I direct your attention to those last two items. While there
is no agreement on the definition of scrod, we marketed it as young cod and
told people it was more tender and sweet.
And expensive.
In the back
cooler, at the start of each day, we made a genuine effort to separate the big cod
fillets from the small because any number of our customers absolutely insisted
on scrod. Occasionally we would run out
of the little guys, however, both in the case and in the cooler.
At those
times, for those insistent customers, we were instructed to take a big cod
fillet (behind the scenes, of course) and shape it into smaller scrod
fillets. Like seafood alchemy, cod to
scrod.
Never once
did a customer complain. Not once. As long as we called it scrod, it was the
most tender, sweetest fillet that ever cleaved the Seven Seas.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My dad had a
friend who used to stop by on an occasional Saturday night to play cards. This friend could only drink Narragansett
beer. (No kidding.) Any other beer, he told my father, and he would
get an instant headache.
One evening,
over a hand of bridge, my father went to the kitchen to refill drinks
and discovered he had run out of Narragansett.
It would be an understatement to say that my dad was a boy scout, but on
this occasion, his trustworthy and loyal gave way to necessity. Dad took a bottle of Bud and poured it into
his friend’s Narragansett bottle.
Disaster averted. No headache.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
April
1985. New Coke.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 |
| Source: Footnote 1 |
Beyond Meat
went public on May 1, gaining almost 250% in its first month.[1]
It’s a company
that manufactures plant-based meats that enable “consumers to experience the
taste, texture and other sensory attributes of popular animal-based meat
products while enjoying the nutritional benefits of eating our plant-based meat
products.”[2] Among Beyond Meat’s most popular products is
the Beyond Burger, a plant-based patty that looks and tastes like the real
thing. “THESE ARE CRAZY,” one diner
wrote. “THE BURGERS TASTED SO MUCH LIKE MEAT THAT I HAD TO GO BACK AND
DOUBLE-CHECK THE BOX TO MAKE SURE THESE WERE, IN FACT, VEGAN."[3]
The company’s
IPO has trounced those of Uber and Lyft.
Beyond Meat’s product is already selling in 33,000 grocery stores,
restaurants, and other eating establishments.
Ambassadors for the brand include Chris Paul, Kyrie Irving, and Charity
Morgan, while early investors numbered Bill Gates, Biz Stones, and Tyson
Foods. Diners report that Beyond Meat is
delicious and often indistinguishable from the “real thing.”
Which means, of
course, now comes the tricky part.
Scrod. Narragansett beer. New Coke. Beef. For most people, eating is an act of intimacy. Choices in the cup and on the plate are based on smell, taste, and texture, and away from the dining table on health, family, ethics, tradition, culture, and religion. Sometimes—or maybe often—choices are made on delusion.
And, in a
world facing climate Armageddon, the sustainability of food production has
become an important issue for many, or at least some, consumers.
As Beyond Meat looks to grow, these factors relate in ways that may make
the company’s breakthrough technology—hacking the ruminant, as it were—the easiest
part of its market disruption.
Meat is an
industry that contributes $894 billion to the U.S. economy. Beef alone is a $95 billion industry,[4]
and a powerful one. In 2015, against the
advice of its own expert panel, the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) and US Department of Health & Human Services rejected consideration
of environmental sustainability in the newest edition of Dietary Guidelines for
Americans—guidelines that would have meant eating less red and processed
meats. It was a political decision in
which lobbyists overwhelmed scientists.
In 2018, the
powerful National Cattlemen’s Beef Association adopted a policy to protect
consumers from “fake meat” and misleading labels. Meanwhile, the equally powerful U.S.
Cattlemen’s Association petitioned the USDA for rulemaking to differentiate
beef produced from cattle versus that produced in a laboratory. Traditional government subsidies, crop
insurance, and regulations shape and alter free-market demand across the entire
agricultural landscape.
