I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. The Food Company Beyond Meat recently had a short-lived spike in its stock, mostly thanks to internet trolls, but now shares are back to where

they have been for a while hovering around just a dollar per share. Its biggest competitor,

Impossible Foods, is privately held, but their financial outlook is allegedly not much better.

Meat alternatives were once trendy. Now the top purveyors are struggling to stay afloat. Online wellness

influencers have stepped up their attacks on the brands for being ultra-processed, pointing to a long

list of hard-to-pronounce ingredients. Beyond an impossible have clapped back with videos and documentaries

of their own, but those haven't seemed to

generate quite as much buzz. So where does all this leave these brands at a time when the tides

have shifted? Here to talk about it is Clint Rainey, an investigative journalist who's covered

beyond meat and impossible foods since their beginnings. A few years ago, he was approached by these companies

to investigate a social media disinformation campaign, allegedly funded by big meat companies to

eliminate beyond and impossible from the competition. Clint will join us to explain where this beef

with fake meat came from and whether these online rumors were true.

But first, Dina Shanker of Bloomberg Business Week dives deeper into how beyond became a meme stock this fall,

and whether there's a place for it on Wall Street's table moving forward.

Stick around because all that's coming up.

Music coming up. Dina Shanker, welcome to Business Wars.

Thank you so much for having me.

Hey, tell us a little bit about your time on the package food beat at Bloomberg.

When did Beyond Meat hit your radar?

Were you, was it for work,

or were you just sort of at the grocery store one day and you stumbled upon something interesting?

...