With its rebranding as Beyond, the company’s strategic pivot is meant to underscore its clean plant protein bonafides, and to get investors and consumers back on board, after meat-lobby advocacy and disinformation campaigns painted the sector as ultra-processed and unhealthy. Last week, rumours surfaced in the media that Beyond was heading for bankruptcy, something the company vehemently denied. “We have not filed nor are we planning to file for bankruptcy. Go Beyond,” it said in a statement on X.

Alongside the name change, the company is also launching Beyond Ground, a simpler product made with four ingredients. It has also reformulated its flagship Beyond IV burger to cut saturated fat by 60% and sodium by 20%. “Our second quarter of 2025 required a deeper and fundamental reset of our company,” Beyond CEO Ethan Brown said in a May 2025 earnings call. “The necessity of this reset, however, does not reduce or diminish our commitment of enthusiasm for the future that awaits.”

Revenue down, misinformation up

The rebrand of Beyond Meat, once lauded as the vanguard of plant‑based innovation, comes as our food consumption culture and the market shift, making the once-promising investment a tougher pea to swallow. After its eye‑watering 2019 initial public offering and subsequent rise, the company now faces a 19.6% year‑over‑year drop in revenues. Its 2025 second-quarter net revenues were US$75 million,  well below the approximately US$82 million analysts had expected. With retail demand down – refrigerated sales by 17.2% and frozen by 8.1% – and investors responding with a stock price at a multiyear low, it’s clear the category is in need of a refresh. At the same time, the company also secured US$100 million in debt financing from Unprocessed Foods, a subsidiary of the Ahimsa Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to promoting plant-based eating. This funding is part of a broader investment push by Ahimsa and its affiliates, which have recently backed companies such as Simulate, Eat Just, Blackbird Foods and Wicked Kitchen.

According to Brown, misinformation has been a major driver in consumers’ move away from the company’s offerings. “While Beyond Meat can always and will always seek to improve our products, we believe the central issue impeding our return to sustained growth is perception. Or more accurately, misperception,” he said during the call. A meat-industry-backed public relations group called the Center for Consumer Freedom has been painting plant-based meats as ultra-processed, unhealthy and even scary, focusing on long ingredient lists and unfamiliar ingredient names. This messaging was then amplified by veterinary pharmaceutical giant Elanco. The rise of the carnivore movement, along with other politically charged trends toward more seemingly “natural” proteins and ongoing meat industry advocacy and disinformation campaigns, have all helped paint plant-based meat alternatives into a difficult corner.

Thus the stage is set for a dramatic overhaul, and Beyond Meat knows it. “If we look inward, our highest priority is driving operating and margin improvements. Externally, our highest priority is on dispelling misinformation and empowering the consumer to make informed decisions around our products,” Brown said.

Daring moves

Daring product shifts are often accompanied by daring company rebranding. In this case, Beyond’s branding reset and product strategy are not just survival tactics, but calculated attempts to redefine the company’s identity. “Going forward, we intend to increasingly use Beyond as the primary brand identifier,” Brown said, adding that the emphasis will instead be on providing high-quality plant protein rather than replicating animal meat. In addition to the name shift, Beyond is also planning to release a new simplified ground-protein product made from water, fava bean protein, potato protein and psyllium husk. The company also noted via social media that it will offer three pre-seasoned varieties, including Tuscan Tomato.

“Our limited test offering of Beyond Ground on our social channels last week represents an early foray beyond beef, pork and poultry replication and has been met with considerable enthusiasm, albeit within a very narrow consumer set,” Brown said. “In the coming months, we will provide additional details on our increased use of the brand mark Beyond, which will be implemented on a rolling basis.”

In July, Fast Company reported that the new ground-protein product would be available on Beyond’s website in August. As of publication of this article, it is not yet for sale.

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance writer covering animal rights and welfare and plant-based food topics. She is also the culture and disinformation correspondent for Sentient. 

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Duckweed isn’t tasty – unless you’re a duck – but the flavour is at least inoffensive, and it packs a powerful nutritional punch. The plant’s miniature leaves contain uniquely high concentrations of rubisco, a ubiquitous protein that has been recognized by scientists as ideal for human consumption, according to the standards of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Duckweed’s protein density and high yield are part of the secret sauce that has made the California-based start-up Plantible a darling of venture capitalists. In November, the company closed a US$30-million “series B” funding round to expand its manufacturing operations at its 100-acre “vertically integrated biology platform” in West Texas, also known as the Ranchito. The new financing brings Plantible’s total fundraising to US$57 million since its founding in 2018. Investors include the venture arms of both Kellogg and Chipotle.

This isn’t the first time that duckweed has garnered attention as a potential superfood. Wolffia and Spirodela are two other varieties that have been acclaimed and whose powdered form can be purchased at online stores and health food shops. But apart from in Southeast Asia, where Wolffia (or Mankai) is a traditional ingredient, neither has escaped the tight niche of vegan dietary supplements.

Plantible’s approach is different and may set it on a path for wider adoption. Rather than market to consumers, the company sells directly to food manufacturers like ICL Food Specialties, attracted by the low environmental impact and stable, high-volume supply – Lemna doubles its mass every two to three days and can be grown indoors with 95% recycled water – as well as its non-allergenic properties, nutritive value and ease of digestion.

