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The Beyond Meat story for me is a boon since its IPO. I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally. Let's not forget how, in the late 2010s, VC mon

The Beyond Meat story for me is a boon since its IPO. I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally. Let's not forget how, in the late 2010s, VC money successfully pushed the idea that Beyond Meat et al didn't just taste as good as what it mimmicks, but that it acutally tastes better. Then-Celebrety Chef David Chang even said "it melted my brain" (Impossbile Foods). Chain stores around the world fell over each other to first announce stocking their shelves with it, then told their customers they had to wait due to too much demand in existing markets, and ultimately that they won't be selling any actual meat at all in in a couple of years. It was the full display of top-to-bottom class-war, elitist groupthink drooling over the power to pull a staple of our cuisine, culture and life quality from us – exactly because we like it. And then shove super processed improvements into the mouths of the dull plebs. And make a killing with eyewatering stock prices of up to 190 USD.

zahlman 1y ago
> I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally. How did you decide when the rally was over?
- woodpanel 1y ago
  May 2019 is when they launched in Germany and by looking at the shelves during the coming months it was obvious that BYND's then-market-cap of over 10B USD was unsustainable. Shelves were being emptied out quickly by customers at the start. By the end of the summer though, these new types of patties (whether BYND or its competitors) had more discount/sale stickers on it than the average carpet store window. To be fair: Price actually returned to that valuation a year later during Covid but by then I wasn't exposed and didn't bother to double down. Probably bad financial behaviour, since I was betting against "the market can be incorrect longer than you can remain solvent", but the visibility of it's products vis-a-vis the hype, and the unlikelyness to me that a patty of hyperprocessed legumes could ever achieve a moat large enough to sustain such a market cap, gave me confidence that with BYND sanity would return to markets rather sooner along side the first quaterly results.
  - seec 1y ago
    I was amazed at the cognitive dissonance of people pretending it tasted good, when I similarly remarked that many of those types of products were regularly discounted because their sell-by date was too close. On the same shelf, just one inch to the left, you would be hard pressed to find a discounted meat product that sticks around more than a few hours. And usually, it's the large quantities or specialty items that not many want/know how to deal with. All those fake meat products were bound to fail because once you remove the ideology, they are just bad products. If at least they could be cheap, they could make sense as a substitute for something better but that's not even the case. If you have to eat bad tasting plant-based product, you might as well eat shitty tofu, at least it's somewhat cheaper (still ridiculously overpriced).

zahlman 1y ago

> I made a good fortune betting against the post-IPO rally. How did you decide when the rally was over?

woodpanel 1y ago
May 2019 is when they launched in Germany and by looking at the shelves during the coming months it was obvious that BYND's then-market-cap of over 10B USD was unsustainable. Shelves were being emptied out quickly by customers at the start. By the end of the summer though, these new types of patties (whether BYND or its competitors) had more discount/sale stickers on it than the average carpet store window. To be fair: Price actually returned to that valuation a year later during Covid but by then I wasn't exposed and didn't bother to double down. Probably bad financial behaviour, since I was betting against "the market can be incorrect longer than you can remain solvent", but the visibility of it's products vis-a-vis the hype, and the unlikelyness to me that a patty of hyperprocessed legumes could ever achieve a moat large enough to sustain such a market cap, gave me confidence that with BYND sanity would return to markets rather sooner along side the first quaterly results.
- seec 1y ago
  I was amazed at the cognitive dissonance of people pretending it tasted good, when I similarly remarked that many of those types of products were regularly discounted because their sell-by date was too close. On the same shelf, just one inch to the left, you would be hard pressed to find a discounted meat product that sticks around more than a few hours. And usually, it's the large quantities or specialty items that not many want/know how to deal with. All those fake meat products were bound to fail because once you remove the ideology, they are just bad products. If at least they could be cheap, they could make sense as a substitute for something better but that's not even the case. If you have to eat bad tasting plant-based product, you might as well eat shitty tofu, at least it's somewhat cheaper (still ridiculously overpriced).