.
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Russell, it is not me making the argument you are countering, it is D69. Its argument is that cows make milk from plants ergo my comment and then yours.
not sure what your quote rant was trying to point out.
25
I seem to recall an issue in the UK related to cows caused by eating non-vegetarian inputs
“Mad cow disease”
90
I was just a simple farmer, all my vegetarian animals had multiple stomachs, sheep and cows, my horses had just one stomach but have a digestive gut behind there stomach and thus they need to eat much more than a cow that can sit and ruminate its food. My dogs just one stomach like all carnivores and omnivores and we have no digestive gut like a horse. Why fight nature!!
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Clearly we need a stomach tax
40
The Left want we non-Elites to stop eating real meat, but shouldn’t we be eating as much as possible to reduce the population of f@rting/burping animals, you know, to save the planet?
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Sorry David, meant green.
30
It’s great that we’ve evolved enough to be worrying about what we should eat.
Most of our history was spent worrying if we would eat.
Of course, there have always been those of us that would prefer that some of us don’t.
I’m thinking that’s the actual ‘beyond’ they’re hoping to get to.
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Real Beef is a superfood- Protein, Vit B12, Zinc, Selenium, Niacin, Riboflavin, Fat, Iron, Vit B6, Magnesium, Potassium and more.
https://ohmyfacts.com/food-beverage/45-steak-nutrition-facts/
Anything that Bill Gates is suggesting to ingest or put in your body stay well away from it!
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Mock meat not meeting expectations? Not a great week for Bill Gates as his latest batch of genetically modified mosquitos was cancelled this week in Africa. GM mosquitos- what possibly could go wrong?
https://westafricaweekly.com/burkina-faso-bans-gates-backed-gm-mosquito-experiments-samples-to-be-destroyed-nationwide/
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Who actually lost the money? Upfront investors put in ?<1bn. The company spent it all plus a borrowed 1bn on … what? On consultant fees for the original investors? Later, they IPO at ?4bn. I suspect that the original investors did very well and the retail investing public, as usual, has been dudded. And let's face it, those original investors weren't investing in an artificial meat product, they were investing in an idea they could sell at a higher price. The meat product wasn't the objective, the IPO was the objective.
In the days when I had a stockbroker – we had to, back then, in order to own shares – I would get a call from time to time telling me enthusiastically about an IPO. I quickly learned that I was only offered the duds after anything worthwhile was taken up by the brokers and their mates.
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Great comment. Yes, investing in the share market is a lot like betting on the horses sometimes.
60
shares if held long enough on a broad enough basis will respond to inflation.
Horses if held long enough will respond to old age
60
There are studies and videos (some on YouTube) debunking the “fake meat is better for the environment than real meat” myth.
A lifelong meatarian I wouldn’t touch the ingredients of fake meat if served up separately.
40
The only good thing about the fake meat was the high level of pea protein used. So, supporting pea farmers is possibly a good thing, but why bother when you can just support cow farmers.
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And eat the peas with meat.
Cut out the factory process.
40
Who do you market this to once you get past the curious?
The meat eaters who arent seeking alternatives?
Or vegetarians looking for a product that emulates something they dont like and avoid?
Without radical government mandates how can this work? I guess the Dems failed him by losing.
20
Impossible Foods is another company that seems to have raised a bunch of money with a negative return. It is still a private company. I think there are a couple of others.
40
4 billion USD? what a waste. Thats a couple of Kamala style presidential election campaigns that could have been funded.
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Normally, schadenfreude is just not a good look.
However, this time I am willing to make an exception.
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Hurrah! The private capital markets worked properly. There was hype, and lots of incaution people bought the hype, and got burned to various degrees. Very investor has probably learned the lessons of pragmatic investing the hard, by buying into a dumpster fire of one sort or another. In my portfolio, I’ve had some nasty losers, and learned from each of them. It is in the nature of a capital market that if you take little risk, you can get small, consistent rewards, If you take bigger, calculated risks, you can lose 100% of your money on the one bad decision, but gain a considerable amount more on a good decision. $4B is a pretty cheap lesson, as private money can change its course and lick its wounds, while government money often doubles down again and again on failure. Had the energy markets been left to private markets, even with highly regulated companies, we might have avoided the trillions wasted, and the waste continuing long after “alternative energy” proves itself to be a wealth destruction machine.
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