Plantible put its first commercial product on the market in 2023, an egg replacement for baked goods. Called Ruby Whisk, it claims to whip up better than the real thing, binds unsaturated fats like a dream and emulsifies perfectly. The company has since added Rubi Prime, an ingredient for imitation meat and seafood whose virtues include something called “thermo-irreversible binding.”

A rollercoaster for plant-based protein companies

Anyone who’s been watching the plant-based-proteins space will be rightly wary of hype for new entrants. The market was set for explosive growth in 2019 as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods found pickup in fast-food chains and meat companies started investing big in plant-based product lines. By 2020, Bloomberg Intelligence forecasted that the market would enjoy a compound annual growth rate of 18.6% to 2030. But the boom never materialized, at least in part because of an aggressive smear campaign by food industry lobbyists. After rising quickly, sales plateaued and then declined sharply. Beyond Meat’s shares now trade for less than $5, from a peak of nearly $200.

But plant-based proteins aren’t just a fad. Consumers are more health-conscious than ever, and the appetite for vegetarian and vegan options is growing. “We’re still very optimistic about the long-term opportunity and growth potential for the industry,” said Jen Bartashus, a senior research analyst at Bloomberg, on a podcast in 2023.

Recent analysis by other market intelligence firms has been tempered but upbeat, projecting between 7.5% and 8.1% compound annual growth rate over the next few years and citing “heightened awareness and adoption of plant-based diets among consumers, emphasizing the importance of protein-rich plant sources.”

Plantible already has tens of millions of dollars in contracts, according to MSN, and other duckweed start-ups are rushing to catch up. GreenOnyx in Israel has raised US$47 million, and Flo Wolffia in Thailand, DryGrow in the United Kingdom and microTerra in Mexico are all vying for a piece of the action.

Whatever Plantible’s place in the transition, the way we source plant proteins is changing. According to a paper on duckweed for the food and feed industry published in the journal Foods in May, “it is common knowledge that soy and maize will not be the definitive source of plant proteins as mycoproteins, algae proteins, seaweed proteins and bacterial proteins will tend to become the sources of proteins that will feed the world.”

But trends aside, diets don’t change easily. The pace of the protein revolution will depend on how well companies learn from each other’s mistakes. By targeting producers rather than consumers, Plantible seems to have found a fresh burst of momentum.

Mark Mann is a journalist in Montreal and the associate editor at Corporate Knights. 

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And while being smack dab in the middle of Canada’s largest beef-producing region may have earned Calgary the nickname Cowtown, the city is quickly emerging as a major player in the booming plant protein business.

Last month, the U.K.’s Meatless Farm set up shop in the Albertan city with a US$12-million, 30,000-square-foot plant with the capacity to produce up to 18,000 tonnes of plant protein ingredients under the banner Lovingly Made Ingredients. Lovingly is a spinoff company dedicated to manufacturing a global supply of textured plant protein that mimics beef and pork products. Yellow peas sourced from Alberta and Saskatchewan farmers will be one of the main ingredients of choice, though the company is also looking to add fava beans, hemp and other legumes to the mix.

Canada is “the pea capital of the world,” says Meatless Farm founder Morten Toft Bech, and while much of those 4.2 million tonnes of peas were being exported for processing, Bech says its new location gives the company the ability to “grow, harvest, process and extract its pea protein all within one country.”

Meatless made its British debut in 2019 after raising $17 million from investors and last fall pulled in another $31 million in investments to fuel its global expansion.

As Calgary Herald columnist David Parker puts it, “It represents a good potential new-growth industry for Calgary, with a positive effect up and down the supply chain.” But Alberta faces heavy competition from the Prairies, where $1 billion has already been invested in protein-processing plants, despite Albertan farmers growing nearly half of the field peas in the West, according to the Plant Protein Alliance of Alberta. Roquette Canada is poised to open the world’s largest pea-protein facility – worth $600 million – in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, in early 2021. Roquette Canada’s CEO says Manitoba “can be the Silicon Valley of plant-based proteins.”

For the rising Albertan pea-protein sector, them be fightin’ words.

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Early numbers suggest noteworthy increases in the purchase of plant-based foods during the pandemic. New vegan products are being brought to market almost weekly. And advancements in cultured “clean” meat may soon result in mass production.

These technological innovations mean that meat can be created for those who wish to consume it without needing to kill animals. Diverse investors, including Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Leonardo DiCaprio and leaders of major agribusinesses, recognize the opportunity to more efficiently and sustainably produce products. As a result, we will see a serious decline — if not the complete elimination — of industrial animal agriculture.

Given its significant contributions to climate change and the depth and breadth of the animal suffering it causes, the demise of factory farming will have many social benefits. New humane jobs will be created in urban areas developing food, undoubtedly. But what will happen to rural economies and to farmed animals?

Fewer but happier animals

The end of factory farming will lay the foundation for a rural resurgence and the development of more just and sustainable communities. And there will be fewer but healthier and happier animals not destined for slaughterhouses.

1. There will be a revival and reshaping of family farms.

Factory farming has led to a steep and continuous decline in the number of family farms. In contrast to the rigid corporatized and mechanized status quo, the end of industrial animal agriculture will be a boon for family farming and a meaningful chance to diversify.

Canada is already a world leader in pulse proteins that include lentils and chickpeas. There will be new demand for organic and veganic farming, more plant-based crops and the ingredients needed for the new lab-created products. Some consumers may still want meat from dead animals, so small-scale animal farming may find a market.

