Beyond Meat, the company which was once at the forefront of the fake meat industry, reported annual results which showed another loss was made during 2024. The volume of product sold also fell, dropping to 35,000 tonnes in the year.
Beyond Meat, the company which was once at the forefront of the fake meat industry, reported annual results which showed another loss was made during 2024.
The volume of product sold also fell, dropping to 35,000 tonnes in the year.
The loss from operations for the year totalled $156.1m (€149m), representing an operating margin of -47.8%. To put this in context, in 2024 it cost Beyond Meat more than $1.47 to make $1 of sales.
The company also announced that it was cutting 44 jobs in the US and Europe and was withdrawing from the Chinese market, which would lead to another 20 job losses. This represents approximately 9% of the company’s total global workforce.
Reaction
Market reaction to the results was negative, with shares trading lower in the immediate aftermath of the announcement. Those shares are now trading more than 98% below the company’s record high value seen in 2019.
Company CEO Ethan Brown said Beyond Meat continues to pursue its main goals “with considerable confidence in the long-term growth of the global plant-based meat industry and our leadership position therein”.
The company ended the year with $145m (€138.4m) of cash on its balance sheet, a 30% drop from the end of 2023. This drop was despite another input of cash from investors during the course of 2024.
Beyond Meat’s failure to ever actually make money from selling fake meat points to both the lack of economic reality in what it is trying to do – basically it is too expensive to make and sell a pound of fake meat – coupled with an apparent lack of consumer demand for the product.
This is a subscriber-only article
SHARING OPTIONS: