We always figured we would find vegans wearing linen clothes, with a little bit of patchouli sprayed on for good measure, hitting up the nearest superfood salad bar after hanging out in a drum circle.
Via Giphy
These days, however, you’re just as likely to find them wearing slick powersuits, dining on haute cuisine after a busy day of trading stocks.
Via Giphy
That’s right. Vegan food has arrived on Wall Street. The California-based company Beyond Meat became the first pure-play maker of vegan ‘meat’ to publicly trade shares on the NASDAQ on May 2nd. They promptly soared 163% on their first day. Not too shabby.
Via CNBC
The IPO (initial public offering) comes at a time when interest in vegetarian and vegan foods is booming. Sales of plant-based meats in the U.S. spiked 42% between March 2016 and March 2019 to a total of $888 million dollars. Other places in the world have also been interested in the plant craze. Sales of plant-based meat have grown 18% in the U.K. over the same time period.
Via Wikimedia
We’ve also been seeing an increase in vegetarian options from our partner restaurants and new vegetarian restaurants that want to work with us in our operating cities of Shanghai, Beijing, and Suzhou.
More and more grocery stores and fast food companies like Burger King are starting to offer alternative meat products from Beyond Meat and competitors like Impossible Foods. You’re definitely starting to go mainstream if fast food accepts you. Nestle and even Tyson (of chicken fame) have started to develop new plant-based meat products for release in the very nearby future.
Via Giphy
The Onion is also jumping aboard the fun with satire articles like ‘Diners Eating Impossible Burgers Doused With Beet Juice by Protesting Meat-Rights Activists’.
Ah, we love The Onion.
Via The Onion
Now for a little backstory on Beyond Meat.
Beyond Meat was founded in 2009 by Ethan Brown. As a child, he spent a lot of his weekends on the farm that his parents co-owned. After he got older, he started to question people’s need for animals to get meat. He found two professors Fu-Hung Hsieh and Harold Huff, who had been working on creating soy-based chicken since the 1980s, to help him develop his first recipes. Today, the company employees 63 chefs, scientists, engineers, technicians, and researchers at its 30,000 square foot California lab and has plans to invest $40 million dollars in manufacturing plants and another $50 million dollars in product development and sales.
Via Quartz
The company hasn’t turned a profit yet, losing nearly $30 million dollars last year, but investors are willing to tolerate that because of the company’s rapid growth and opportunity for the future. The company’s net revenue hit $87.9 million dollars in 2018, a growth of 170% over 2017.
There’s a bright and delicious future ahead for vegetarian-based diets. While we’re not going 100% vegetarian anytime soon (we love spicy chicken wings too much), we’ll definitely devour a hearty portobello mushroom burger or get delivery from iVegan to have us feeling good while still satisfying our taste buds.
How about you? Are you down with the vegetarian food craze?