Beyond Meat just launched a new product that’s even further from meat than ever before: a protein soda. Beyond Immerse is the company’s first product that makes no attempt to replicate meat whatsoever, marking a sharp shift in Beyond’s business model. It might seem like it comes out of left field, but it all clicks into place once you know just how badly the veggie burger business is working out for Beyond. A pivot to protein is still a long shot for a company that’s never turned an annual profit — but it’s an attempt to tap into the one market left that might offer it hope.

Immerse is an oddity in and of itself. Unlike most protein drinks, which are usually chalky at best, it claims to be “crisp and refreshing” and comes in three fruity flavors: Peach Mango, Lemon Lime, and Orange Tangerine. Each flavor then comes in two versions, with either 10g or 20g of protein, at either 60 or 100 calories per 12oz can, with 7g of fiber either way.

As you’d expect from Beyond, Immerse is entirely plant-based. The protein comes from peas and the fiber from tapioca, with stevia, “natural flavors,” and a few juice concentrates and food colorings to round out the ingredient list. Beyond makes sure this ticks off a few more of the health food boxes, promising plenty of antioxidants and electrolytes too.

Immerse’s macronutrients are almost suspiciously impressive. I drink a protein shake most days, and 100 calories’ worth of my powder of choice would only net me 19g of protein and essentially no fiber at all, delivered in a semi-palatable sludge that I must try — and fail — to convince myself tastes like a milkshake. If Immerse can actually deliver better macros, and is as “crisp and invigorating” as Beyond promises, the appeal is obvious. Other people seem to agree. On the Beyond Test Kitchen site, where the limited first run of Immerse is exclusively available, every released flavor is already sold out.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. Protein snacks, drinks, and supplements are a big and growing business. US sales of ready-made protein shakes grew 71 percent between 2021 and 2025, and they’re now an $8 billion market. Much of that protein comes from dairy-based whey, but plant-based protein is growing too — sales of both drinks and powders grew 11 percent from 2023 to 2024 according to the Good Food Institute, making up a $450 million business in its own right. Those numbers pale in comparison to the larger “functional drinks” market — prebiotics, probiotics, fiber, protein, electrolytes, preworkout, postworkout, CBD, and more — that was worth over $200 billion in 2024 and is only expected to grow from here. The drinks fridge in my local store is overflowing with gut-friendly kombucha, cold-pressed ginger shots, and electrolyte-packed recovery drinks from brands big and small, with more every time I look. Poppi, a prebiotic soda that touts the benefits of apple cider vinegar, has drawn investment from Shark Tank, spent millions to run Super Bowl ads two years in a row, and in 2025 was acquired by Pepsi for a cool $1.95 billion (it also settled a class action lawsuit alleging its “gut-healthy” claims were misleading, but hey, it can’t all be good news).

You can see why Beyond wants in. It’s already got “pioneering expertise in unlocking the power of plants,” according to founder and CEO Ethan Brown, and is one of the few brands in plant-based food that can truly claim to be a household name. More to the point, protein drinks are clearly profitable — and if there’s one thing Beyond needs right now, it’s profit.

Beyond Meat was founded by Brown in 2009 and within a few years was generating excited headlines suggesting that the future of food was here. In 2019, Beyond went public; its shares launched at $25 each but rose to $65 on the first day of trading, making it the fastest-growing US IPO since Palm Inc. in 2000. A few months later shares peaked at just under $240 each, giving the company a valuation of over $14 billion. It secured supermarket distribution with Walmart, Target, and Kroger; supplied its fake meat to McDonald’s, KFC, and Subway.

