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Notes -
Nudge towards Just(ice/ Egg)
As some may be aware, Europe has stricter non-trademark restrictions on what one is allow to call their product. In the EU a cheese may only be called a Feta or Parmesan if it is produced according to specified procedure in Greece or Italy, respectively and contains specfied ingredients. This geographic restriction even includes pastry such as Kalakukko. That a consumer might not taste the difference (or even find the johnny-come-lately superior) is irrelevant in the eyes of the law.
The stated reason of making sure that the consumer is certain that the product matches what he imagines it to be, is also behind the recent push to ban animal deficient and even wholly lacking products, on cashing in on the perception of taste created by centuries of butchers and milkmen.
A maiori ad minus as "plant-based protein" products do not even taste the same, let alone contain the same nutrients as non-human animal derived ones, while cheddar-style cheese unapologetically made in the Green Mountain State and West Country Farmhouse Cheddar are similar in taste and nutrients, it stands to reason that restrictions on usage of meat-related names should be at least just as onerous as those related to geography.
An even better argument would be a survey asking consumers if foods with names such as: "malk", "chick'n nuggets", "just mayo", "beyond sausage", "chik'n apple sausage" [different brand than the previously mentioned nuggets], "chilli sin carne" contain milk, meat or eggs or if they have in the past been misled into buying vegan products which usually aren't clearly segregated, thinking they are omnivoric.
The latest news on this front comes from also one the biggest supporters of restrictions on usage geographic indicators, France. After a court voided an attempt last year to curtail cultural appropriation of companies like Beyond Meat™, the French government has on monday taken another swing at it.
That it falls to the country of de Gaulle and Pétain, and not the organization of Altiero Spinelli and Konrad Adenauer (which one would expect, given how involved the EU is with consumer rights) is due the latter abdicating this aforementioned duty.
Opponents of restricting what may be labeled a steak, burger, sausage, mayonnaise, or milk, claim that nobody is being misled and that consumers might be more easily convinced to purchase "Chick3n Nugg3ts" than "Breaded Soy for Frying", "Malk" than "White Oats Concoction". The argument goes that people might be reluctant to try new things and that they would be unfamiliar what to do vegan neologism-labeled products. That overcoming this reluctance, by hook or by crook, is necessary not only for the benefit of soy farmers and Impossible Foods™ but for the whole of humankind as replacing meat with vegetables reduces the risk or severity of climate crisis.
Yeah, it's clear that the thumb has been on the scale to benefit the producers of fake meat-like products. Imagine if you took some cheap meat, processed and dyed it, and then labeled it as "heirloom tomatoes". That clearly wouldn't fly and neither should the opposite.
There was a weird amount of hype for these things a few years back, with Impossible and Beyond burgers being touted as tasting just as good as meat. They don't, and furthermore, they are terrible for your health.
Going further, Beyond (BYND) was a pump and dump stock scam, and now trades at 95% less than its peak 2019 price. Despite Beyond burgers being ungodly expensive, the company has gross margins of zero. Factoring in overhead, they lose 50 cents for every $1 in revenue. Cash reserves have dwindled from 1.1 billion to 200 million which means that bankruptcy could be looming in the next couple years. I'm sure some insiders got rich while index fund holders paid the tab.
Just kill this Frankenfood already.
Agree with everything except the financial market bit. Our IPO market is broken (make me the head of the sec lol) but it’s not insiders cashing out. It’s just trader versus trader and supposedly some win and some lose.
Historically firms only IPO a small float for a very good reason that public markets are different in how they analyze things than private markets. They look for countries hitting metrics and often have portfolios with many stocks versus focused funds. So they don’t know the companies that well at first. It trades for a while and then has some earnings reports and then insiders/private investors slowly add shares. For things with billions in market cap the public markets are just not able to absorb the entire float at one ipo. So they float 10% of the company typical though sometimes less. And all the insiders and private investors are usually banned from selling any shares for 6 months.
Now we have all these algo traders plus especially since COVID dumb retail money that have zero fundamental analysis. If the algo guys detect retail punting they bid it up crazy. And then you have that dude Huang who did the retail game at scale. And short selling is basically impossible in these names. Some thing blows up as a meme and it’s up 500% (happens all the time now) will blow up the shorts. They also changed a bunch of short borrowing stuff to prevent shorting without a borrower but then your borrow rate can blow out crazy.
Those first 6 months of trading are basically fake prices. Insiders aren’t allowed to sell. Shorts are too dangerous. And IPO stocks don’t just enter etfs (potentially some IPO etf but those often wait 6 months plus). Things like Tesla were public for I think a decade before they entered majorly etfs like spy.
