Beyond Meat appointed Phil Hardin as its new finance chief. Hardin joins the plant-based meat maker from Amazon, where he worked for 15 years in finance and investor relations across several business units. 

Hardin was most recently vice president of finance for Amazon Advertising and held other leadership roles, including director of finance for EU customer fulfillment, director of investor relations for Amazon.com, and director of finance for Kindle content and digital subsidiaries. He will join the company next month.

The company also named Deanna Jurgens as its chief growth officer and Margaret Trask as chief people officer. 

“In each case, we conducted extensive searches to identify best-in-class talent and I could not be more pleased with the outcome,” said Ethan Brown, president and CEO of Beyond Meat. “Whether Deanna’s highly successful customer-focused leadership at PepsiCo, Jackie’s impressive track record of building teams and raising the bar at JAFRA, or Phil’s long tenure of strategic investing for outsized future growth at Amazon, today we’ve put in place key members of the team to help drive the business toward our goal of being tomorrow’s global protein company.” 

Hardin replaces former CFO Mark Nelson, who retired on May 5 but will remain as a consultant until May 5, 2023. Nelson joined the company as its CFO in December 2015 and played a key role in Beyond Meat’s blockbuster public listing in 2019. 

Nelson has come under question after being named in a fraud claims lawsuit filed by former Beyond Meat supplier Don Lee Farms. Beyond Meat countersued Don Lee Farms and a trial is scheduled for later this year. 

“We will prove our claim that Beyond Meat misappropriated our trade secrets to manufacture the Beyond Burger and other products. We will prove the breach of the exclusive supply agreement and fraud claim committed by Mr. Nelson and others,” said Donald Goodman, president of Don Lee Farms.