Boutique dining tourism that brings people onto farms and face-to-face with food cultivation could also thrive. Ideally, the well-being of the migrant workers who make so much fruit and vegetable farming possible will be taken much more seriously, too. This is sorely needed.

2. Green care will be expanded.

The term green care isn’t well known yet, but it makes sense: it refers to a range of organized and formal beneficial interactions with nature. Animal-assisted therapy, therapeutic horticulture and care farms are all examples of green care.

Farms can be re-imagined as places for children’s and adults’ learning, health care and job training. This will both provide valuable services and generate new green and humane jobs of different kinds in rural communities.

Some of these farms already exist, and normally involve out-of-pocket fees in countries like Canada. The removal of factory farms from the rural economy will create new opportunities to more deliberately and thoughtfully expand green care, regulate it and integrate it with existing education, health care and One Health programs akin to what is being done in northern Europe. This would make it more accessible, diverse and equitable.

3. Farm animals will be raised for pleasure.

Many people already work and interact with horses for leisure, sport, companionship and sheer joy. Some similar opportunities exist for farmed animals like chickens, rabbits, goats, pigs, cattle and sheep.

Sub-cultures can celebrate and showcase heritage breeds, for example, and the beauty of these animals — without the subsequent death sentence.

More farms may also become non-profit sanctuaries where animals can flourish without any expectations.

4. Some rural spaces will be rewilded.

As British writer George Monbiot and others have argued, there are many environmental reasons to allow some areas to regenerate and be repopulated with native plant and animal species.

Known as rewilding, it could allow for certain carefully planned opportunities for expanded recreation and learning in the country (hiking, birding) and some modest, strategic eco-tourism, including Indigenous-led initiatives and partnerships.

But definitively returning some land to other species is one small way to begin to make amends for the immense damage we have done to animal families, cultures and habitats.

Sustainable, vibrant spaces

In contrast to today’s large, windowless facilities that intensively confine hundreds of millions of animals indoors and litter Canada’s rural landscapes, rural regions would become more sustainable and vibrant spaces for humans and animals to thrive and co-exist.

Rather than harming rural economies, the end of factory farming is an invitation to revive reciprocal practices as well as develop compelling new possibilities rooted in interspecies respect. It is a clear opportunity to create new income sources and humane jobs for diverse people.

After factory farming, we will all be better off.

Kendra Coulter, Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence; Chair of the Labour Studies Department; Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists; Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, Brock University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Canadians, however, were mostly relegated to reading about the latest plant burgers – until A&W got in on the action. Yes, the chain best known for its baby boomer-pleasing root beer decided to get a piece of the much-hyped pea-based Beyond Meat burger before any other national burger franchise in the country.

“Normally, product development of that nature takes quite a long time,” says A&W CEO Susan Senecal. “But we were focused on trying to make it happen as quickly as we could, and we were able to launch the burger six months after we first tasted it.”

It proved to be a shrewd move.

Over 90,000 split pea-based patties were sold in the first three days of its launch in July 2018. Many locations sold out on day one and Beyond burgers sold out nationwide within weeks. The plant burger shortage only fuelled the growing hype.

Suddenly the stodgy old chain was filling up with millennials and new clients that had never visited before. Some locations even reported higher sales of the vegan burger than beef ones.

Although A&W has promoted the heck out of the fact that it carries Beyond Meat, the Silicon Valley burger upstart comes with its own multi-million-dollar promotion machine. Beyond Meat has a small army of celebrities lining up to endorse or invest in it, including over a dozen pro athletes, rapper-investors Snoop Dogg and Common, and founding celebrity-investor Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s the kind of publicity that really can’t be bought on a Canadian budget.

Yes, analysts have slagged Beyond Meat for failing to break even a decade after its founding, but capitalist forces seem to be aligning behind plant burgers. When Beyond Meat was listed on the NASDAQ in early May, it had the best IPO of 2019 with its share price more than doubling on the first day of trading.

There’s no denying that carrying Beyond has helped fuel A&W’s sector-shirking growth.

“In 2013, the quick-service industry was flat at best. A&W knew they needed to disrupt the market and differentiate in order to succeed,” notes Rethink Canada, the chain’s advertising agency. The root beer pusher was saddled with an aging boomer demographic (and its waning interest in fast food), while new premium burger joints were popping up across the country like portobello mushrooms. If A&W was going to attract coveted 25- to 44-year-olds, it would need to tap into their growing concern about how their food was made.

A&W CEO Susan Senecal

That early market research into the “fast foodie” movement spawned a switch over to largely grass-fed, steroid- and antibiotic-free beef back in 2013, followed by a steady stream of boldly-promoted “ingredient guarantees” on antibiotic-free chicken and pork, as well as eggs from vegetarian hens. “The home of the burger family” started serving organic, fair trade coffee, brought in ceramic plates and cutlery at breakfast and started brewing its famous root beer with natural flavours.

By 2017, A&W was the fastest growing quick-service burger chain in Canada. That year, it opened its 900th restaurant and shifted away from suburban drive-throughs to more urban locations.

In 2018, sales really took off. And while Senecal won’t say how many Beyond burgers the chain has sold, she did tell Corporate Knights that sales have remained “steady from the get go” and that it’s now one of A&W’s “top-selling burgers.”

No matter how you slice it, same-store sales were up 10% in 2018, from 3.4% in 2017 and 7.6% the year prior. The Vancouver-headquartered chain is betting big on continued growth with dozens of new stores under construction.

