Neil Freiman

It's not the center of the plate, which is this industry term for the most expensive item, the main protein.

As part of your meal, the meat, poultry, seafood, it's outside the center of the plate.

It's things like drinks.

And that's what Beyond Meat is looking at.

Protein beverages grew 122% between 2020 and 2024.

And companies as disparate as Starbucks, Dunkin', Propel are all getting into the protein trend.

And Beyond Meat thinks that it can use the pea protein that it made its main products on.

That can transfer pretty easily into the drink realm.

Beyond Meat is just really rowing upstream here because the food pyramid...

according to the government, has essentially been flipped on its head and it just completely fell on what Beyond Meat was doing with its plant-based burgers because demand for animal proteins, actual meat, is absolutely surging.

JBS, which is a meat giant, just posted record revenue.

Cargill, another massive meat company, had a 44% profit increase.

What is at the top of the food pyramid now, according to RFK Jr.

?

Red meat, whole milk, things that are just actually come from animals.

So maybe this is beyond meat saying, actually, our main business that we've been trying to do for 10 years is dead in the water right now.

We're just going against all of the trends.

Why don't we hop on a trend and actually go with the current right now?

And we'll see whether consumers will be amenable to that.

One thing that is smart that I think they're doing is they're throwing this up on their DTC website.