Plant-based burger company opens new facility

Beyond Meat said it has more than tripled its manufacturing footprint from 30,000 to 100,000 square feet. The company said this expanded capacity will help support increasing demand for its line of plant-based fresh meat products, including the Beyond Burger, which is soy-free, made mostly of peas and uses beets for color.

“Our expanded 100,000 square foot manufacturing footprint will provide the scale we need to service our rapidly growing retail, foodservice and international customer base,” said Mark Nelson, COO and CFO at Beyond Meat.

Located in Columbia, Missouri, the new facility will generate more than 250 new jobs in 2018, Beyond Meat said, and that the facility includes high efficiency lighting and a new water recirculation system that reduce consumption by nearly 80 percent.

“We first came to Missouri in 2009 to access the outstanding research being conducted at the University of Missouri,” said Ethan Brown, CEO and founder of Beyond Meat.

When Brown was first exploring the notion that the protein at the center of the plate didn’t need to be made using an animal, he tapped into research that was taking place at the University of Missouri, the company said. This research eventually provided one of the technical foundations for Beyond Meat’s visionary approach to building meat from plants.