Beyond Meat’s new ads send the trillion-dollar meat industry a coded message: Here’s what they mean
Beyond Meat has unveiled its first new advertising campaign since escaping a tumultuous 2022, and the theme is that a sea of misinformation about plant-based meat is making it hard for American shoppers “to navigate between fact and fiction,” so it’s time to start “demystifying the process” behind creating its products.
The “There’s Goodness Here” campaign—which Fast Company got an exclusive peek at, but goes live today on Beyond’s website and social media—introduces consumers to a fifth-generation farmer named Steven, and shows us his rows of North Dakota fava beans, a crop used as a base ingredient in Beyond products.
“Our story begins with sun, soil, water, and a seed,” the ad narrates as the camera follows Steven through his field. “From these crops, we get protein and run it through a simple and clean process of heating, cooling, and pressure to form plant-based meats that are better for you.”
The plain, raw, rural setting is strategic—Steven’s John Deere is the sole “tech”—and the campaign marks Beyond’s first response to coordinated attacks that began in 2019 under interest groups tied to the meat industry, as Beyond was becoming all the rage on Wall Street. Forgotten by the public by now, the negative campaign used print ads nationwide, newspaper op-eds, and special websites like CleanFoodFacts.com to blast vegan meat products as “ultra-processed imitations,” going as far as to compare them to dog food and argue they used chemicals that doubled as laxatives or were found in antifreeze.
The attacks, the work of an outfit called the Center for Consumer Freedom (CFF) run by the Washington corporate lobbyist Rick Berman, proved highly effective against the entire plant-based cohort, and the ads have recently found new life on social media—a subject that Fast Company explores in a longer feature in our next print issue.
The initial draw, even mystique, of burgers like Beyond’s and Impossible’s when they first debuted in the mid-2010s was the feeling that if your parents’ frozen-aisle veggie burgers were Pinocchio, these represented the real boy.
But that same scientific wizardry proved to be an Achilles heel: By 2019, critics—who quickly grew to include would-be allies like VB6 author Mark Bittman, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, and Chipotle—were dismissing the newfangled high-tech substitutes as ultra-processed at the same time Americans were being warned that bizarre chemicals and probable carcinogens were hiding in their foods.
The CCF attacks sought to exploit this. It didn’t matter that “processed” lacked an agreed-upon meaning, beyond referring to a food product that was modified in some way, like to keep it fresh, enhance flavor, or enrich it with vitamins. Nor did the ads’ creators seem troubled by the nuance that processed foods can be unhealthy, but aren’t automatically, or that counting a food label’s ingredients is a poor gauge of nutritional value.
In fact, the meat industry—which was already busy getting savaged for its climate footprint—was ready to run with the “ultra-processed” message. Its own surveys showed consumers didn’t think beef was better for the environment, but definitely believed it was less processed and contained fewer ingredients. (Beyond’s revolutionary burger that launched in 2016 used two dozen ingredients. Cow beef is supposed to include just one.)
Impossible Foods founder Pat Brown’s business strategy had been more activist-adjacent from day 1. (He may be best-known for stressing that both his and Impossible’s “mission” was to make meat obsolete by 2035.) Impossible swung back at the attacks almost immediately, rebutting the CCF’s “Fake meat, real chemicals” tagline everywhere from popular podcasts, to New York Times interviews, the food trade press, even Twitter replies, like this comment chief communications officer Rachel Konrad left for Mark Bittman:
However, the CCF—a group that’s gone after everyone from the Humane Society to Mothers Against Drunk Driving—thrives on this sort of conflict. It escalated things by running a 2020 Super Bowl ad that featured a spelling bee where students get stumped by words like methylcellulose (“a chemical laxative that is also used in synthetic meat”) and propylene glycol (“a chemical used in antifreeze and synthetic meats”). Impossible retaliated with a counter-ad where their word was poop, to point to the fecal bacteria found in ground beef. It took the CCF a few days to release a counter-counter-ad that got even more childish, rebranding the entire Impossible Burger as “Impossible Poop,” since it “comes out of your butt easier because it has methylcellulose.”
During this time, Beyond took the higher—or at least quieter—road. While Pat Brown was egging on the attacks (“It’s hard to imagine a stronger endorsement”), Beyond’s CEO, Ethan Brown, kept his comments focused on scientific rigor. He stressed to investors during the firm’s 2019 Q3 earnings call that their new Beyond Sausage had more protein and iron, 44% less saturated fat, and 37% less sodium than the leading animal competitor. “I’m imploring people to please do their research,” he pleaded with CBC in Canada. Earlier this year, Brown vented to an analyst who asked about Beyond’s retail sales. “We are not doing what others do. We’re not putting propaganda out there,” he said. “We’re not criticizing other companies. What we are doing is doing the research, right?”
They may not have put propaganda out there, but since 2019 the anti-vegan meat attacks have festered—what goes on the internet stays on the internet, after all. And they have festered during the plant-based industry’s worst year on record. That one-two punch has seemingly at least had an effect of encouraging companies like Beyond to strike back, especially at misinformation they believe is being spread to kneecap them.
So Beyond’s “goodness” claim stands up better to scrutiny, and the company has recruited some outside help. Last October, Beyond Steak debuted in supermarkets, with a “clean ingredient deck” boasting just a handful of ingredients with names like wheat, fava bean protein, salt, garlic powder, pomegranate concentrate, and vegetable juice. The faux meat strips just received the American Heart Association’s seal of approval in May, the first such product to get that recognition, animal- or plant-based; Beyond’s new campaign christens it “heart-healthy steak from the Heartland.”
Meanwhile, the campaign is still pushing the “research” that Ethan Brown urged consumers to go find on their own, but many apparently missed. It is reminding them of a 2020 study it helped Stanford University publish that compared the health of people who ate conventional meat to that of people who consumed Beyond. The paper claimed that after eight weeks, the Beyond group presented with lower LDL cholesterol levels (the “bad” kind), lost weight, and showed improved risk factors for heart disease.
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