New Green, New Food: Green for the Many or Green for the Few?

Speaker Series: David Yeung,
Founder & CEO, Green Monday Ventures (Omnipork, Beyond Meat)

Lunch, Thursday, 28 November 2019, 12:15-14:00 pm, China Club

How Green Monday is driving meat-substitute foods out from the boutique grocery shelf to affordable eating options and scalable business models, and making green investment yield attractive returns.

Event Details:

The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong is pleased to invite you a special luncheon event (including Omnipork dumplings) with David Yeung, Founder & CEO of Green Monday, the social venture firm behind Omnipork, Beyond Meat, milk-substitute Perfect Day and yoghurt-substitute Lavva. Green Monday started out as a social movement which then became a social enterprise that became a social venture firm, focusing on food products, a unique business model/combination.

Omnipork, it’s “Asian star student” (though founded in Canada) has been heralded as pork-oriented Asia’s “solution-food”. It is viewed as a product “whose time has come”, particularly as China faces pork safety challenges, building upon Buddhist imitation meat traditions that target carnivores, not already committed vegetarians.

But it is only one of a growing number of holdings in the Green Monday portfolio. How Green Monday identifies, incubates and grows such businesses, and the mix of LPs that it brings to the equation are a key success factor in this approach.

The promise of such food-oriented investments? Healthier lifestyles, lower carbon footprints, and revolutionary change of a meat industry that has been criticized since the earliest days of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle first told of the ugly underside of the Chicago meatpacking industry almost 115 years ago.

Modern vegan food alternatives have attracted capital and consumer enthusiasm that have been likened to “the Tesla effect” – allowing folk to change their consumer behaviors without having to sacrifice on style, speed and, in the case of vegan meats, taste. Beyond Meat’s May 2019 IPO led to the share price going up almost 5x in less than 3 months (even if later returning to “slightly more sober” 2x IPO levels, today). Just East, in the UK, reported vegetarian take-away grew 400% from 2016 to 2018. Uber Eats reported 23% growth in vegan takeaway in January 2019, alone. Rival Impossible Burger is being rolled out in Burger King, nationally, in the USA.

But is it all “as easy as that?”. For foods such as Omnipork, is it healthy for the few, or for the many? Can it offer an affordable alternative for the world’s emerging market aspirational upper-lower and middle class, for whom animal proteins remain the “cheapest first bite”? And, as an investor, how does one work through the lifecycle of scaling up such businesses, post-fad phase, and create profitable businesses and affordable products? As the CEOs of both Whole Foods and of Chipotle have asked, are we ignoring the promise of healthier meats/sustainable animal products in exchange for “high-tech, highly processed, high calorie” foods, often using genetically modified organisms (GMOs), soy-based diets that bring their own problems? Similarly, critics of other green companies such as Tesla point out that car batteries can be as dirty as carbon fuels. That electricity is only green when it isn’t produced by coal-fired plants, and that nuclear, the “true green option”, has its own risks.

The Stanford GSB Chapter of Hong Kong could not be more pleased to have you join us for this event, to hear directly from David and taste Omnipork featured dishes firsthand!

Speaker’s Bio: David Yeung