Millennials have been credited with driving much of that growth. The debt-conscious generation may not spend quite as much on restaurants as boomers and Generation Xers yet (depending on who you ask), but, according to new research from CBRE, they’re “driving up demand for low-priced food options such as fast casual and fast food.” And A&W knows it. (It even has a low-equity millennial franchisee program.)

“We’ve really started to build a much stronger bond and connection with our millennial guests,” says Senecal, the chain’s first female CEO. She has spent four decades pushing beef burgers for A&W, first as a manager, then as a marketer, and now as chief executive officer (who’s clearly still a natural marketer at heart). “We’ve seen rapid growth in terms of the number of millennials choosing us when they want a great tasting burger.”

It just so happens that a lot of millennials are looking for a great tasting burger made of plants. Mintel found that 80% eat meat alternatives compared to roughly half of non-millennials. And much to the plant burger advantage, according to Forbes, “a full 70% of the world population is reportedly either reducing meat consumption or leaving meat off the table altogether.”

Although A&W already had a veggie burger on its menu, Senecal told Corporate Knights in a phone conversation from her office in Vancouver that they “kept searching for a veggie burger that people would choose, not one they’d settle for.” When the team first tasted the Beyond Meat burger in 2017, “it was love at first bite.”

Stir into the mix a ban on plastic straws that kicked off in 2018 and A&W is now officially the wokest of the large national burger chains. On point with the plastic-purging trend, says Senecal, A&W has also eliminated over 90% of disposable items in its restaurants.

That’s not to say that A&W is beyond reproach. The majority of its eggs are still not cage-free (though hens live in “enriched colony housing”) and while it says it’s committed to phasing out gestation crates for sows, its pork is still not crate-free.

Nonetheless, to a growing number of Canadians, A&W is the best of the big boys. Sure, Beyond Meat’s highly publicized rollout into Canadian grocery stores this summer could cut into some of A&W’s restaurant sales. Thankfully for Canada’s second biggest burger chain, the generation reviving A&W’s fortunes isn’t a big fan of cooking.

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When this soy-free, non-GMO, beet-tinted, split pea-based Lightlife-branded burger debuts in grocery store fridges across the continent this barbeque season, McCain will have muscled his way into the food fight to crown a new wave of plant burger kings that look, cook and taste more like ground beef than ever before.

In the past two years, the meat maven has invested three-quarters of a billion dollars (about 40% of its new investments) to become top dog in the U.S. vegan protein scene. It’s a bit like an oil company betting big on green power. People get excited when an oil heavyweight like Shell announces that it’s putting up to 10% of its new investments in cleaner energy. Meanwhile, Maple Leaf just bet quadruple that on a sector with one of the cleanest revenue streams and leanest carbon footprints around.

Beyond pork

Like other meat majors, Maple Leaf had been keeping a watchful eye on the steady growth in plant-based foods. In 2016, American meat giant Tyson (with US$40 billion in annual revenue) coughed up US$13 million in venture capital for a 5% ownership stake in Beyond Meat, the much-hyped vegan startup. A few months later, Maple Leaf announced that it wasn’t just dipping a toe in the sector, it was going whole hog after the U.S. alternative protein market, dishing out US$140 million for a veteran of American veggie dogs, Massachusetts-based Lightlife Foods.

Buying Lightlife – a respected 40-year-old tempeh and tofu hotdog maker – was a solid play for Canada’s largest pork producer and chicken processor, which used some of the cash from selling off its bakery division at a time when North Americans have been shunning white bread and trying plant protein in record numbers. With four decades in the game, Lightlife had already cornered 38% of the refrigerated plant-protein market when Maple Leaf bought it out in early 2017.

Later that year, the Canadian meat maven behind the Schneiders, Shopsy’s and Prime brands forked over US$120 million for another leading heritage vegan brand, Field Roast Grain Meat, a 20-year-old Seattle-based company famous for its artisan vegan sausages and “celebration” roasts (you know, the kind you can serve up at family holidays). Within 12 months, Maple Leaf Foods had bought itself a 50% U.S. market share in the rapidly growing refrigerated plant-protein business.

And just like that, the king of Canadian pork and poultry became the new prince of plant protein in the U.S.

“It’s the only thing I’ve had in my entire life that is 50% of anything in the U.S.,” says McCain with a quiet chuckle. “So, I’m glad to have that position that’s in high growth.”

While pork prices have taken a beating in global trade wars, McCain assured analysts in a February conference call that the plant-protein sector is delivering the returns shareholders are looking for. The North American refrigerated plant protein market is currently small, pegged at US$240 million in annual sales, but it grew by a staggering 40% in 2018, with Maple Leaf maintaining at least its share of growth, according to the company.

With two leading veggie brands in his shopping cart, McCain and his team set up a wholly-owned independent subsidiary, Greenleaf Foods, to create, as its president Dan Curtin put it, a “halo” for Lightlife and Field Roast and grow their leadership. If that leadership was ever in question, by spring 2019 McCain and Curtin (a former partner at Boca Burger, another veggie burger pioneer) dropped the mic. They announced they would be spending US$310 million to build the single largest plant-protein manufacturing facility in all of North America (in Shelbyville, Indiana), doubling the company’s production capacity to meet “surging consumer demand.”

