Beef industry battles to scrub polluter image as vegan burgers boom

THE American beef industry, wary of the vegan-burger craze that's sweeping the nation, is trying to scrub its image as a greenhouse-gas-emitting machine. With big retailers and investors pressing companies to improve their footprints, giants like Tyson Foods Inc and Cargill Inc are promising ambitious reductions in emissions, including in supply chains. Chief sustainability officers are popping up all over meat C-suites, and social media ads are touting beef's misunderstood health benefits. It's an uphill battle. For more than a decade, studies have piled on exhorting people to eat less beef for environmental and health reasons. By some measures, agriculture accounts for more global greenhouse gas emissions than transport, thanks in part to livestock production. Meanwhile, plant alternatives have captured the zeitgeist as more Americans dub themselves flexitarians - people who regularly substitute other foods for meat. Companies like Beyond Meat Inc, which saw its shares more than triple since its blistering initial public offering, are riding the anti-meat wave, extolling the virtues of vegan products that are showing up on menus of nationwide chains including TGI Fridays. The rise of meat alternatives could start cutting into beef's livelihood, if the recent decline of milk is any lesson. In less than a decade, alternatives came out of nowhere to steal significant market share from conventional cow's milk, a shift that contributed to the bankruptcy filing this month of behemoth Dean Foods Co. Today, milk alternatives account for 13 per cent of the market...MORE