By Alan Guebert
Beyond Meat, Inc., founded in 2009, has had almost 15 years to build a product line that is — as its name claims — beyond meat and, by some business metrics, it has.
After all, the company, whose market capitalization was pegged at $1.3 billion when it went public in 2018, recently reported April-to-June 2023 sales of $102 million.
To a confirmed carnivore, that sounds like a lot of non-meat meat. To the always ravenous Wall Street, however, the number is undercooked: compared to a year ago, net revenue is off 31 percent and U.S. sales are down 40 percent.
Even worse, according to a comprehensive look at alternative meat companies published Aug. 9 in Plant Based News, “Beyond also backpedalled on its previous goal of achieving positive cash flow … saying this is now ‘unlikely’ to happen in 2023.”
That bad news sliced another 20 percent off Beyond Meat’s stock price the next day and again raised the broader question of whether plant-based meat is just another food fad in the ever-changing, ever-challenging, ever-greener global food market.
Beyond’s biggest competitor, Impossible Foods, Inc., doesn’t seem to have a clear answer, either. Like many of his veggie meat executives, Impossible boss Pat Brown predicted in 2020 that “his company would ‘take a double-digit portion of the beef market’ by 2024 before sending it into a ‘death spiral,’ ” noted Bloomberg last January.
After that boast, Brown lobbed an even bigger brick at the sausage and bacon crowd: “Next, he would target ‘the pork industry and the chicken industry and say, you’re next, and they’ll go bankrupt even faster.’ ”
Beef didn’t enter a death spiral and Brown was, in fact, next; he stepped down as the company’s “chief visionary officer” more than a year ago.
Since then, Impossible has gained a toehold in the veggie chicken nuggets niche. Still, in early 2023, investors saw their shares in the private company “trading at around $12,” or “about half the price during its last fundraising round,” again reports Bloomberg.
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