The quest for the meatiest plant burger

For now, McCain and Greenleaf own half of the American plant protein market. But competition is growing stiffer by the minute, as new-wave beef simulators sweep the nation. The celebrity-endorsed Beyond Burger is already in 10,000 grocery stores and is hitting 3,000 Canadian supermarkets by summer (see A&W/Beyond story on p. 52. Beyond’s main competitor to date, the Impossible Burger, will also be turning up in U.S. grocery stores later this year (backed by all the marketing heft that comes with being crowned Burger King’s new “Impossible Whopper”).

Maple Leaf won’t just be duking it out with Silicon Valley startups new to the food biz. Tyson actually sold its stake in Beyond this spring to focus on rolling out its own alternative protein product, due later this year. And by the fall, Nestlé, the world’s biggest food company, will be gunning for a piece of the action with its yet-to-be-released “Awesome Burger” (or “Incredible Burger,” as Europeans will be calling it).

If Maple Leaf’s newly acquired Lightlife wanted to maintain its No. 1 spot in the refrigerated plant-protein scene, the company had to up its game and shed its frumpy Smart Patty branding. Curtin says Lightlife collaborated with Maple Leaf’s team of meat scientists to develop its own beefy beet-dyed raw-until-you-cook-it pea burger, which took six months from concept to production. With the new recipe, Maple Leaf was putting a dog in the fight – one that happens to look a lot like the Beyond. And like its rival, the Lightlife-branded burger will be merchandised right alongside fresh burger patties in the meat aisle.

Except Lightlife and Field Roast already happen to be in over 20,000 grocery stores to begin with, giving them a leg up. And as their products fan out north of the border, they’ll have the distribution muscle and resources of one of Canada’s largest meat companies behind them. That helps explains why the new burger managed to secure fridge space in thousands of Loblaws, Sobeys, Metro and Longo’s locations as well as a spot on Kelseys’ menus before Canadians even sampled the burger.

That lengthy experience in the food industry, along with the company’s sustainability vision, is also what compelled Field Roast’s vegan founder and former president, David Lee, to sell to Maple Leaf in the first place. “Impossible and Beyond Meat are focused on the investor frenzy and there’s a lot of money swirling around them but it’s all based on a promise, a what-if scenario,” Lee tells CK.

“Versus Maple Leaf, which is run by a food guy that’s been running that company for 25 years. They know how to sell meat – and I think Field Roast is a meat company, we put meat in its name,” explains Lee. “Maple Leaf has the infrastructure, the connections, the process. They’re not losing money.” Adds Lee, “Selling to Maple Leaf just means the proliferation of more vegan food.”

The most sustainable protein company on earth

Casting the bun aside, McCain parcels into the freshly grilled burger patty with a fork and knife and explains that consumers have been telling Maple Leaf they “want more protein choice and they want more balance between plant and animal proteins.”

It certainly helps that high-profile actors, athletes and performers are thrusting the spotlight on the health benefits of plant-based diets (earlier this year, singer Beyonce and Jay-Z launched a contest that offered a free lifetime of concert tickets to a fan that pledged to take on a vegan diet). Anywhere from 7% to 10% of Americans now identify as either vegetarian or vegan. But the real growth, says McCain, is in the flexitarian market – the millions of North Americans that are consciously limiting the amount of meat they eat without ruling it out altogether. Polling from Mintel found that nearly 60% of Americans say they’re trying to eat less meat, while a Nielson survey found that almost 40% are trying to eat more plant protein.

Though it’s not just demand for protein alternatives that’s driving changes behind the scenes at Maple Leaf Foods.

“There’s a large voice of food change advocates, climate change advocates and animal welfare change advocates,” starts McCain. “They’re not wrong that the animal production system needs to change in order to be sustainable on planet earth. Recognizing that those voices are going to ultimately end up in the consumers’ psyche is something we needed to pay attention to.”

As headline after headline singled out eating less meat as one of the fastest ways for humans to slash our carbon footprint, McCain would get out in front of the coming storm. By summer of 2017, Maple Leaf Foods announced a lofty new mission: to become “the most sustainable protein company on earth.”

“Some consumers would say that term [sustainable meat] is an oxymoron,” concedes Maple Leaf’s VP of sustainability, Tim Faveri. He says that’s why Maple Leaf consulted with environmental groups such as WWF before issuing a sweeping sustainability agenda that promised to clean up its ingredient lists, reduce antibiotics use, trim its environmental impact by 50% and improve animal welfare.

Growing the plant division is a central plank of boosting the sustainability of Maple Leaf’s protein profile, but McCain argues that greening the existing production of meat is the most important move the company can make.

Ahead of the last climate talks in Poland, Maple Leaf was the only meat company among 50 global businesses that penned an open letter to the world’s governments urging “greater collaboration in the fight against climate change.” Since 2014, Maple Leaf claims it has reduced its total energy intensity by 19% and greenhouse gas emissions intensity by 18% and that the company is on track to halve its environmental footprint by 2025.

“Our food system has drifted from its roots,” McCain muses. “The role of climate change and animal proteins was going to evolve in a very negative way without change.”

Notably, Maple Leaf’s marketing division has dabbled in pushing a Patagonia-style approach to meat consumption. Its message: Consume us in moderation. Maple Leaf’s “most sustainable protein” launch press release in 2017 also boldly called out North America’s consumption of four times more meat than non-industrial countries as “unsustainable” –particularly since “global meat consumption is forecast to rise 80% by 2050.” Maple Leaf’s Manitoba-based Greenfield Natural Meat brand (which is also experiencing double-digit growth) even tried a Meatless Mondays campaign in 2017.

