Tweet It and Eat It? Twitter Founders Investing in Vegan Mock Meats
Twitter co-foundersBiz Stone and Evan Williams have created quite a buzz by announcing recently that they’ve moved a bit of their focus offline—and potentially into your digestive system—by investing in a vegan mock meat start-up company called Beyond Meat.
The tech-savvy entrepreneurs also co-founded Obvious Corporation—an idea incubator of sorts—that works with web-focused companies, at least, before they got involved in vegan foods, which was partially a result of Biz Stone’s long-standing vegan diet and because the company’s plan made a lot of sense. Fast Company reported that Stone became interested in Beyond Meat because the company founders “were coming at it from this big science, super practical, scalable angle. They were saying, ‘We want to get into the multi-billion-dollar meat industry with a plant-based meat.'”
And there’s certainly good reason; Beyond Meat’s founder, Ethan Brown, comes from a clean energy background, where he made the connection between greenhouse gases and the immense livestock industry while the majority of the industry’s focus on climate change didn’t include a realistic approach to addressing factory farming.
While claiming the products are all GMO-free, the first one to be debuted—Veggie Chicken Strips (which the company along with Stone and Williams say tastes more like “real meat” than any other vegan mock meat products on the market)—contains some questionable ingredients including soy, canola oil, maltodextrin, ‘natural flavoring’, Dipotassium Phosphate and Titanium Dioxide. Clearly it’s not a product targeted at the food purist—but, if like Twitter, it can connect more people to the bigger picture—it could prove to be a helpful step in ushering in a change that will ultimately be in our best interest, or at least give us something healthy to eat while Tweeting.
Keep in touch with Jill on Twitter @jillettinger
Image: Mai Le
