Beyond Meat triples manufacturing footprint
“This expansion in our production capacity will help us to meet the considerable increase in market demand we have seen for our new and innovative product offerings,” said COO and CFO Mark Nelson.
The Beyond Meat brand – spanning frozen grounds, strips and burgers and chilled burgers and sausages - is now in around 20,000 retail locations; while its pea-protein-based Beyond Burger (which it claims “looks, cooks and satisfies like beef”) is now on the menu in 10,000 restaurants, hotels, college campus dining halls, and hospitals.
It is also planning an aggressive overseas expansion plan, developing partnerships to enable it to “enter over 50 countries including Germany and the rest of Europe, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Chile, Israel, UAE, Korea, Taiwan and South Africa.”
Co-founded by Ethan Brown and Brent Taylor in 2009, Beyond Meat launched its first products on the national stage in 2013, and notched up triple-digit growth in 2017, according to executive chairman Seth Goldman, who said the majority of Beyond Burger fans were flexitarians - meat eaters cutting down on meat, rather than hardcore vegans/vegetarians – validating the initially controversial decision to merchandise the product in the meat case.
