A Decade in A Year, The Great Acceleration

Pandemics and History

The industrial Age is ending ...

Pandemics mark epochs

From The Plague, accelerating Europe into the Renaissance, the rise of the Spanish Flu which led to the roaring 20’s in the US and the digital acceleration in China due to SARS in 2002/2003.

Pandemics accelerate entire civilizations and we’re in the middle of one of those historical shifts at the moment.

The acceleration is happening globally all around us due to COVID19, death and rebirth.

2yrs in 2 months

The world is transforming VERY fast, Microsoft’s CEO, in May 2020 on a corporate earnings call stated that they’d seen TWO YEARS worth of digital acceleration in TWO MONTHS. 

In the world of the future of food, it's going even faster based on the reflection of one analyst on Beyond Meat's acceleration:

“We were saying that by 2030, Beyond Meat could have a $1 billion in sales,” said Alexia Burland Howard , the senior research analyst of US food at Bernstein. “Now, we’re saying by the end of 2020, which is only 18 months later.”

The Future of Food is NOW

Pre-COVID19 RethinkX predicted that in a decade 50% of the Beef and Dairy Industry would be Bankrupt and 90% would be bankrupt by 2035. 

This prediction started to fulfill itself almost immediately as the US’s largest dairy producer, Dean Foods filed for bankruptcy in 2019.

The crazy part is this extinction level event for the factory farming industry might now happen even sooner with sales of plant based meats surging over 265% over the pandemic period.

Are we looking at a world where Plant Based Meat (Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Zhen Foods, Omni Pork, Evo Foods, Wild Earth), Cell Based (Memphis Meats, Mosa Meats, Shiok Meats, Mission Barnes, Wild Type, Peace of Meat, BlueNalu, Finless Foods) and Recombinant (Geltor, Clara Foods, Perfect Day, Turtle Tree Labs) alternatives to conventional factory farmed animal products totally disrupt and essentially end factory farming?

YES

Will companies like Tyson, Smithfield and JBS go bankrupt? Maybe, if they don’t adapt to the new world they're going to find themselves in.

What about our Pets? In the US, they account for 25-30% of our meat consumption and the world loves pets even more than the US with growth rates in pet ownership skyrocketing 20% year on year in China and India.

Where we go, our pets will too! My dog Liza is 100% plant based like me and there are going to be many millions more just like her over the next few years.

The Future of Consumer?

The US in particular is over retailed, malls and department stores having been dying a slow death but as Web Smith of 2pm has noted, we might actually be over retailed by about 10x compared to other countries like China. 

This means everything is about to change for retail in the US and across much of the world too. 

Pre-COVID19, Direct To Consumer (DTC) e-commerce was starting to look like a struggling category with the failure of Brandless and Casper’s lackluster IPO.

Those days are over with even previously struggling food delivery companies like Blue Apron are looking like rockstars surging 70% on the stock market.

Arming the Rebels

Pre-COVID19, Amazon seemed like an unbeatable empire. 

Amazon dominated every category of e-commerce but since the pandemic, not only has Shopify (the un-amazon) armed the rebels, providing small e-commerce brands with scalable technology that can compete directly with the Amazon experience but they now also offer fully integrated delivery capabilities.

2 day delivery is now available to even to your friend’s startup.

This unbundles Amazon’s market place for many new challenger brands to continue to rise both online and eventually in retail, accelerating the challenger brand competition for large consumer goods companies.

The pandemic has also unleashed another assault on Amazon’s previously unbeatable position, it’s old foes, Target and Walmart are back with a vengeance. 

If you order with Target today online, you can get deliveries within a few hours, same day, it make’s Amazon’s prime look like an outdated service from the past.

For those of you reading this in the future, about 2-3 months ago (before May 2020), anyone beating Amazon Prime’s delivery speed seemed unimaginable, no one could beat Amazon Prime and today, 2 day delivery seems like a relic from another era.

2 years in 2 months.

A Golden Era of Biotechnology

COVID19 caught the world mostly asleep, the pandemics Bill Gates had been warning us about for decades happened and most world governments were asleep at the wheel.

Boris Johnson, the UK’s Prime Minister was so unconcerned that he shook people’s hands in a COVID19 ward and ended up an intensive care unit fighting for his life.

The leader of one of the most wealthy and powerful countries on the planet got felled by a biohazard which started with someone eating a bat (?) or a pangolin (?) in Wuhan, China which has so far killed hundreds of thousands of people and infected millions.

It didn’t have to be this way, if we as a global society had taken biosecurity more seriously, invested deeper into diagnostics, vaccines and medical research and safer food alternatives to wet markets and animal factory farms.

A pandemic world also transformed the FDA

Within weeks, the FDA allowed human telemedicine across state lines, an act which had been stalled for decades.

The FDA provided emergency authorization for diagnostic tests, vaccine and therapeutic drug development to combat COVID19 in weeks, actions that previously would have taken years.

Biotech is back.

Vaccines are hot again, the general public can again clearly see why humanity needs science to combat infectious disease and protect both the strong and the weak.

Biotech companies like Moderna (mRNA vaccine) and Gilead’s (anti-viral) stock’s are skyrocketing and this is just the start.

2 years in 2 months

A Decade in Year

The industrial Age is ending and a New Age of Humanity is beginning and we all get to live through its birth.