Exclusive: Beyond pivots again, this time with a sports recovery drink

Fifty minutes into a training session at a gym in lower Manhattan, I’m doing burpees and clean-and-jerks while Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown—all 6 feet, 5 inches of him—is bear-crawling into pushups, then slamming a medicine ball to the ground from overhead.

I was lured to this TMPL gym off Astor Place because Brown is a lifelong fitness nut, and he’d shoehorned this workout in on Monday morning between arriving from L.A. the night before and departing again that afternoon.

But Brown also wanted me to experience Beyond’s radical new launch, its first product that is not a savory meal option, the way a target customer would: post-workout, desperate for a functional recovery drink. After Brown’s trainers—known as Coach K and Dom—put me through multiple rounds of kettlebell squat jumps and casually suggested that I add another 40 clean-and-jerk reps with just the bar to, you know, tighten my form, I was ready to chug anything liquid and cold.

The product Brown handed me was from Beyond’s new line of drinks, called Immerse—for the way he says its ingredients “immerse the consumer in the remarkable nutrition of plants.” They come in 12-ounce cans that are sold in two protein strengths (10 and 20 grams) and three lightly carbonated flavors: lemon-lime, peach-mango, and orange-clementine. Starting today, they’re available on the Beyond Test Kitchen site for $29.95 for a 12-pack of the lower-protein version and $34.95 for a 12-pack of the higher-protein version, with retail rollout coming soon. Each can delivers seven grams of fiber, plus electrolytes, and a full day’s worth of vitamin C. The protein comes from yellow peas, though Brown says that Beyond plans to add other plant proteins next, such as fava beans.

How Beyond went liquid

Immerse represents the second category departure in six months for Beyond—a notable pivot for a company that has been battered by changing consumer tastes. Last July, Beyond broke from its 17-year history as a meat-substitute pioneer to relaunch as a complete-protein brand, dropping “Meat” from its name and introducing Ground, a versatile Swiss Army knife of plant proteins designed to work in any dish, any time. The shift into functional beverages extends that same philosophy: plant proteins liberated from the center of the dinner plate.

“The idea is to unlock what’s in plants and minerals, and get that to consumers in a form they’ll use,” he explains, “instead of trying to represent them as something else.” Immerse is the first ready-to-drink product to combine protein, fiber, and electrolytes in such a high formulation, and the company hints these beverages are the opening salvo in a broader line of functional products, saying that some are in the works.

Beyond has been flirting with the beverage category for longer than you’d think, ever since Brown tried making a plant-protein water back in the 2010s. But he says the recovery-drink idea was born out of personal need.

Brown is obsessive about plant protein, generally consuming it at every meal, and often in between. For years, he drank post-workout protein shakes, and to these he would add a scoop of psyllium husk, for fiber. But the formulation filled him up.

“I wanted to feel light,” Brown says. And the science just wasn’t there yet; he recalls jugs of early prototypes he kept under his desk and protein that kept separating. Back then, perfecting a beverage line wasn’t mission-critical for Beyond anyway. Worth billions at the time, the company was the darling of Silicon Valley, beloved by Hollywood stars, Wall Street, and seemingly every fast-food chain on the planet.

But then alt-meats’ novelty started to wane, and the pandemic drove up input and distribution costs, making these products feel like more of a splurge to price-conscious shoppers. By 2024, Beyond’s market cap had slid to $500 million.

Around that time, the recovery-drink concept reemerged. Brown would visit his son at the University of Missouri, where he was playing guard on the school’s basketball team, and swing by the locker room, where he’d see three separate types of recovery drinks being offered to players: electrolytes for hydration, cherry juice for antioxidants, Core Power-brand shakes for protein. That was . . . a lot of liquid? Brown wondered, Why not one drink that could achieve all three?

In Beyond’s early attempts, sediment settled at the bottom of cans. The advances that the company made in solubility “were the big thing,” Brown explains. Now, “you can drink 20 grams of protein and 7 grams of fiber, and it feels like a regular liquid.” In the process, Beyond scientists also worked to minimize calories and keep fat at zero. (A comparable 12 ounces of a Core Power chocolate shake contains 22 grams of protein, but has 50% more calories and almost 3 grams of saturated fat, and raises cholesterol rather than lowering it the way soluble fiber does.)

It turned out that the sports nutrition space could reward Beyond’s scientific strengths—protein density, nutritional optimization—rather than punishing it.

