Beyond Meat is undergoing a makeover.

Last month, the popular plant-based meat company announced a new product — Beyond Ground — that, unlike its signature plant-based burger, sausage links, and chicken nuggets, isn’t meant to directly imitate meat. Instead, it has a neutral flavor that “serves as a blank canvas,” according to the company, for customers to season however they like.

Beyond Ground contains only four ingredients — fava beans, potato starch, water, and psyllium husk — and has a macronutrient profile similar to chicken (high in protein, low in fat). It’s an “effort to step outside of the confines of mimicking a particular species and just provide something that is capable of confidently standing on its own as a center-of-the-plate protein,” Ethan Brown, Beyond Meat’s founder and CEO, told me.

The product represents an attempt to meet our current cultural moment, in which wellness has moved beyond mere exercise and nutrition optimization to broader, and dubious, appeals to “natural” living — think the rise of raw milk, the Make America Healthy Again movement, regenerative farming, and homesteading influencers. There’s a reason Beyond’s advertisements have increasingly featured the bean farmers who supply its ingredients.

“There’s this desire to connect back to something authentic…something simpler,” Brown said. “Being a facsimile in that moment is challenging.”

To that end, the company is also shedding “meat” from its name to become, simply, Beyond.

The recent moves follow similar changes the company made last year, like when it launched the Sun Sausage — a product that’s closer to an old-school veggie dog than a high-tech meat imitation — and reformulated its burger to contain less sodium and saturated fat with a simpler and cleaner ingredient list.

The makeover is a “direct reaction,” Brown said, to the many attacks the plant-based meat industry has weathered over the last five years, namely that its products are overly processed and unhealthy (attacks that I would argue are largely inaccurate and unfair). Moving forward, the industry’s success, he said, will depend on making products with “really strong macronutrient content and ratios and then really simple, clean ingredients.”

Meanwhile, Impossible Foods — one of Beyond’s main competitors — has taken a decidedly different tack.

Over the last couple years, Impossible Foods changed its green packaging to a “bold red” design in what it called a “meatier brand identity,” launched an “indulgent” burger (higher in calories, fat, sodium, and protein), recruited the world’s top competitive hot dog eater as a spokesperson, and is considering making a

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