Beyond Meat Inc., founded in 2009, has had almost 15 years to build a product line-up 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% and U.S. sales are down 40%.
Even worse, according to a comprehensive look at alternative meat companies published Aug. 9 in Plant Based News, “Beyond also backpedaled on its previous goal of achieving positive cash flow … saying this is now ‘unlikely’ to happen in 2023.”
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That bad news sliced another 20% 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’s 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” over 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.
Fake meat isn’t the only “new” food struggling to land into the American grocery cart. According to a Sept. 22 report, “Just Eat, Inc., a closely held maker of cultivated chicken and plant-based eggs, has dismissed roughly 40 employees, less than a month after raising $16 million …”
Perhaps the most remarkable part of that brief report is the apparent disconnect it highlights: Despite continued evidence that the majority of Americans have a very limited appetite for non-meat meat and non-egg eggs, investors continue to throw venture capital at both half-cooked ideas.