Beyond Meat and Wine

Not long to go till the holiday season is upon us and we can stuff our faces with as many carbs as humanly possible. And, as always, the more food there is the more news we get to cover. Let’s dig in.

This week:

🐔 Tyson Foods makes a BIG mistake.

🍔 Beyond Meat disappoints with its quarterly earnings.

💸 The UN reveals the true cost of food production.

🍷 Wine gets a rebrand in California…

SUPPLY CHAIN
TYSON FOODS SLIPS UP

To kick things off this week, around 30,000 pounds of Tyson Foods’ dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets were found to contain metal pieces in them. FUN.

The Arkansas-based food processing company said it’s recalling all of the Dino Nuggets that were produced on 5th September out of an “abundance of caution”, adding that “no other products were affected.”

While this may seem to be a minor issue for the company that processes meat for MILLIONS of customers each year, this is not the first time Tyson Foods royally screwed up. In 2019, the company recalled 69,093 pounds of frozen chicken strips after metal pieces were found and then, again, recalled 36,000 pounds of chicken nuggets after customers found blue rubber pieces. And you can BET that the phrase, “abundance of caution” was used too.

ZOOMING OUT: All this drama comes amidst an American meat industry that has gone haywire. Beef prices are climbing to a record high of $8 per pound and, now, an avian flu outbreak is killing THOUSANDS of chickens in Arkansas and Alabama. All we’ll say is that it’s not looking good for the carnivores out there.

BUSINESS
BEYOND EMBARRASSING

When Beyond Meat IPO’d in 2019, there were so many high hopes. Trading at $240 per share, the company seemed to be the great pioneer of plant-based food. Now, however, the rhetoric has shifted. With disappointing quarterly earnings, shares now priced at a measly $12, and significant layoffs, we have to ask…what the hell happened?

Just last week, in anticipation of poor financial results, Beyond Meat announced that they would be cutting non-operational staff by 19%, while also rethinking their pricing strategy and reducing their working capital. 

Then, when earnings finally hit, they hit HARD. Net revenue fell by 8.7% to $75.3 million and the volume of its plant-based offerings also fell by 24%. And, to add insult to injury, Beyond Meat shares declined by 46% since the start of the year.

ZOOMING OUT: After doing some digging, we may have found THREE of the biggest reasons why the plant-based food company has produced such disappointing results:

• Beyond Meat now has to compete with more established brands, like Tyson Foods, who are entering the plant-based space and have more capital to play with.

• Consumers are starting to doubt how healthy Beyond Meat’s products are, opting to buy whole ingredients rather than pea protein and additives.

• Heavy inflation is pushing people away from expensive, “experimental” foods and towards cheaper cuts of meat at grocery stores.

CLIMATE
FOOD’S TRUE COST

We, at Food Jungle, understand how boring it can be to read extra long reports. Especially when it’s a 150-pager written by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). But worry not! We’ve done the reading for you so YOU don’t have to. And, as much as it is entertaining to provide a little humour to the news, there are some times when it is VERY hard. This is no exception.

According to the FAO’s recent report, $10 TRILLION is the BIG number you should know. That is supposedly the economic VALUE of the habitat destruction and unfair compensation for farmers (among other forms of waste) that exists when ingredients get processed for consumers.

And surprise, surprise…most of the environmental cost - $5 TRILLION - is generated by upper-middle-income countries. When it comes to the social side of food production, the vast majority of farmers in low-income countries need AT LEAST a 57% raise on their incomes to even qualify for being out of poverty.

But what we found the most shocking was that 73% of these wasted trillions of dollars came from losses in productivity due to unhealthy diets, from which the global food industry makes its largest financial gains. Absurd.

ZOOMING OUT: We never want to be the buzzkill here, but the reality of the food industry is not always filled with cool inventions and tasty recipes. And we feel that you, yes YOU, deserve to know the full story. With COP 28 quickly approaching, we can only HOPE that change is around the corner.

IT’S NOT ALL DOOM AND GLOOM
WINE IS NOW…HEALTHY?

Ok, we understand that the title may have been a little “clickbaity”, but it IS TRUE…sort of. Sonomaceuticals, a small company in California, is reinventing the way in which leftover grapes from the Chardonnay wine-making process are being used.

Each year, the global production of wine creates around 20 million tons of byproducts and about one fifth of those are generated in California alone.

Sonomaceuticals is using the byproducts - packed with healthy fibres and other goodies - from Chardonnay production to create a fine powder that is then mixed into their very own chocolate bars!

15% of each chocolate bar from Sonomaceuticals is pure Chardonnay bliss and contains a whole HOST of good stuff, from flavinols to improve cardiovascular health to prebiotic fibres to maintain normal blood sugar levels. All this, while reducing the millions of tons of grapes that would have otherwise gone to waste. So, basically, we’re telling you that wine and chocolate are great for you. Not really, but you get the point…

BEFORE YOU GO…

• Price inflation of grocery items in the UK slowed down to single digits for the first time in 16 months.

• Columbia passes an ambitious tax on junk food.

• Starbucks will raise the hourly wages of non-unionised employees by 3%, starting next year.

• Disclosed emissions from the world’s 20 largest public meat and dairy companies rose 3.3% from 2022 levels.

• Since last week, Avian Flu has affected 31,600 young hens in Arkansas and 47,900 young hens in Alabama.

• KSI and Logan Paul’s PRIME announces that it will hit $1.2 billion in internal sales by 2023.

• Rice prices hit their highest levels in 12 years in the wake of India's export ban of its plain, white, long-grain rice.

• Heinz releases a pickle-flavoured ketchup. Yay?