And Brown’s excitement is now fixating on a nutrient that isn’t even protein. It’s a different ingredient in Immerse, a tapioca fiber derived from the cassava plant. It helps lower LDL cholesterol, feeds good gut bacteria, regulates blood sugar response, and triggers satiety hormones including PYY and—you guessed it—GLP-1. Brown is doubly excited, because he says research suggests that if eaten together, the combination of this fiber and the psyllium husk he adds to his own protein shakes (and uses in the Beyond Ground products) can synergistically deliver both immediate and long-term improvements to gut and heart health.

The FDA says that tapioca fiber may help reduce heart disease risk as part of a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet. Beyond contends the Immerse drinks are therefore great for muscle recovery, gut health, immunity, and people with lactose intolerance.

The power of plants

Were these drinks great for me?

After my workout at TMPL, no magic was going to fix my stiff back, neck, and legs. But as far as the high fiber goes—equal to three cups of spinach, or half a can of black beans—I was an interesting test case.

As a type 1 diabetic, I wear a continuous glucose monitor in my arm that records my blood sugar 24/7. A “perfect” glucose is 100 milligrams per deciliter of blood, though even non-diabetics routinely swing between 70 and 140 during the day. The night after trying Immerse, mine traced a straight line between 90 and 110. Causation, or coincidence? It’s impossible to say with a sample size of one. But the functional properties designed for athletic recovery have established ancillary benefits, like steadying metabolic responses.

The new drink line “also takes us outside of what’s become a very political thing,” Brown adds, moving past the science to address Beyond’s deeper corporate strategy, one that bypasses the culture-war baggage attached to putting protein “at the center of the plate.”

Beyond, along with the company’s top rival, Impossible Foods, and other alt-meat proponents, say the multibillion-dollar beef industry has spent years secretly and not-so-secretly smearing alt-meats as unhealthy, ultra-processed, and too fake. The results have been brutal. Beyond’s own sales dropped by nearly 5% in 2024, and then by another projected 14% for 2025. Shares, which peaked above $230 after its 2019 IPO, slid to penny-stock levels before meme traders staged a 1,300% rally in October that evaporated within days. The company has restructured debt and cut staff while working to stabilize its finances.

Meanwhile, demand for animal proteins helped JBS and Cargill post record revenue and a 44% profit increase despite the highest-ever beef prices and worst cattle shortage in years.

Impossible’s CEO Peter McGuinness has even threatened to stick actual beef into the Impossible Burger.

Then, days before TMPL’s trainers kicked our butts, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. flipped the national food guidelines upside down—going all-in on red meat and full-fat milk while demoting whole grains, but still advising Americans to, somehow, reduce their intake of saturated fat. The Trump administration immediately described it as “the most significant change in federal nutrition guidance in the history of our nation,” and commemorated the move by announcing it would sell RFK-autographed food posters for $400 from a government-run website.

For years, Beyond has supported work being done by Stanford Medicine researcher Christopher Gardner to evaluate a plant-based diet’s effects on cardiovascular health. Gardner is of the 20 nutrition experts the federal government has tapped to review evidence for the new dietary recommendations. Last week, Gardner said that the Trump guidelines “go against decades and decades of evidence and research.”

Brown, like many Americans, feels like we are living in Upside-Down World. But he’s not deterred from pushing plants. After all, the new pyramid does put peas at the very top—even if they’re shown in a bag labeled “frozen.”

What excites Brown, despite the chaos, is that the past few years have helped him refocus on what plants can do that meat cannot.

Much of Beyond’s past was invested in making plants emulate meat—in ways previous generations would have thought impossible. Now he’s highlighting plants’ distinct nutritional advantages, including their fiber content, something essential to human health that animal products lack. Plants also deliver protein in a lower-calorie format. Immerse packs 20 grams of protein into just 100 calories, a 20% protein-to-calorie ratio. David protein bars swept America last year, hitting $100 million in sales, because they deliver 28 grams of protein for every 150 calories, an 18.7% ratio.

Watching Brown power through his final set at TMPL—a guy who had five knee surgeries by his 20s and just took the Beyond corporate team on a grueling hike to celebrate the Immerse launch—you see how much thought he has put into obsessing over making his body perform. It’s hard not to wonder if the company is catching up to its founder.

He jokes that this time, critics looking for ingredients to attack will have to target the water in the cans: “They’ll have to say, ‘There’s too much H2O in that water!’”