Ethan Brown
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is now open.
Yes, these are great questions and like the capacity question, is one that's constantly top of mind for me. And it's important for a number of reasons. One is the diversification in supply and the ability to exert pricing pressure build on redundancy, et cetera. But to be honest, that's probably, to me almost a secondary consideration. One of the most important considerations is really continues to be around pleasing the consumer. And if you think about the way mom shops or dad shops on a weekend for the family, they're not buying a particular protein in six or seven different form factors, they're buying pork, they're buying beef, they're buying Turkey chicken, et cetera. So for us to credibly take a very, very long run and broad run at the meat case, we need to offer the consumer that same diversity. So I think if you look ahead five years from now, you'll see sausage from us that has different proteins, maybe one sausage will be offered with lentil protein, the other with lupin or camelina. You can kind of name your source. But when you start to think about the plant kingdom as a source of protein, there really just almost an endless number of crops that you can pull it from. And there's fascinating science going on in the area about which crops can yield the highest scores or amino acids. And, not through genetic modification, but through breeding, how you get there. And so I think we're just scratching the surface of an amazing journey in agriculture to grow protein directly for human consumption. And I think it's really important that as a company Beyond Meat leads that charge and bringing new proteins to the market. So if you look at, for example, we're able to do with our breakfast sausage. I'm very proud of that product because I think it points in the direction of where we're headed for the future, it not only has pea protein in it, but it has mung bean protein, brown rice protein and sunflower seed protein. That's really the way to do this. You get a lot of benefits, not only in supply chain, but you get consumer satisfaction with that in terms of having a more diversified protein. But importantly, you also get a pretty big win on the PDCAAS score, which is the measure of protein quality in the human body. And so in that case, when you're combining amino acids from different sources like that, you're able to craft amino acid score that actually exceeds that, in some cases, the pork equivalent. So if you look at our latest breakfast sausage that actually has more protein in it, ounce per ounce, and then it's protein -- then it's animal protein equivalent. So lots of ahead for us on that front.