Beyond Meat is striving to reach more customers following a meme-fueled stock rally, but its poor fundamentals may leave investors wondering: “Where’s the beef?”
The company said Tuesday it was expanding its distribution at over 2,000 Walmart locations in the U.S., and on Thursday announced that upscale grocer Erewhon would carry the latest versions of its Beyond Burger and Beyond Beef products.
Beyond Meat shares traded below a dollar for the first time on Oct. 13, then shot up to an intraday high of $7.69 earlier this week. And while shares remain up 339.9% this week, putting Beyond Meat on pace for its best week on record, shares were down 20.7% at $2.84 on Thursday, marking their second consecutive losing session.
Those numbers are nowhere near the highs Beyond Meat reached shortly after its initial public offering in 2019. Shares surged to $234.90 in mid-July of that year. Since then, the price has fallen into the single-digit range. How did we get here?
Beyond Meat was the first pure-play maker of plant-based alternative meat to go public. One might assume this gave the company a first-mover advantage, an early start to snap up market share and gain an edge over competitors.
And while Beyond Meat attracted attention at the start, thanks largely to celebrity endorsements and partnerships with names like McDonald’s and Yum! Brands, the hype didn’t last.
A look at the company’s financials shows a sharp drop-off in sales after 2021, the same year it saw a pandemic-era surge. The company brought in $464.7 million in sales, marking its best year on record, but the metric has declined steadily since then, reaching $326.5 million in 2024.
To date, Beyond Meat has never turned an annual profit, and its operating cash flows have been consistently negative. In its latest annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March, the company conceded that it had a history of losses and “may be unable to achieve or sustain profitability.”
In addition to company-specific issues related to its debt, weakness in the plant-based meat category has taken its toll. Beyond Meat also faces stiff competition from privately owned Impossible Foods as well as larger players like Tyson Foods that have launched their own plant-based options.
The latest spike in stock price wasn’t a sign of recovering demand; rather, it appeared to be the result of a short squeeze, a phenomenon in which the price of a heavily shorted stock rises suddenly, forcing short sellers to buy back shares to cover their positions. This leads to a further increase in the price.
Shares traded below $1 for the first time earlier this month after the company disclosed the initial results of a debt-swap deal announced in September. While it helped clean up Beyond Meat’s balance sheet, it also led to a massive dilution of existing shareholders.
Once shares closed at an all-time low of 52 cents on Oct. 16, interest began to build. Trading volume more than doubled the following day as retail investors banded together on social media, declaring it was time to “make $BYND great again.”
Since then the rally has lost steam. While Beyond Meat may have expanded an existing partnership and introduced a new one on the back of heightened interest in the company, this doesn’t mend its underlying problems. Until the company can resolve issues with falling volumes and demand that have plagued it for years, it’ll be all sizzle and no steak.