Bloomberg profiled James Cameron in 2019, describing how the Titanic director was “betting on a better future” — one where traditional meat would play a much smaller role. Plant-based meats, the article suggested, were the sustainable future of both food and investing.
To illustrate the frenzy, Bloomberg pointed to Beyond Meat Inc., a maker of vegan chicken and beef substitutes whose market cap had surged to $6.2 billion, its shares having quadrupled in value following its IPO.
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The message was clear. Companies like Beyond Meat were the Microsoft and Apple of the future — “The internet in 1994,” according to an adviser to the Cameron family — and investors should capitalize.
“From the moment we went plant-based, our world did a 180,” Cameron’s wife, former actress Suzy Amis Cameron, told Bloomberg. “We started looking at our investments, our business opportunities. At this point, aside from Jim’s film work, they all go through a plant-based lens.”
Six years on, Beyond Meat is struggling to survive.
On Monday, its stock fell below 70 cents a share after the company announced a debt‑swap deal to pay down $800 million in liabilities by issuing new stock, diluting their power and value for existing shareholders.
That’s a steep decline from the stock’s $197 peak in July 2019, shortly after Bloomberg profiled Beyond Meat and the Camerons. The company’s market cap now stands at just $61 million, a fraction of the $1.3 billion in debt it carried in late 2024.
Beyond Meat’s founder and CEO, Ethan Brown, told the Wall Street Journal he was disappointed with the second-quarter results and had brought in an interim chief transformation officer to guide a major overhaul. Layoffs and cost-cutting will follow. Still, these steps are unlikely to save Beyond Meat, let alone restore its frothy share price.
The company’s revenue is projected at $281.6 million for 2025, down about 40% from Beyond Meat’s 2021 revenue peak of $464.7 million.
Industry forecasts couldn’t have been more wrong. A 2021 Bloomberg Intelligence report projected massive growth in the global market for meat substitutes, from $29.4 billion in 2020 to more than $162 billion.
“Food-related consumer habits often come and go as fads, but plant-based alternatives are here to stay — and grow,” said Jennifer Bartashus, a senior consumer staples analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Except they aren’t. U.S. retail sales of plant-based meat are declining, down 7.5% to $1.13 billion, with unit sales falling 10%, according to AgFunderNews.
Why plant-based meat-alternative sales are getting butchered is subject to debate.
Perhaps it stems from the collapse of ESG investing, which had funneled large amounts of capital into companies that had the “right” values, inflating expectations and masking underlying weaknesses in consumer demand. Maybe plant-based products are too expensive for many shoppers in a tightening economy. Maybe vegan chicken and beef substitutes can’t compete with the flavor of actual meat, or consumers have determined that plant-based meat isn’t as nutritious or green as billed.
Whatever the reason, it’s clear that people aren’t taking Bill Gates’s advice and giving up their real hamburgers just yet, and markets are responding. This would no doubt please Ludwig von Mises, who saw that consumers are “the real bosses” in a free economy.
“They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants,” the Austrian economist wrote. “They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.”
No amount of moralizing or celebrity endorsement can override their collective judgment. If people want real beef instead of pea protein, the market will shift accordingly — reminding us that in capitalism, power ultimately rests not with billionaires or bureaucrats, but with ordinary buyers in the checkout line.
The plant-based meat craze petered out because consumers never wanted it. It was a campaign pushed by ESG zealots, climate alarmists, and those who disapprove of people eating animals. The consumers have spoken, and they are voting with their forks.
Those of us who love steak and pork chops (and freedom) can be forgiven for relishing the fall of the industry that used dubious ethics and government coercion to prop up companies such as Beyond Meat and push people off a millennia-old dietary and cultural staple.
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That said, we should resist the eye-for-an-eye impulse to reactively restrict others’ choices to consume plant-based or lab-grown meats. But several states have done just that.
In a free country, consumers should decide. So let them eat fake meat. And give me ribeye, or give me death.
Jon Miltimore is senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.
