• 🛑 Motif FoodWorks Shuts Down
• ✅ FDA Approves Listeria Fighting Aid
• 🍌 DoorDash, Magnolia Bakery Partner
• 📰 What We’re Reading
• 🍜 Side Hustlers, Noodle Lovers & T-Pain

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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). 

Quick rewind: In February, Beyond announced an overhaul of its formulation with the debut of the Beyond IV product platform. The tweaks saw an adoption of avocado oil to reduce the saturated fat content, a 20% sodium reduction, adoption of better quality proteins and claims of a shorter ingredient list. 

As consumers continue to point to the segment’s over-processed nature, could Beyond’s embrace of healthfulness inject a panacea into its challenged profit margins?

The position as a whole-muscle chicken alternative also puts the product in direct competition with Meati – the mycelium-based alt-chicken producer that has raised upwards of $365 million. Like Beyond, Meati continues to struggle to reach profitability at a commercial scale and has executed at least three rounds of layoffs since April 2023. 

Since the pandemic-era plant-based boom, many of Beyond’s major foodservice partnerships have expired without renewal and its volumes in grocery have been down, including a 14% decrease in the volume of products sold during Q2 2024. 

According to the Good Food Institute's 2023 State of the Industry report, plant-based food retail dollar sales broadly have declined for two consecutive years. While it is unlikely a single, new product type can immediately convince disinterested consumers to begin actively shopping the plant-based protein set again, this launch may signal a shift in the approach to attracting new customers during the post-pandemic plant-based bust.

Go Deeper: Beyond Meat Q2 Sees Revenue Down, Margins Up

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. 

Canadian biotechnology company Innodal has received Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) status for INNEO, a food processing aid designed to eliminate Listeria monocytogenes. Innodal can now enter the U.S. market following the approval.

🇨🇦 INNEO has been commercialized in Canada for four years and, the company claims, has proven “significantly more effective” than traditional chemical treatments in fighting listeria in industry trials. 

⚠️ The products’ U.S. approval comes amidst a recent series of listeria outbreaks across the U.S. and Canada. In August, Canada’s Public Health Agency issued a recall for 18 alt-milk products sold under the Silk and Great Value brands; the infections led to three deaths. Additionally, a multistate listeria outbreak in deli meat has led to national recalls of products from leading brands including Boar’s Head Provisions.

🍦 At least 70 ice cream and sorbet products, including cakes, sandwiches, pints and novelties, were recalled in June due to possible listeria contamination. Brands involved in the recall included Jeni’s, Marco and Friendly’s, among others. 

DoorDash has teamed up with cult-favorite bakeshop Magnolia Bakery to launch an exclusive Banana Pudding with Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chunks, available for on-demand delivery on the DoorDash app.

🚚 Once a small corner store with a regional reach, Magnolia Bakery is now accessible nationwide through DashMart, the fulfillment platform and store operated by DoorDash.

🗣️ What they said: “Our deep partnership with DoorDash over the last year has created invaluable opportunities for our growing brand to seamlessly reach millions of customers daily across the country and deliver our promise of indulgent, iconic desserts, now on-demand...” – Eddie Revis, chief commercial officer of Magnolia Bakery

🥨 The New York Times examines a new study on ultra-processed foods led by Josiemer Mattei, an associate professor of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The two categories most linked to poor health outcomes, according to the research, are sugary drinks and processed meats.

🍪 “How Snacks Took Over American Life” by Ellen Cushing in The Atlantic suggests consumers are abandoning meals entirely in favor of snacking and details the influences behind the movement – namely busier lifestyles and developments in manufacturing that have made food more fun and tastier (read: hyperpalatable). 

🐟 Premium tinned seafood brand Fishwife is launching “The Fishwife Cookbook,” penned by co-founder Becca Millstein and Vilda Gonzalez and featuring 80 recipes that span a range of mealtimes and occasions. The book is currently available for pre-order on the HarperCollins website.

Was Newtopia Now worth a visit? Why are founders flocking to San Diego? Is “Side Hustlers” the new “Shark Tank”? What’s going on with instant noodles? And, is drinking pastrami a real thing? All good questions. The hosts have answers.

Listen to the full episode now.