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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.
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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