Beyond Meat’s Rumored Bankruptcy Is The Perfect Example of Food Media Bias

Beyond Meat is not going under — at least, not right now. After reports suggesting the company was filing for bankruptcy spread online, the plant-based food producer took to social media. “Recent media stories suggesting that Beyond Meat filed for bankruptcy are unequivocally false,” the company said in a statement also shared with Sentient. “We have not filed nor are we planning to file for bankruptcy,” it read. Beyond’s exact next steps are not known to the public, but the story spread like wildfire with a glee typical of the way food media treats the plant-based food sector.

Beyond Has Become a Stand-in for the Plant-Based Food Industry

The rumored bankruptcy filing appears to have stemmed from an August 10 story published by the financial news website TheStreet, with the provocative headline “Beyond Meat headed to Chapter 11 bankruptcy.” Co-Editor-in-Chief Daniel Kline wrote the piece, which cited a number of factors pointing to a potential restructuring, including Beyond’s decision to hire a “chief transformation officer” with experience in restructuring. The story was updated on August 14, and TheStreet published another article on August 22 with an analyst reaching the same conclusion. Sentient contacted Beyond Meat for comment on the claims made by TheStreet, but did not receive a response by the date of this publication.

In an email to Sentient, TheStreet’s Kline defended the story, writing in part that it did not include rumors, as the article never stated the company was filing for bankruptcy. “In a piece that was marked analysis, I showed their economic reality, which is grim. I followed that up with a piece based on data from Creditsafe,” a company that provides business credit reports. To substantiate his analysis, Kline cited “dwindling cash, looming liabilities,” and his belief the company has failed to “differentiate” the product in the marketplace.

Screenshots of the disputed headline were shared widely on social media, including by Sean Baker, a popular carnivore diet influencer who has over 630k followers on Instagram. The rumor was amplified with stories published at Veg News (later taken down), The Economic Times, The Independent and The Food Institute.

Beyond Has Become a Stand-in for the Plant-Based Food Industry

Beyond’s fate aside, the way the news spread suggests something else is at play: Beyond represents much more than just what it sells.

Jan Dutkiewicz, assistant professor of political science at the Pratt Institute, tells Sentient that ever since Beyond became a public company trading on the stock exchange, the company has attracted an outsized level of attention. Similar reports about “Gardein,” Dutkiewicz says as an example, would never garner this kind of response.

The scrutiny comes from social media, but traditional media plays a role too. “There are a number of reporters on the food beat who very regularly will use the stock performance of Beyond as a stand-in or the performance of the sector as a whole,” says Dutkiewicz. That, accompanied by Beyond’s latest quarterly report, means “a rumor like Beyond going out of business already has such fertile ground to spread like wildfire online.”

The company also says it is rebranding, dropping the word “meat” from its name. The rebrand to Beyond is a notable turn for a company once hailed as a pioneer in the plant-based meat market for its headline-grabbing IPO in 2019.

Since then, the market has cooled, meat-heavy diets are now surging in popularity and critics and shadowy campaigners alike call plant-based meats ultra-processed and unhealthy. To help boost its financial position, Beyond was able to obtain $100 million in debt financing from Unprocessed Foods, a subsidiary of the Ahimsa Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing plant-based eating.

Misinformation Meets MAHA

In an interview from 2023, founder Ethan Brown told The Guardian that one reason for sluggish sales was a false narrative about plant-based foods, a “change in perception” that “is not without encouragement from interest groups.”

One such campaign comes from The Center for Consumer Freedom, a PR firm with ties to the meat industry. In 2020, when Beyond’s sales were booming (especially during the pandemic, when the increase in at-home cooking helped sales of meat alternatives surge), a campaign to tar, falsely, plant-based meats as ultra-processed, unhealthy and even scary got national attention. The Center for Consumer Freedom took out full-page ads in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal warning that “fake meats” are full of “real chemicals.” The group also created a $5 million Super Bowl ad showing a girl being asked to spell “methylcellulose” (a common food binding ingredient), which was described as a “chemical laxative” in “synthetic meat.”

The false narrative was amplified by interested parties, including veterinary pharmaceutical giant Elanco, whose profits are inextricably linked with factory farming. It was also spread by online “meatfluencers” and proponents of the carnivore diet.

Dutkiewicz says these false narratives, “many of them rooted in bad information about their ‘lack of healthiness’, their level of processing,” have added to challenges the plant-based industry faces today. The misinformation continues to circulate online, even though it “is not actually borne out by peer-reviewed science.”

These narratives dovetail perfectly with the Make America Healthy Again movement. Many MAHA supporters follow a meat-heavy carnivore diet and prefer foods they perceive to be more “natural.” In other words, home-butchered meat, grass-fed beef, raw milk and tallow are in, while cultivated meat (still known to much of the public as lab-grown meat) and plant-based meat are out.

In a bid to distance itself from the ultra-processed critique, Beyond recently pledged changes to its products. Along with the rebrand, the company says it will be rolling out new items, including a stripped-down ground meat called Beyond Ground, made with just four ingredients: water, fava bean protein, potato protein and psyllium husk. In a recent interview, Brown told Vox that the success of the plant-based market will require “really simple, clean ingredients.” The company has even reformulated its burger, now in its fourth iteration, to have 60 percent less saturated fat and 20 percent less sodium.

Whether Beyond can avoid restructuring remains to be seen. What is far more certain — and often left out of the breathless reporting of a plant-based company failing — is the heaps of research supporting a shift to eating less meat and more plants.

“The fact remains that all peer-reviewed science shows that eating a primarily plant-based diet, even if it’s processed, even if the delivery mechanism is plant-based meat alternatives, is better,” says Dutkiewicz. It’s “better for the environment and is part of a healthier complete diet.”