It’s basically just a little Vegas part of markets without a ton of real investment. I find it embarrassing when stocks like VFS has a $150 billion market cap but I believe they only floated 1% of their shares so even the mark to market peak only had a $1.5 billion worth of shares on the public market. I wish they would find a way to fix this issue because I find it embarrassing when people like you say what Wall St idiots valuing this shithole at this price. Everyone does in fact know it’s crap but it’s not like you can short it and make money.
That's why shorting bitcoin so much better than shorting stocks. No manipulation with the floats, less $ from hedge fund manipulation. Stocks can easily be manipulated by management , whereas this is not possible or harder to do with bitcoin. Crypto is one of the most overhyped things ever, yet nothing but downhill since 2021 despite endless hype still. It would seem there does come a point where no amount of hype can help an asset class. Commodities overall , which crypto is more commodity-like than stock-like, tend to be better short candidates compared to stocks due to absence of earnings , buybacks, etc.
My experience is different - broad community consensus is that there are whales and brokers that go hunting for liquidity, massacring shorts and longs. The technical term is 'scamwick'.
Interesting. I'm not really a crypto guy (read Satoshi's whitepaper when BTC were going for pennies), or a trader, but I know a little bit about technical analysis. The "wick" here is the wick of a candle chart, which shows the open & close, high & low, for a given trading period. The delta between open and close forms the body of the candle, while the high and low (which necessarily equal or exceed the open and close) form the "wicks" (upper and lower) of the candle. A so-called scamwick is a recognition of suspicious price movements which indicate price manipulation.
My prior on "price manipulation" is that most manipulators lose in the long run, at least for deep markets, but that the attempt to manipulate prices is an important part of price discovery and akin to "random noise" which motivates the true price.
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management can try to prop up stocks with bogus PR. this is not possible with bitcoin. no amount of hype by Blackrock, Ark and others is enough to make bitcoin price go up. Even with whales , my experience is shorting is not a problem. gains do not hold , and when it does go up /down it's in a predictable manner...like pulling money out of a broken ATM.
In 21, Elon's tweets were a primary driver of price action. I lost a fair bit of money based on his announcements.
I would advise caution in shorting bitcoin just before the halving too.
yeah this stuck me as unethical and reckless on his part especially given tesla quietly sold its bitcoin position in 2022 as retail investors who heeded his advice bought at or near the top and held on the way down, both btc and doge
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When Beyond's lockup expired in October 2020, they were still trading at $100/share. ($11 now and still overpriced). Insiders absolutely cashed.
Nothing like Alex Karp levels, but yes, this was a transfer of wealth from your pension fund to company insiders. Dumb money retail sets the price, and then indexers come and buy in volume. So while you and I might realize that Beyond at $100 was fake, your pension fund was more than happy to buy in size.
Did it enter an index? Maybe the Russell. They all have some rules to prevent the worst stuff.
Yes, it's in the Russell 1000, Russell 3000, and Nasdaq Composite. (Because it's a tech stock, lol).
If you own VTI, you own it. Its not in the SPY index which has a profitability filter. But this doesn't mean that SPY is shenanigans proof. People front run stocks before they enter the SPY.
Am I butt-hurt that people who aren't me are becoming centimillionaires on the back of this stuff? Yes, I am. This is the real wealth inequality, not some doctor making $400k or whatever.
Beyond has multiple insiders who made $10 million plus on insider sales in the last 3 years alone. I don't have the totals from 2019, but they would be way worse, quite possible 9 figure exits. https://www.marketbeat.com/stocks/NASDAQ/BYND/insider-trades/
Lockup periods need to be 5 years at least.
Ya. Tesla was the big shenanigan in SP500.
Though at the higher price in BYND a reasonable time after lock up settling it was $8-10 billion. I don’t see that as obviously stupid. As there have been plenty of things I’ve called obviously stupid like crypto being more than a nerds play thing.
Conceivably BYND could have gotten a little flywheel going and continued to innovate into healthier better options. Maybe eventually add lab meats and become a behemoth. As the first to market they could have become the platform for all alt meats.
Water in a bottle companies have been sold in that range of 6-10 billion so atleast they innovated.
There have been far worse offenders than bynd. And I do feel like the SEC should figure out how to end some of the worst offenders. Chamath one of the worst. Whatever that Vietnamese electric car company that went to 130 billion last week was. Just makes are markets look comical. Maybe give companies rights to randomly sell stock if it’s behaving stupid to keep the punters out. It just seems like we could have a more orderly market.
