Muth Moves on From Beyond Meat, Remains as Chairman of JV

Last week Chuck Muth, Chief Growth Officer at Beyond Meat, announced he had retired from the plant-based brand after four years. Muth will remain on the boards of several notable food and beverage brands, including Beyond Meat’s own joint venture with PepsiCo.

Muth joined Beyond Meat in May 2017, joining Seth Goldman — his former boss at Honest Tea and the board chair at Beyond Meat — to help the company grow to over 120,000 retail and foodservice outlets. Now a publicly traded company, Beyond Meat is sold in over 80 countries worldwide. Muth was instrumental in that growth, helping craft the attention-getting strategy that pushed retailers to merchandise the product within the meat department.

Muth is a former executive with Seagram’s, the Philadelphia Coca-Cola Bottling Co., and Coke’s Venturing & Emerging Brands (VEB — Honest Tea was its best-known acquisition). He has moved from Los Angeles, where he had moved to work with Beyond Meat, to Florida, saying he wanted to focus more on his family.

“I think it’s a good time to bring in new energy and new ideas,” Muth said “Then the other part of it is age related — I wanted to take a step back and explore other opportunities.”

Beyond Meat, meanwhile, announced it had hired Deanna Jurgens as Chief Growth Officer — a move that accompanied the appointment of Phil Hardin as CFO and Margaret “Jackie” Trask as Chief People Officer. Jurgens was formerly the Chief Global Sales Officer at skincare company Rodan & Fields, a role she held after spending 15 years in a variety of senior leadership positions at PepsiCo.

Muth will, however, remain as chairman of the board of The PLANeT Partnership, Beyond Meat’s joint venture with PepsiCo, serving as a consultant to Beyond Meat. The board has three other members: Ethan Brown, CEO and founder of Beyond Meat; Ram Krishnan, PepsiCo Global Chief Commercial Officer; and Tarka Gurkan, SVP of Corporate Mergers & Acquisitions for PepsiCo. The PLANeT Partnership is based out of the Beyond Meat Offices in El Segundo. It’s led by CEO Daniel Moisan, a 14 year veteran of PepsiCo, alongside interim COO Lisa Warnock — who has spent time at both PepsiCo and Beyond Meat.

“The Pepsi snack system is the best in the world,” Muth said.“There are other applications beyond snacks, things that I can’t talk about right now, but there are synergies here where we can combine our brand and our R&D capabilities with the Pepsi sales, distribution and marketing system.”

In addition to The PLANet Partnership, Muth also sits on the boards of allergen-free snack brand Partake Foods, juice shot brand Vive Organics, Sub-Saharan Africa based healthy food distributor Infinite Foods, and coconut water brand Zico Rising. Muth said he plans to also consult for several brands.

Muth said he reflects back on his time at Beyond Meat fondly — when he joined the brand at $16 million in sales, he couldn’t foresee the meteoric rise it would have. But even more than the company itself, he added, he’s proud of the impact it’s had.

“In a lot of ways, we really helped create this plant-based meat category in a different way than it had been done before,” Muth said. “I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished in such a short period of time… I never could have imagined being what it is today when I first came there.”