But the glory days didn’t last long. Beyond has posted straight losses ever since it went public. Profit sometimes seems like an optional afterthought in modern capitalism, but if investors don’t see profit, they do expect to see growth, and that’s where Beyond has stalled: after a peak in 2021, Beyond’s annual revenue has steadily declined, down to $326 million in 2024. None of those fast food deals yielded permanent products on US menus. Beyond’s stock price has been in freefall for years, aside from a short-lived rally as a meme stock last October. It’s currently trading at below a dollar per share, placing it at risk of being delisted from the Nasdaq stock exchange, and is facing a class action lawsuit from its own shareholders, who allege it hid the need for a $77.4 million write-down of aging assets.

What went wrong? While Beyond Meat’s management have no doubt made mistakes over the years, really it’s simply the highest profile victim of a collapse in the market for meatless meat. The Good Food Institute found that US plant-based meat sales had dropped 7 percent from 2023 to 2024, marking the third straight year of decline. “The category is smaller today than it was two years ago, four years ago, five years ago,” Peter McGuinness, the CEO of Beyond’s chief rival Impossible Foods, told New York earlier this month. “That’s not good.”

In fact Beyond and Impossible have arguably done well by surviving so long, but both are struggling. Impossible has never delivered on long-rumored plans for an IPO of its own, likely put off by Beyond’s public problems, but has suffered repeated rounds of layoffs; last year McGuinness told The Wall Street Journal that profitability was likely years away.

Both companies sit at the nexus of two major trends that are working against them. The first is that meat is back on the menu. The Good Food Institute notes a 4 percent decline in sales of plant-based foods between 2023 and 2024, while the Food Industry Association found that meat sales grew almost 5 percent over the same period, to a record $105 billion. The number of vegetarians and vegans has declined, with Gallup’s 2023 Consumption Habits poll estimating 1 percent of the US population are vegan and 4 percent vegetarian, down from 3 percent and 5 percent in 2018. But vegetarians were never meant to be Beyond’s whole market — it was supposed to persuade swathes of the rest of us to eat less meat in favor of plant-based alternatives. For a while it seemed to be working — by 2023, nearly half of US restaurants offered vegan menu options, and cutting back on meat consumption, especially to reduce climate impact, was at the core of the cultural zeitgeist. But by 2025, only 22 percent of Americans were trying to reduce their meat intake, down from 37 percent three years earlier.

That would be bad enough for Beyond, but it has a second problem: processed food is out too. And a patty of pea protein, oils, and starches, pushed through an extruder and treated so that it will appear to bleed, is pretty darn processed. Researchers have linked ultra-processed foods (UPFs) to 32 different harmful health effects, The Lancet has labeled them a global health threat, and San Francisco is suing processed food giants. Then there’s RFK Jr., whose new dietary guidelines include perhaps the only part of current American health policy I could get behind, urging Americans to limit highly processed foods (and, in a double whammy for Beyond, to eat more meat). There’s no real evidence yet of a decline in sales of UPFs as a whole, but anyone trying to eat more healthily right now is unlikely to be recommended Beyond patties. Instead they might be told to eat whole foods, to stick to snacks with fewer than five ingredients, to eat more meat but maybe cut back on beef. Beyond doesn’t enter the picture.

This all goes some way to explaining why Beyond has turned for salvation in, of all things, soda. Next time you’re passing a supermarket drinks fridge, take a look at the “wellness drinks” on offer. You know two things they almost all have in common? They don’t include meat (I hope), and they’re pretty heavily processed. Health-conscious eaters don’t want their food to be made in a factory or packed with preservatives, but rarely seem to mind when it comes to what they drink. My Instagram feed is packed with fitfluencers promoting “clean” eating and whole foods, while they shill branded discount codes for processed protein powders. There’s a double standard at work that likely won’t last forever, but as long as it does, you can see why Beyond Meat wants to take full advantage.

It’s unlikely that a protein soda, no matter how refreshing or fiber-packed, will turn Beyond’s fortunes round entirely. But right now it doesn’t need that: it just needs time. Time to persuade investors to stick around, time to pull the share price up by a buck or two, and maybe just time for food fads to change once more and give meatless meat a second life.