Just don’t let those Meatless Mondays or investments in the plant-based sector give you the impression that the company is going soft on its meat business. When I suggest that Maple Leaf is pivoting away from meat, McCain gets visibly tense. “I’m a little sensitive to that point,” he says. “I do not support the demonization of a meat company simply because they’re meat any more than I would demonize an automobile company, or an airline company or an office building that wasn’t LEEDs [green-certified].”

Though it’s not greeted with the same kind of media frenzy, Maple Leaf is plowing major investments into meat, too. Some capital investments are intended to boost the company’s animal welfare standards, like the $55 million going towards converting 31 pig barns to open housing systems for its 70,000 sows (a move renowned animal welfare consultant Temple Grandin recently praised). Or the $28 million it plucked from its cash pile to transition its Edmonton chicken plant to more humane CO2 stunning.

Other moves make it clear Maple Leaf is still betting the farm on traditional meat. The Mississauga-headquartered company is building a $660 million chicken processing facility (with another $140 million in related costs) in London, Ontario, as we speak, which the company says represents the “largest single-site investment ever in the Canadian food industry history.” Maple Leaf also spent $215 million on a Montreal pepperoni company in October.

During the 2019 Super Bowl, Maple Leaf didn’t run a spot pumping its new plant protein, which to be fair, it’s just ramping up. Instead, its #RealMapleLeaf ad encouraged parents to feed their fussy toddlers Maple Leaf’s revamped bacon, ham and hotdogs, now purged of ingredients like corn syrup solids and sodium diacetate. Yes, the ingredient decks have gotten cleaner, but not everyone was thrilled that Maple Leaf was marketing red and processed meat for two-year-olds.

The future of food

With the meat industry responsible for 14.5% of global GHGs, many are reconsidering the make-up of their diets. A January 2019 EAT-Lancet study garnered world-wide attention for proposing a massive reduction in the amount of meat we consume to help prevent “irreversible and potentially catastrophic shifts in the Earth system.” Unlike past reports targeting beef and lamb, the EAT-Lancet brief for healthcare professions lumped pork, beef and lamb together, advising that on a weekly basis we eat “no more than 98 grams of red meat (pork, beef or lamb) [and] 203 grams of poultry” per week.

That’s basically a deck of card’s worth of red meat and roughly one large boneless chicken breast a week. If North Americans ever get serious about following a climate diet and keep upping their plant protein, many barns and processing plants could potentially become stranded assets, along the lines of today’s oil sands and coal mines.

Canadians have witnessed McCain deftly turn crisis into opportunity before, dating back to the 2008 listeria outbreak that killed 23 Canadians. As president and CEO, McCain opted to take full responsibility for the disaster, which helped the company bounce back relatively quickly from a consumer confidence perspective. Now the crisis is existential. McCain knows that unless he makes protein more sustainable, Maple Leaf Foods won’t be viable in the long run. Greening protein is also critical to keeping a generation of millennial consumers who are cynical about Big Food on side.

Natural Resource Defence Council’s Sujatha Bergen is skeptical McCain will be able to square being the most sustainable protein company on the planet without substantially changing its business mix: “A pork-producing company will never be able to match the low emissions of a company that sells primarily plant-based proteins like lentils.” But she adds that if they are able to, for instance, eliminate the use of antibiotics in their meat and reduce the GHG-intensive chemical fertilizers and pesticides used on animal feed they could get a few steps closer.

In the meantime, McCain is hedging his bets. He’s positioning Maple Leaf Foods to feed our growing appetite for plants, all while supplying the market with, hopefully, a greener cut of the meat the world’s growing middle classes and Keto-dieters crave.

McCain is frank, “We are making progress but the reality is we’re not perfect. Our commitment is to make progress towards a sustainable world for our category.”

Owning up to shortcomings and rebelling against what’s expected of him seems to be working for the exiled son of the McCain French fry empire.

Either way, McCain signals he’s geared up for the challenge: “We’re at an age and stage and sense of maturity where we’re recognizing that we can change the world in a positive way.” With a beaded leather bracelet peering out of the cuff of his pink dress shirt, he adds, “We’re small enough to be really rebellious about these things but large enough to actually move the needle.”

The post Plant burgers bring home the bacon appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Restaurant Brands International (QSR:TSX) is a Toronto Stock Exchange-listed quick-serve company that owns Burger King and Tim Hortons, as well as Popeyes Chicken. They sell a lot of burgers and a lot of coffee, two items with a global supply chain and a heavy impact on the environment.

Burger King seems to be trying to revive its sputtering sales by getting in on the plant-based burger craze. By year’s end, its American locations will be serving up the Impossible Whopper, a plant-based alternative that seems to taste just like a regular whopper. Unfortunately, there’s some concern that it uses genetically modified yeast to produce the key ingredient that makes the burgers taste so meat-like. Health Canada has yet to approve the ingredient, so don’t expect to see the Impossible Whopper on Canadian Burger King menus anytime soon.

According to RBI’s short sustainability report, the only measure BK has taken towards sustainable beef production is non-specified ‘support’ for farmers to join the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, and a loose commitment to develop specific criteria by 2020. On the bright side, RBI has said its eggs will be cage-free by 2025 and its pork will be crate-free by 2022.

