Canada’s largest coffee chain is ending sales of Beyond Meat after offering its plant-based, imitation meat products for seven months.
“We introduced Beyond Meat as a limited time offer. We are always listening to our guests and testing new products that align to our core menu offerings. We may offer Beyond Meat again in the future,” Tim Hortons said in a Tuesday statement to Bloomberg.
Recommended Stories
The Beyond Meat breakfast sandwich and burger were both offered at 4,000 Tim Hortons locations in Canada. The company had already dropped the fake meat from some of its stores in September before its latest announcement.
Tim Hortons’s decision to end its Beyond Meat offering is the latest blow to the imitation meat market. Beyond Meat has seen its stocks plunge 50% since its peak this summer when the product was being touted as the future of meat. The company lost another 4% of its value on Tuesday.
Burger King has also had trouble selling its plant-based burger, seeing sales slide after its initial introduction. The company uses Impossible Foods, a Beyond Meat competitor. One Burger King franchise owner said the fake meat was “compressing the margin” in his store because of its poor performance. He said they only sold 20 Impossible Whoppers a day.
Several states have begun regulating fake meats, banning them from being labeled as “meat” or “burger,” and the European Union is looking to implement similar protections.
“You don’t have the right to mislead consumers into believing that they’re buying one thing when they’re actually buying something totally different,” Cody Burkham, the executive vice president of the Arkansas Cattlemen’s Association, said. “You can’t take a Buick, take the hood ornament off and slap a Porsche hood ornament on, and try to sell that Buick as a Porsche. It doesn’t work like that.”
