Beyond Meat tumbles as CEO blames American society for its business struggles after issuing weak sales outlook

Beyond Meat is tanking on Wednesday after the plant-based meat company issued an underwhelming Q1 sales outlook. The firm expects net revenues for the current quarter to come in between $57 million and $59 million, while Wall Street was looking for $66.7 million.

CEO Ethan Brown offered a novel, all-encompassing excuse for its travails.

TL;DR: we’re not struggling because we’re a bad business. We’re struggling because American society is in a bad place.

Here’s Brown on the conference call:

“If I thought that Beyond, in our original value proposition, were struggling during a period when the role of science and public discourse and social media, media and government, was pronounced and effective when pricing and economic stability and buying power were all favorable, and the American political landscape were characterized by a sense of common ground versus division, and Beyond were really suffering, I would be very concerned for our long-term prospects and for the plant-based meat category overall. But none of that is true, right?

This is a very difficult period for the world, and it’s a difficult period for our country. And I think one of the things that is most significant for our business in terms of what’s impacting it is this kind of surround sound of pseudoscientific jargon and positioning and promotion that really overwhelms what is decades and decades and decades of science. And I think nothing in our lane is a more obvious representation of this troubling trend than the resurgence of red meat.

And I’ve spent over 17 years now seeking and listening to the counsel of some of the very best cardiologists in the country at some of our most prestigious institutions. And I can only look at these current trends with a mixture of sadness for the folks that are going to be impacted by it and increased impatience for those that are seeking to profit from it...”

The remarks are a not-so-thinly veiled jab at the MAHA (or “Make America Healthy Again”) movement popularized by Human and Health Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has advocated in favor of eating more red meat. Beyond’s downward revenue trajectory, however, far predates President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

Investors have to take the world as it is and how they expect it to evolve when making decisions about where to put their capital, rather than idealized versions of what the world “should” be and how different businesses might perform in that utopian environment. And it’s the job of leaders to position their organizations to thrive in the world that is and will be.

“But the good news is that this is a pendulum,” Brown added. “It’s going to swing, and it’s going to swing back, and I’m very comfortable that Beyond will prosper when it does, but I’m not going to wait around for that.”

Beyond Meat remains unable to file its annual report in a timely fashion after discovering more accounting irregularities while in the process of addressing previously detailed accounting issues.