Sitting in
the middle of these shifting sands is the USDA, which has jurisdiction over
meat, and the Food and Drug Administration, which has jurisdiction over
plant-based foods. It is a world where
commercial interests overlap with politics, regulation, and consumer demand in
a complex mosaic.
Perhaps more
than any other food, beef has long been part of America’s identity. The American cowboy and cattle drive are
still iconic national image. Red meat has long been associated with strength
and male vitality, wealth, and wellbeing.
“Where’s the beef?”, a tagline originated by Wendy’s fast food chain in
the 1980s, has become a more general indictment of a product or idea without
substance.
Since the
1970s, however, beef has also become a flashpoint in America’s culture
wars. For some, red meat is seen as “the
new SUV—a hopelessly selfish, American indulgence; a middle finger to the
planet.” Doug Bocher of the Union of
Concerned Scientists believes that the limit of 2 degrees Celsius set at the
Paris climate conference will be impossible to meet without managing livestock
and meat consumption differently.[5]
In addition, many Americans have grown
concerned about the perceived links between beef and heart disease. They are appalled at the way animals are
treated on factory farms. And they are
concerned about the impact of meat production on the environment. The rise of something called “the omnivore’s
dilemma” now reflects an emotional and moral danger linked to eating certain
kinds of food based on the health of animals, the planet, and the diner.
There remains
thoughtful support for animal-based beef, however. In Defending
Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production, Nicolette Hahn Niman, a
biologist, rancher’s wife, and vegetarian shows how livestock provide food for
one billion poor people around the globe, thriving where plant crops are
unviable. She delinks red meat and cardiovascular
disease and points to the true culprits, processed foods and sugar. And she demonstrates that deforestation is
not about cattle, but about growing soy for pigs. In fact, Niman says, cattle support grassland
biodiversity and help sequester carbon that would otherwise be removed from the
soil by the production of feed crops.
Amanda Radke,
who writes for “Beef Magazine,” likewise questions the “meatless movement” and
its misconceptions around ethics and sustainability, but offers the more
visceral objection to not wanting her “meat grown in a garden.”[6]
Both sides of
the debate have strongly held positions generally unrelated to flavor and
texture, the primary attributes of food.
The power of marketing—traditionally defined as product, price, promotion,
and distribution—to address these broader questions of health, ethics, and
sustainability in the food industry is fraught, and its impact historically has
been ambiguous.
The Other White Meat
and Similar Frustrations
Consider the
very different narratives of red meat’s two major rivals. In 1987, a national campaign was launched to
position pork as “the other white meat.”
Believed by consumers at the time to be full of fat, dangerous unless
overcooked, and reminiscent of Sunday dinner with their grandparents, pork had
a lot of ground to make up. In 1999,
twelve years later, the ad campaign had achieved a remarkable 58 percent
awareness—but only 42 percent of consumers believed pork had changed in the
last twenty years.[7]
In 2005, the
industry tripled spending and added a “Don’t be blah” tagline to position pork
as an alternative to the same old dinners.
From 45.6 pounds per person in 1987, per capita pork consumption in 2017
was 50.4 pounds—only a paltry one-third of one percent growth annually over
three decades.[8]
Compare this
history to chicken, whose growth as an industry over the last fifty years was
driven more by brand names (such as Purdue) than national industry campaigns,
and whose acceptance by consumers was driven successfully by a number of
competing factors. Consumers responded
favorably when grocers began selling chicken in parts rather than whole. They were attracted by improved packaging,
better storage, and longer shelf life.
Health-conscious Americans came to see chicken as a high protein, low
fat alternative to red meat. And the
fast food industry embraced chicken with a vengeance. In 1985 America’s consumption of chicken
surpassed pork, and in 1992 beef.