On the coffee side of things, it’s pretty clear that Restaurant Brands is prioritizing lower costs over sustainable agriculture and fair wages. Instead of using third-party certifications like Fairtrade or organic, it uses an in-house vender code that sets the bar ridiculously low at legal minimum standards, with vague statements about reducing environmental impacts.

Looking for a sustainable alternative in fast food was challenging, but I found a tasty option in A&W Revenue Royalties Income Fund (AW.UN:TSX). You’re forgiven if you haven’t been to an A&W restaurant in a while, but it’s going through a resurgence and is now Canada fastest-growing burger chain, with over 950 locations. It’s now Canada’s second largest burger chain, behind McDonald’s (BK is in fourth place, behind Wendy’s).

A big part of its economic renewal has come from its commitment to bringing in more natural, ethically-sourced ingredients. All of its meat is now antibiotic-free, A&W started selling certified organic, fair trade coffee in 2015 and then started making its famous root beer from natural cane sugar and all-natural flavours in 2017.

While RBI reports that same-store sales are falling at Tims,  A&W’s same-store sales are up 10%. Much of that growth is attributed to A&W’s ongoing sales of the much-hyped Beyond Meat burger (introduced last summer) and the Beyond Meat breakfast patty (introduced close to the end of its first quarter). Plant-based Beyond Meat products are assertively non-GMO certified, so they escape much of the criticism from ardent environmentalists. And Beyond Meat’s soaring IPO debut last week only drew more media attention to the burger.

Besides its recent ingredient innovations, A&W is positioning itself as a sustainability leader by being on top of hot trends like banning plastic straws. Considering Tim Hortons was cited as the second largest plastic polluter in Canada, according to a Greenpeace beach litter audit, A&W’s move to eliminate 90% of in-store disposables gives it a major reputational boost. Being first to market with these small solutions is a great way to differentiate against global fast food chains and lets them reap significant reputational benefits with each incremental change.

A&W still has a long way to go. While it’s made some solid moves towards improving animal welfare, its eggs aren’t yet cage-free and its pork producers are still transitioning to gestation crate-free systems.  I’d like to see a more detailed annual sustainability report and more transparency around carbon emissions and executive pay. That said, A&W is definitely moving quickly towards greater sustainability and CEO Susan Senecal recognizes that these issues are important to consumers.

A&W Food Services of Canada (which has no corporate connections to A&W’s American locations) is obviously a much smaller company than Restaurant Brands, but perhaps that allows it to be nimbler in the quickly-evolving quick-service sector. With a higher dividend and a lower beta, A&W provides a nice mix of income and growth potential. The chain is the clear winner in this week’s Sustainable Stock Showdown.

*A note regarding total Returns: Since RBI first started trading December 15, 2014,  we used that start date to assess both companies.

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Have a company in your portfolio that you want to replace with a more sustainable option? Write us an email or send us a tweet!

Tim Nash blogs as The Sustainable Economist and is the founder of Good Investing. Tweet him at @timenash.

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With trend spotters declaring “plant-based” everything the hottest food craze of 2018, all while North Americans eat more protein than ever, the market for “alt meat” is undeniably blowing up – and a growing handful of San Francisco Bay area startups with a taste for food have been leading the charge. They’re not serving up the dry soy burgers and chick’n strips of yore. No, buzzy companies like Beyond Meat (now at a growing number of Canadian restaurants), Impossible Foods and Memphis Meats are spending millions on high tech labs staffed with food scientists, biochemists and physicists to replicate “the architecture of meat,” as Beyond Meat’s CEO Ethan Brown put it. They’re running burgers under MRIs, replicating flavour molecules, splicing genes and, in the case of cellular agriculture companies like Memphis Meat, they’re brewing actual “clean” meatballs, milk, even leather in bioreactors.

Okay, so not all of that will sit well with the whole grain set, but it’s certainly caught the meat industry’s attention.

No doubt meat has needed a radical makeover. The industry’s been slammed for being a bigger climate change driver than all the cars, trucks and planes on the planet combined (not good when global meat consumption is expected to double by 2050, thanks to growing demand from developing economies). What’s more, it requires tremendous amounts of water, land and other resources, as well as controversial antibiotics and other drugs. Not to mention, industrial meat farming has spent the better part of a decade under heavy fire from animal welfare group exposes. It’s all left a bad taste in consumers’ mouths, and, as one of the globe’s largest meat processors, Cargill, put it, “[Millennials] are driving calls to do things differently.”

The thing is, until recently, fake meat, well, it’s kind of sucked. While an April study by Mintel found that an impressive 53 per cent mostly omnivorous Canadians say that they eat plant-based meat alternatives like veggie burgers and hot dogs (with one in five Canadians eating mock meat a few times a week), only 16 per cent say those alternatives “taste as good as meat.” To win over skeptics, Mintel’s associate director of food and drink, Joel Gregoire, says the makers of meat alternatives will have to bridge the taste and texture gap between their products and actual meat.

It’s a gap that’s rapidly closing thanks to this new wave of alt meat innovations emerging south of the border. Globally, the market for plant-based meat is expected to reach $4.6 billion (U.S.) in 2018 and climb to $6.3 billion by 2023. One agro-biz financier, Rabobank, has warned animal protein companies to seize the opportunity “or they will turn into threats.” So far, the world’s largest meat companies are wisely getting in on the action. Chicken processing giant Tyson Foods has snatched up a five per cent stake in one leading “bleeding” veggie burger maker, Beyond Meat. It, along with Cargill, also secured a minority investment in Memphis Meats, the San Francisco startup growing clean beef, chicken and duck meat from animal cells. Cargill, by the way, sold its last two remaining feed yards last year, to, in part, “explore plant-based protein, fish and insects.”

