Beyond Meat vs Impossible Burger | We've Got Beef | 5

I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. The food company Beyond Meat recently had a short lived spike in its stock, mostly thanks to Internet trolls. But now shares are back to where they have been for a while, hovering around just a dollar per share. Its biggest competitor, Impossible Foods, is privately held, but their financial outlook is allegedly not much better. Meat alternatives were once trendy. Now the top purveyors are struggling to stay afloat. Online wellness influencers have stepped up their attacks on the brands for being ultra processed, pointing to a long list of hard to pronounce ingredients. Beyond an impossible of clap back with videos and documentaries of their own, but those haven't seemed to generate quite as much buzz. So where does all this leave these brands at a time when the tides have shifted? Here to talk about it is Clint Rainey, an investigative journalist who's covered Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods since their beginnings. A few years ago, he was approached by these companies to investigate a social media disinformation campaign allegedly funded by big meat companies to eliminate Beyond and Impossible from the competition. Clint will join us to explain where this beef with fake meat came from and whether these online rumors were true. But first, Dina Schenker of Bloomberg Businessweek dives deeper into how Beyond became a meme stock this fall and whether there's a place for it on Wall Street's table moving forward. Stick around because all that's coming up. Dina Schenker, welcome to Business Wars. Thank you so much for having me. Hey. Tell us a little bit about your time on the packaged food beat at Bloomberg. When did Beyond Meat hit your radar? Were you was it for work, or were you just sort of, at the grocery store one day and you stumbled upon something interesting? So Beyond Meat came onto my radar before I even started at Bloomberg. Before Bloomberg, I was at Quartz still covering food. Yeah. And, people were talking about these bleeding burgers. There was the Beyond Meat burger, and there was the Impossible Burger. And they were kinda going head to head. And at the time, it was really hard to to get your hands on one, to try one. I think I made it to a Beyond Meat burger party, and it was like a hop in party in the East Village. And everybody wanted to try those burgers, and, like, you could get, like, a quarter of a burger. Like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There really wasn't a lot of it. So you had some Beyond Meat at this little Beyond Meat party. What did it taste like to you? So I should say that I'm not a meat eater. So I I mean, I've eaten meat in the past for sure, but I'm not a regular meat eater. I stopped eating meat probably, like, ten years ago with some exceptions while I while I was pregnant. …