In the
process, however, these unfortunate fowl were swept up in the machinery of
factory farming. In 1970, it took 56
days to grow a broiler to a market weight of 3.62 pounds, and in 2015 48 days
to reach 6.24 pounds.[9] This growth, engineered to maximize white
meat, created a heavy, misshapen bird that dwarfed its twentieth-century
ancestor but made chicken the cheapest protein among meats.
In recent
years, the environmental impact of meat production has been measured and better
understood. Chicken, pork, dairy, and
eggs are equivalent in impact within a factor of two, while beef requires 28
times more land, six times more fertilizer, and 11 times more water in
comparison.[10]
Do Americans Really Care About Food
Sustainability?
Whether this
imbalance matters to most American consumers is unclear. Bottled water provides one cautionary
tale.
For the first
three-quarters of the twentieth century it was nothing more than a sleepy niche
product served at fine restaurants. In
1977, Perrier took to the television, positioning itself as an alternative to
diet sodas using saccharin, an artificial sweetener that had been linked to
cancer. Perrier rode the coattails of
Americans’ increasing obsession with their health, selling three million
bottles in 1975 and 200 million in 1979.
In 1994, Pepsi introduced Aquafina and in 1999 Coca-Cola introduced
Dasani. With these giants placing their
muscle behind the product category, bottled-water sales reached 10 billion
gallons in 2013.[11]
New flavors
and enhanced products, from fizzy spring water with fruit juice to water with
caffeine and vitamins, now take up entire aisles at the grocery store. Bottled water has become America’s favorite
drink.
This is a
grand marketing success in a world where consumers often cannot taste the
difference between bottled and tap water, and where bottled water is three
thousand times more expensive than tap water and generally no safer, cleaner,
or healthier. As important, consumers
clearly value convenience and personal health over the detrimental impact of
the 17 million barrels of oil required to manufacture the industry’s plastic
bottles, 86 percent of which in the U.S. become litter.[12]
There are modest bottled water bans in some locations, but the industry continues
to grow.
Another
collision between food and sustainability came in 2010 when Frito-Lay
discontinued its eco-friendly, plant-based, fully compostable bag for SunChips
because consumers complained it was too noisy.
Sales had fallen 11 percent in the prior year. 44,000 members on Facebook belonged to a
group called “Sorry I Can’t Hear You Over This SunChips Bag.” Reporter Kate Sheppard summed up the feelings
of many when she wrote, “If the sound of a crinkly eco-chip bag is too much to
handle, then the human species really is screwed.”[13]
Her
disappointment is reinforced by a study of environmental attitudes and habits
of people in eighteen countries conducted by National Geographic showing that Americans are among the most
likely to resist paying extra for environmentally friendly products and rank
last in overall environmental attitudes and habits. “It’s depressing, researcher Eric Whan says,
“that where the greatest per capita consumption happens, there seems to be the
least willingness to change, adapt, and carry one’s share of the load.”[14]
What lessons
might Beyond Meat take from these narratives as it grows? Is it the power of brand that matters? Health considerations? Animal ethics? Convenience?
Price? Can sustainability really
be a factor that moves American consumers in their food choices? CEO Ethan Brown has sifted through this
complexity and takes a counterintuitive approach for creating demand for his
product. “The way I think about it is to
not build a business on telling people not to eat meat,” Brown says, “but to
build a business around challenging what people’s perception of meat is.”[15]
This novel
approach—the conceptual innovation behind the hack of the ruminant—requires
consumers to separate origin from
composition. If consumers come to
understand the meat from cattle and the meat from an extruding machine are,
under a microscope, virtually identical, and look and taste the same on a
plate, then Beyond Meat can become an attractive alternative to animal
meat. Health and sustainability will
follow.
“Fifty years
from now . . . my hope is that beef and chicken will no longer have a
relationship to the animal that they came from,” Brown says. “They will be in the same packaging, but they
will be based on plant-based inputs.”[16]
I’m betting
it works. I’m betting that fifty years
from now we will consider eating beef from
a cow much like we today consider smoking on an airplane.
