Beyond Meat got off to a sizzling start when it made its IPO debut in 2019. As the company and others in the plant-based meat industry developed better-tasting products, sales boomed and stock prices soared. Growing partnerships with restaurants and retailers generated greater acceptance among consumers.
“Everybody wanted a piece of them. Everybody wanted to tell their story,” said Alexia Howard, senior research analyst for U.S. food at Bernstein. “And that encouraged people to trial the products.”
Beyond Meat’s successful IPO aligned with the broader excitement around meat substitutes. Sales for the overall market reached $1.3 billion in 2020, a 46% increase from 2019, according to data from market research firm Circana.
“Much of the initial bullishness around the Beyond Meat investment case around the time of the IPO was the expectation that plant-based meat could achieve a similar market share in the meat market that plant-based beverages had achieved in the cow’s milk market,” said John Baumgartner, senior equity analyst for food and healthy living at Mizuho Securities. “There were numbers on the street sizing that opportunity to $20 to $30 billion over a 10-year period.”
Yet something changed over the last few years. Instead of continued growth, the industry has seen declining sales, mounting layoffs and shuttered factories. And Beyond Meat, once a leader in the sector, has seen its stock fall from a high of $239 dollars in 2019 to hovering just above $3 dollars today.
“This was made to be a major disruption of the food supply and a major threat to the beef industry,” said Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “And it didn’t work out that way.”
Watch the video above to find out what went wrong for Beyond Meat in recent years, the challenges facing the company and the broader plant-based meat industry today and whether the sector can reinvent itself to win back consumers’ appetites.
