One of the reasons certain investors love Beyond Meat (NASDAQ:BYND) is a belief that it is an eco-friendly company that embraces all that is green. But a closer look reveals a concerning reality that is quite different from this widely held belief. Beyond's supply chain, logistics, and agricultural requirements are, in fact, extremely unfriendly to the environment and generate a substantial carbon footprint and other negative externalities. ESG Investors, in particular, should be cognizant of the reality behind the green facade of Beyond Meat.
Let's break this down into two key components:
- Excess shipping and logistics put carbon into the environment
- The negative impacts of monoculture
Convoluted Supply Chain = Large Carbon Footprint
Beyond's CEO Ethan Brown is fond of repeating the mantra that it takes less water and land to create a Beyond Meat burger than it does a real beef burger. But what he fails to disclose during these sound bites is that the amount of energy required to get the raw materials from all over the world to Beyond's manufacturing facility, process them, pass them along to a slew of co-manufacturers and distributors, and finally ship to the end consumers is enormous.
Let's take a closer look at the manufacturing process as it's described in Beyond Meat's 10-K.
Pea Protein is shipped from all over the world, including China and Europe, into ports in the United States.
That product is then shipped via trucks/rail from the coastal ports to Beyond's manufacturing facility in Columbia, MO.
Page 10 of BYND's 10-K reveals that these raw materials are then combined to form a 'dry blend' which "then enters our extruder, where both water and steam are added. We then use a combination of heating, cooling, and variations of pressure to weave together the proteins. The formed woven protein is
