Nearly five years ago, we speculated about the burger joint of the future. It would be a 3D-printed “brick-and-mortar” establishment with robots doing all the cooking, using lab-grown meat and synthetic biology as the secret sauce. It hasn’t happened yet. Instead, the biggest revolution in food has been in plant-based meats, which try to mimic the real thing using various proteins and proprietary hocus pocus to convince carnivores to cull animals out of their diets. Beyond Meat (BYND) emerged as an early green tech favorite and jumped into the public markets in 2019 after 10 years in business. At the time, Beyond Meat stock was one of the hottest IPOs in history and quickly became a $12 billion company after premiering at a valuation of about $1.5 billion. Today, its market cap sits around $3 billion.
While we