Beyond Meat is going after the whole (plant-based) steak. 

Late last week, CEO Ethan Brown announced the company will soon roll out a whole muscle cut, plant-based steak made with mycelium. Brown told CNBC he believes the product will be viewed as a chicken substitute and that it will most likely debut in partnership with a health-minded restaurant chain.

The move comes as the publicly traded company has seen nine consecutive quarters of revenue declines. The company has embraced a range of strategies to prop up its products (and profits) including positioning on its environmental impact and positive animal welfare attributes and locking in celebrity taste-based endorsements. 

This year, with its balance sheet under intense scrutiny, Beyond has worked to execute a strategic turnaround, cutting costs as well as low-performing SKUs such as a jerky made via a JV with PepsiCo. That turnaround also brought price increases, which helped boost its gross margin to 14.7% last quarter, its best quarterly gross margin since Q3 2021. The new approach also marks a shift beyond its original playbook of fast food partnerships and simple product types (think: nuggets, burgers and other malleable form factors). 

Nosh Insiders can access the full story to learn what this launch signals about the future of Beyond and competition in the broader plant-based protein sector.

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Plant-based food tech company Motif FoodWorks is closing down, according to a report by AgFunder News. A skeleton crew will help shutter the Boston-based firm, which spun off from Gingko Bioworks in 2019 and opened a new market development and research center in Northborough, Mass., in 2022. 

⏪ The news comes just days after Impossible Foods settled its multi-year patent infringement suit against Motif, according to a dismissal order filed in Delaware District Court. The spat began in 2022 when Impossible filed a lawsuit alleging Motif willfully and indirectly infringed on its patents by using a heme-containing protein in a “beef replica product.” 

💰 Motif has raised $345 million since its spinoff from Gingko and planned to sell its technology rather than create finished CPG products. The company’s formulations included alt-proteins as well as plant-based dairy alternatives. 

💭 “The Motif situation has been greatly impacted by the Impossible lawsuit. In the long run, Motif would have hit the same headwinds as all plant-based companies, but [its] technologies were making tremendous progress,” a source close to the company told AgFunder News. 

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