For most vegans, the 2009 introduction of Beyond Burgers represents a clear demarcation—of life before, when store-bought veggie burgers tasted like wax, and after, when they were not only exciting to eat, but delicious enough to share with your omnivorous friends.
The Beyond Meat brand had a quick and early success—through big investors including Bill Gates, high-profile partnerships with outlets from Dunkin’ to KFC, and a first day of trading in 2019 that saw its shares soar by 163%. Plant-based eating, it seemed, was finally having an unbreakable mainstream streak of success.
But it would not last, due, at least in part, to a 2019 campaign mounted by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a project of lobbyist Richard Berman, who had previously taken aim at the Humane Society and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The campaign was funded by “restaurants, food companies and thousands of individual consumers,” many of which remained anonymous, according to the CCF website.
The campaign used prominent TV spots and full-page ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal to ask, “What’s hiding in your plant-based meat?” in an aim to paint plant-based burgers and sausages as unhealthier than beef and pork.
And, much to the shock of Beyond Meat founder and CEO Ethan Brown, the campaign seemed to work.
“It was a very difficult period,” Brown tells Fortune, recalling how the accusations clashed with an internal marketing phrase his company had been using as a touchstone at the time: “There’s goodness here.”
“We had such a belief system that…there’s goodness for the human body,” he says of the Beyond products. “There’s goodness for climate, goodness for animals. And then to, all of a sudden, have that all demonized?” The worst part was that “consumers were starting to believe it,” Brown says, recalling a Food Industry Association survey that had found over 50% of people thought that plant-based was healthy in 2020—but that by 2022, only 38% did.
“We felt it,” he says. “We felt that, all of a sudden, the dream that you could have a really nice burger that was really good for your body and good for the Earth started to really destabilize. And that was due to these campaigns.”
Plant-based meat alternatives comprise an $8.8 billion market, with Beyond, followed by Impossible in 2011, as one of the leaders of this “meatless meat” revolution. And there’s no question that these…
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