Not to be outdone, Canada’s largest packaged meat provider, Maple Leaf Farms, has purchased two popular plant-based protein companies, Field Roast and Lightlife Foods, boldly noting, “This acquisition advances Maple Leaf’s vision to be the most sustainable protein company on earth, including a core strategy to diversify into plant-based protein.”

Maple Leaf Foods CEO Michael McCain has acknowledged that the food industry is “pivoting towards a crisis,” ceding that the planet’s limited resources can’t sustain current dietary trends for a growing population. McCain told the Globe’s Report on Business magazine that while consumers want to ingest more protein, “they want more choice in the proteins they consume [and] the majority of that growth in North America will come from plant-based proteins, not animal proteins.” It seems Maple Leaf is effectively pulling a Patagonia, encouraging its customers to buy less of its products – its meat products anyway. Said McCain, “We’re the only meat company in the world that is overtly expressing the objective for consumers to eat meat in moderation.”

There’s no denying investing in slaughter-free products is a smart way to bank some good PR and to warm relations with most animal welfare orgs. Though some vegans have accused their favourite plant protein brands of selling out and sleeping with enemy, Mercy for Animal’s communications director, Kenny Torrella, doesn’t see it that way. “[These meat companies] see the writing on the wall. There’s more and more awareness about the unsustainability of our high meat consumption both in Canada and the U.S. Rather than being disrupted by it, they want to be part of the disruption.”

Adds Torrella, “Ultimately, for major meat and food companies, their bottom line is making money.”

And analysts note there’s plenty more money to be made. The market for alternative meat could claim up to a third of the protein market by 2054, according to Lux Research, as more “flexitarians” and “reducetarians” moderate their meat intake. No wonder Walmart is asking its suppliers to make more meat-free fare and, Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, snatched up Sweet Earth to start selling its Benevolent Bacon and Harmless Ham.

Even so, not everyone’s embracing the tectonic shifts afoot. American cattle ranchers have made it clear they have a major beef with plant-based and lab-grown meats. Back in February, the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association filed a petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture requesting that the feds establish labelling requirements that outlaw “products not derived directly from animals raised and slaughtered” from using terms like “beef” and “meat.”

Missouri lawmakers have already introduced a meat industry-friendly bill that “prohibits misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” They’re particularly threatened by lab-grown meat, which could be on shelves by the end of 2018, if vegan mayo maker Just delivers on its promise to be selling a cultured avian product, or maybe lab-grown foie gras, by then. (That would place it years ahead of cellular ag competitors like Memphis Meats, Israeli startup SuperMeat and even Finless Foods’ much-anticipated fish fillets.) Just is also vowing to be one of the first clean meat firms to culture that meat without pints upon pints of controversial fetal bovine serum, the “miracle juice” behind most lab-grown meat.

Whichever cultured meat hits Americans’ shelves first, since it would be classified as a “novel” food in Canada, it’ll need Health Canada’s approval before it’s permitted on menus here. Ditto for Impossible Food’s “bleeding” wheat and potato protein burger, which gets its deceptively meaty taste and aroma from a genetically modified yeast protein, yet to be cleared by Canadian authorities.

Which begs the question, are all these new options a tad too processed? Mintel’s survey found that 21 per cent of Canadians already think so. But it depends how you look at it, says Alison Rabschnuk, with D.C.-based Good Food Institute, Mercy for Animals’ burgeoning sister nonprofit that incubates and promotes plant-based and clean meat innovation around the globe. “If you’re chicken on a farm you’re typically pumped full of antibiotics because you’re in such crowded conditions and you’ve been genetically modified to grow to the point where…you can barely stand on your two legs. That to us is what processed food really looks like.”

Adds Rabschnuk, “It’s really up to the consumer to decide what they can bear.”

Either way, if new-wave alternatives to traditional meat are as tasty as the special sauce-laden Beyond Burger selling out at that downtown Toronto eatery, Bill Gates is likely right in calling it “the future of food.”

Homegrown: Canadian Prairies feeding pea protein craze

For years, fake meat mostly got its protein from one crop: soy. Now, a second-generation plant protein source is on the rise: yellow peas. Beyond Meat’s burgers, Sophie’s Kitchen’s vegan scallops and Good Catch’s upcoming fish-free tuna all fold pea concentrates and isolates into their recipes – as do a growing array of high protein snacks, powders and pet foods. And as the world’s largest producer of yellow peas, Canadian pea farmers are poised to cash in on the trend. Much of those peas currently get processed into protein concentrates in China, but the race is on to build capacity locally.

Last September, Avatar director and environmental advocate James Cameron showed up in rural Saskatchewan to announce that his company, Verdient Foods, is building North America’s largest pea protein plant southwest of Saskatoon. Manitoba and Alberta are getting new processing plants, too. The push for more Canadian peas couldn’t come any sooner for Prairie farmers left holding the bag ever since their top customer, India, slapped a 50 per cent tariff on yellow peas earlier this year. More silver linings: Since yellow peas aren’t genetically modified, they should stir up less controversy than alt meat’s old soy standby.

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