I’d still think that for the most part pensions funds etc didn’t lose on these things (large amount).
I sort of get what you're gesturing at. A flywheel represents the difficulty of spinning up a new market. You need to solve both supply and demand at the same time to get the engine running. Failure is catastrophic while success is a money machine. If there is an imbalance, the flywheel is bottlenecked and doesn't want to spin.
In this case, the flywheel represents the pseudo-meat market, I suppose. There have been meat substitutes and meat replacements before, but this is really a new kind of market and new kind of product. Maybe this particular market is cursed, but if the flywheel gets going, then maybe:
AKA the pivot
Think you got it. Not necessarily a pivot though. It’s more like Tesla.
Entering Market as basically custom handmade cars.
Develop experience building cars and improving battery tech. And marketing skill. Plus develop car programming.
Enter at more scale and cheaper price point. Repeat all the same process improvements.
Once again cut price point and increase operational scale.
For beyond it would have been make $300-400 million a year selling shitty vegetable meat. Invest that in better vegetable meat at more scale. Probably eventually add on some kind of lab grown meat. Use experience in day chicken to expand into all kinds of lab meats.
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Fair enough. By and large I think we agree. Beyond was a bad investment, insiders got rich, and pension funds lost (debatable how much). But it wasn't a scam like Nikola or some of the other worst offenders.
Were pension funds substantially invested in Beyond? The Canadian teachers probably did, but they’re notorious gamblers (admittedly it’s paid off for them they’ve have something like 9% annualized real returns for 40 years), but most won’t have. I don’t care to find their cap table, and they’re not hugely helpful for pension funds ownership anyway for various reasons, but I’d be surprised if pension funds were well represented among the top institutional shareholders.
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Of course there was a lot of hype for these. A perfect replacement for burgers is a white whale for food science.
Like everything in bizarro-venture-capital-world, valuation is only loosely coupled to fundamentals. Discovering the actual level of demand is not trivial. Congratulations, fake meat has experienced the tech hype cycle! It’s not unique to “Frankenfood.”
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What makes them bad for your health? I wouldn't eat them except as a one off experiment, since I'm an unapologetic meat eater, but I haven't heard that claim before.
Eyeballing the ingredients, it looks like the beyond burger is about 15-20% seed oils. That completely rules it out in my book.
What's your beef (rimshot) with seed oils?
I think they're the cause of the obesity epidemic and the main cause of chronic disease.
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Seed oils are a meme, the evidence against them is limited. Some of the most ‘ultra processed’ foods are vegan foods, but they’re also stuff like salami made using the traditional method, packed full of sodium nitrate. We don’t know, it’s like microplastics, there’s a lot of supposition bur the assumption is they’re probably deleterious in some way.
Ah, so more naturalist fallacies at work.
I do like the joke about Oreos being completely vegan and therefore a health food. Always gets a chuckle out of me.
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Beyond burgers are an ultra-high processed food
The first three ingredients are pea protein isolate, expeller-pressed canola oil, and refined coconut oil. The rest is the usual assortment of flavors and additives.
In my opinion, the taste is mostly okay especially if paired with a good bun and tomato. But the terrible health profile make them a no-go for me.
I have always found the "ultra-processed" definition lacking. I don't doubt the conclusions generally, but "processed" is a very broad definition, and I think deserves a closer set of guidelines: hydrogenated oils, breaded-and-fried foods, and such are far worse than, say, hummus, which is "processed" by pureeing a few fairly-healthy ingredients. I think it'd be a lot clearer to grade processes rather than count them.
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Coconuts are obviously seeds, but are peas? What about other legumes?
Asking because of the “seed oil” comment above. The real percentage could be much higher if we count peas.
Seed oil in practice seems to just refer to polyunsaturated fats, which is probably listed on the nutrition label.
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I haven't looked into this deeply, but I recall when Impossible and Beyond were first coming out, all promotional material conspicuously ignored commenting on how healthy the food was, which is highly unusual for a plant-based meat-imitation product, and all independent analysis tended to point out that they were, pound-for-pound, less healthy than actual meat. This led me to conclude that they were almost definitely at most as healthy as regular meat and likely less healthy, even if I don't recall what the exact reason was; I think higher saturated fat than regular meat?
That would be highly unusual because saturated fat mostly comes from animal products. It’s probably high levels of polyunsaturated fat, which vegan food in general uses immense amounts of.
Coconut oil in particular is mostly saturated fat
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It also depends on what you mean by “healthy”. Plants simply don’t contain all of the necessary nutrients humans need.
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