![]() No doubt his endorsement in February 2021 helped keep the price high a while longer. ![]() Perhaps that’s why, despite claiming that Beyond Meat had ‘a quality road map and cost road map’ that made it ‘totally competitive’ in the move to a meatless future, Gates had already cashed out most of his investment in 2019 selling $28 million worth of shares. So far, however, he has not persuaded governments to outlaw meat consumption or mandate fake meat patties. His $55 million investment in 3.1 million shares of BioNTech in September 2019 was worth $1.7 billion by August 2021 thanks to mandatory vaccination policies. Using regulation to shift demand is a business model that has been remarkably profitable for Gates. ‘You can get used to the taste difference,’ he enthused, claiming that the ‘green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the (behaviour of) people or use regulation to totally shift the demand’. In February 2021, Gates was singing Beyond Meat’s praises proclaiming ‘all rich countries should move to 100 per cent synthetic beef’. Gates provided venture capital funding Beyond Meat’s shares, priced at $25 on the day of the initial public offering in April 2019 and soared to over $223 in the first three months. Beyond Meat shares would be gilt-edged because they were guilt-edged. With the global market for meat substitutes predicted to grow to more than $230 billion dollars by 2030, Brown’s fake meat protein wouldn’t just be good for people and good for the planet, it would be good for profits. Still, those sorts of incremental changes are of no interest to celebrity revolutionaries. With proper infrastructure, instead of eating bugs, as the FAO and the World Economic Forum advocate, we could eat the food that the bugs are eating. In addition, around 50 per cent of food produced in the world is wasted, mostly in the developing world due to lack of storage facilities and inefficient distribution systems which means that it ends up being eaten by bugs. The developing world could dramatically increase yields in existing farms just by applying existing first world farm management practices. Yields on conventional crops have been rising at one per cent or more per annum and have been for decades. In reality, all that is needed to feed a growing global population is to make agriculture as productive in developing countries as it is in the developed world. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) claims animal agriculture is responsible for more than 14 per cent of global greenhouse emissions, with beef and dairy livestock accounting for 65 per cent of those emissions.Ĭlimate activists also claim that livestock farming takes up too much land and water to produce enough food to feed the growing global population which is why they argue the only animals people should eat are insects. Brown’s motivation for starting the company was to fight climate change by reducing global cow flatulence. What came over Doug Ramsey, chief operating officer of Beyond Meat, a company championed by Bill Gates and celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Kim Kardashian and Leonardo DiCaprio in 2019, but whose shares had taken a nose-dive even before Ramsey’s snack attack?īeyond Meat was founded in 2009 by Ethan Brown who wanted to revolutionise the meat supply chain with a portfolio of fake meat products. The news that an executive in a fake meat company allegedly bit off the tip of the nose of a man in a road rage incident leaves a bad taste in the mouth of any self-respecting vegan.
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