Unless, of
course, the packaging is too noisy. Then,
all bets are off.
[1] Arjun Reddy, “Beyond Meat Is
Leaving Uber and Lyft in Its Dust,” Market
Insider, May 29, 2019, Web May 30, 2019, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/initial-public-offering-stock-market-performance-mixed-2019-5-1028237977.
[4] Deena Shanker, “The US Meat
Industry’s Wildly Successful, 40-Year Crusade to Keep Its Hold on the American
Diet,” Quartz, October 22, 2015, Web
May 30, 2018, https://qz.com/523255/the-us-meat-industrys-wildly-successful-40-year-crusade-to-keep-its-hold-on-the-american-diet/.
[5] John D. Sutter, “Why Beef is
the New SUV,” CNN, November 24, 2015, Web May 30, 2018,
https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/29/opinions/sutter-beef-suv-cliamte-two-degrees/index.html.
[6] Amanda Radke, “What is the
Media Saying About Fake Meats?”, Beef
Magazine, April 27, 2018, Web May 30, 2018,
http://www.beefmagazine.com/beef-quality/what-media-saying-about-fake-meats.
[7] Charlyne Varkonyi, “Pork
Embroiled in Marketing Controversy,” The
Baltimore Sun, August 23, 1999, Web May 30, 2018,
http://articles.latimes.com/1990-08-23/food/fo-1558_1_pork-industry/2.
[8] Jane L. Levere, “The Pork
Industry’s ‘Other White Meat’ Campaign Is Taken in New Directions,” The New York Times, March 4, 2005, Web
May 30, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/business/media/the-pork-industrys-other-white-meat-campaign-is-taken-in-new.html. Also, “Per Capita Consumption of Pork in the
United States from 2015 to 2017 (in Pounds),” Statista, 2018, Web May 30, 2018,
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183616/per-capita-consumption-of-pork-in-the-us-since-2000/.
[9] Alan Bjerga, Dorothy
Gambrell, Cindy Hoffman, Cedric Sam, “If You Are What You Eat, America Tastes
Like Chicken,” Bloomberg.com, September 19, 2017, Web June 2, 2018,
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-peak-food/.
[10] Rachel Nuwer, “Raising Beef
Uses Ten Times More Resources Than Poultry, Dairy, Eggs or Pork,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 21, 2014, Web
June 4, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/beef-uses-ten-times-more-resources-poultry-dairy-eggs-pork-180952103/.
[11] Robert Moss, “How Bottled
Water Became America’s Most Popular Beverage,” Serious Eats, July 10, 2017, Web May 30, 2018,
https://www.seriouseats.com/2017/07/how-bottled-water-became-americas-most-popular-beverage.html.
[12] “Reasons to Avoid Bottled
Water,” Sustainability at Harvard, Harvard University, 2018, Web May 30, 2018,
https://green.harvard.edu/tools-resources/green-tip/reasons-avoid-bottled-water.
[13] Kate Sheppard, “Why We’re
Doomed,” Mother Jones, October 5,
2010, Web May 30, 2018,
https://www.motherjones.com/food/2010/10/snack-attack-sunchips-cans-eco-bag/.
[14] Andrea Stone, “8 Surprising,
Depressing, and Hopeful Findings from Global Survey of Environmental
Attitudes,” National Geographic, September
27, 2014, Web May 30, 2018,
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/09/140926-greendex-national-geographic-survey-environmental-attitudes/.
[15] “Interview with Ethan
Brown,” Animal Charity Evaluators, 2018, Web May 30, 2018,
https://animalcharityevaluators.org/advocacy-interventions/advocacy-advice/learn-from-professionals/interview-with-ethan-brown-ceo-beyond-meat/.
[16] “Beyond Meat CEO Ethan
Brown: The Future of Protein & Meat,” FORA.tv, May 11, 2013, Web May 30,
2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJoOAOtugS4.
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