Behind the scenes at Beyond Meat. What's going on. I'm rich Demiro. This is rich on Tech. Beyond Meat is a company that's recreating favorites like burgers and sausage, but from plants. The company sells their products at whole foods and other grocery stores, but they're often sold out because of demand. They just opened up a brand new twenty six thousand square foot research and development facility just south
of Los Angeles International Airport. Recently, I got to take a tour and do a taste test of some of their items, including a brand new one, a breakfast patty. I had it in a sandwich that was basically a vegetarian sausage McMuffin. The breakfast patty has double the protein of pork sausage, lower fat, and no cholesterol, and it was amazing. I would gladly eat this on a regular basis. It's actually made from pea protein, mung beans, rice, and sunflower.
You'll be able to find that soon, hopefully through a drive through. I talked to Beyond Meats founder and seat Ethan Brown, and I asked him, why is doing all this?
So I looked at I think an important question, which was do you need animals to reduce a piece of meat? And after learning a lot about what meat is, I came to inclusion you really don't. And this effort here at the Matta Beats Project is a now ten year effort to try to prove that you can build a piece of meat directly from plants. And if you think about that, what the animal's doing is they're consuming a
large amount of vegetative matter. They're using a digestive system, they're using their skeletal muscular system to then produce what
we call meat in the form of muscle. And what we're doing is taking the same material plant material, and we're taking the amino acids from it, our protein, the lipids or the fat, we're taking trace minerals, and then we're taking a lot of water, because meats a lot of water, sixty to seventy five percent water, sixty to seventy percent water, and we're combining those in the architecture
of meat. And we're doing that through a system of heating, cooling, and pressure that restitches the protein into the form of muscle or meat, and so we essentially bypassed the animal. The consumer is getting really clean protein directly from plants in the same emily an experience that they would if it came from an animal.
The new facility is all about coming up with new products and perfecting their existing products. We saw engineers, scientists and food technologists all working with various machines like an electronic nose, a texture analyzer that sees how you chomp down on a burger, and we saw the way they make natural coloring from plants like beats.
I think the general concepts, you know, sounds easy, but when you start to try to match molecules and you try to deliver the sensory experience of animal protein using
all plants, it becomes more difficult. And so an example of that is there are thousands of molecules that make meat tastes like meat, So we have to find what those molecules are, and then we have to find analogous where the same ones in plants and match them and then try to get them to perform the same way that they overform underheating on a stove, and you know, as they cool down, have them look the same in terms of transition in the appearance. So you know, it
gets more and more complex. Did you get closer and closer to the animal protein equivalent that you're trying to build directly from plants.
While Brown himself is a vegan, he does not denounce meat. He sees beyond me as offering an alternative to what's already out there, something that even meat eaters like myself would want to eat.
The only thing that I know is that you know, throughout human history and even before human history, when we were evolving about two and a half million years ago, we made a decision that we're going to become more rather than less carnivorous, and that's become part of who we are. You know, the animal protein consumption is a big part of our tradition, our religion, our own cultural experience. And so to advocate that people don't eat meat, I
think is a really bad idea. I think to present a new form of meat that provides all the upside of meat in terms of the protein, the satiating experience, but it's simply made for plants is the right idea. The analogy I use most frequently is to think about this like the mobile phone to the landline. No one's out there defending the landline people, just like the new mobile phone, and we have to create products for so compelling that people are drawn to ours and not necessarily even debating it.
One thing to know about beyond me. They're doing all this science, but this is not frankin food.
They have to use all natural ingredients. They can't use genetic modification, which by the way, they would love to use to make things easier. Sure, but we believe that we need to really respectful that. You know, Mom's going to be feeding us through our kids. I feed it to my own children. So we need to understand everything that's in there. We need a consumer we they'll understand it and feel very comfortable. So we use ingredients that
people are very familiar with. You know, our protein right now comes from peas, it comes from sunflower seeds, It comes from recognizable sources. Same with our fats, and so you have to be careful. You can apply cutting edge science to this, but you have to remember that at the end of the day, food is very intimate and people want to eat things that are familiar to them.
So back to my taste test, I tried some brought worse that could fool anyone at a backyard picnic. It even had the same texture and snap as the real thing. The burger was good, but I could tell it wasn't the real thing, But I do want to try this one again. It had a bit of a smokier note than your typical burger. Plus I ate it at the end when I was really full. The breakfast patty, like I said earlier, was the first thing I ate, and
there's no other way to describe it except delicious. I really want to be able to get that through a drive through so I can eat it on a regular basis.
So I set a goal for myself, which is now I'm running out of time on so I got to hurry up what I said by the time my kids can drive, and I set this goal years ago that they'd be able to go to a McDonald's or a Wendy's or a Burger King or any major of fast food place and be able to get a Beyondburger or it's you know whatever we're calling it at the time, and it wouldn't be an event. It'd be like, you know, someone who orders a fish file at someone was a
Byonburger and it's kind of just normal. So they're thirteen and fourteen now, so I got a couple more years.
One thing I tried it Beyond Meat that I wish they would sell was this vegan cheesecake they had. It was unbelievable, but they told me it was just a test kitchen item because they have a really good chef there. But they have no plans to bring it to market. But I think they should make a decision to do some beyond meat desserts. Thanks so much for listening. If you want to see my TV segment on Beyond Meat, just go to my website. It's richon tech dot TV. I'm Richdemiro. I'll talk to you real soon.