Beyond Meat,
It earned really high ESG ratings . . . until recently when a disgruntled employee released photos of unsanitary conditions at its Pennsylvania plant.
As it is with a LOT of companies, “evil corporation making a huge profit” is just a myth. People seem to learn these stereotypes at the high school lunch tables, never check the facts, and carry them around until age 30 or so.
Anyway it might outlast some crypto currencies, but it is on the ropes and not likely to survive.
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Share price is $13
Company is losing $4/share each year.
It lost money in good times. It lost money in bad times
Net Income…
2022 YTD: -$299 million
2021: -$182 mil.
2020: -$53 mil.
2019: -$12 mil.
2018: -$30 mil.
2017: -$30 mil.
2016: -$25 mil.
On the upside, they have almost a half billion in annual sales,
and they are not the only player in the “vegan meat” industry today.
Impossible Foods is their biggest competitor, but everyone from Kellog’s to Nestle to Cargill & Hormel have now entered the space. There is a lot of crap science stated as fact by vegan activists, but vs. meat vegan alternatives do use less land and produce less water pollution.
Hopefully once Beyond Meat is dead and gone their nearly half billion in annual gross sales will be divided among their competition in ways that will allow them and their products to be economically sustainable.
Gotta clear the crap out of the barn, but once that is done, vegan meat might be a sustainable business.
Interesting information. I have no interest in pretend meat. I also don’t mind it having a place in the market.
Reminds me of our school lunches in the late 1970s. We had burgers that were a blend of ground meat and soybased filler. Soyburgers we called them. The taste was unique. Not that bad. Kinda like a White Castle.
Once positive that comes out of having the Fed condemn us to endless artificial boom-bust cycles is that during boom times dozens of poorly-run companies can innovate and demonstrate “proof of concept” which, when the bust comes can survive even when the companies do not.
Only a few years ago, vegan meat seemed destined to never be bigger than chamomile tea. Now, Beyond Meat is a household name, Burger King offers “Impossible Burgers” and, Nestle has nondairy milk chocolate, Kellog’s has Incogmeato, Hormel and Cargill offer vegan hot dogs, vegan Spam etc…
Throw a trillion dollars at at wall and some of it will stick, in this case, just not Beyond Meat. Sometimes an inventor can manage hundreds of people, negotiate loans, design a factory, hire the right people to run a refrigerated trucking network, and build a multinational company . . . and sometimes an inventor should just sell the idea and go back to inventing stuff.
Haven’t and don’t want to see the pictures. But in cases like this, it’s not good enough to clean up the facility and apologize. Everyone who was okay with filth should be fired.
Still won’t eat bluebell icecream because too many people still work in the same positions where they screwed up the first time.
For it to really work it needed to come in at a price point lower then beef, being healthier than beef wouldn’t hurt either. They failed in both instances.
I must have seen the same trend 1,000 times when I was in retail.
The industry is very fond, overly fond of selling “value added” products.
Green peppers cost “X” chopped green peppers cost 3-5 times “X.”
Ground beef costs “Y” ground beef pressed into circles sells for 2-3 times “Y.”
With that much temptation, the industry becomes overly fond of introducing “value added” products, someone then makes a ridiculously over-priced product which might last for a while, but ultimately they don’t know thing 2 about how to run a business and the over-priced nature of their product cannot survive their ineptness.
Over on the investment discussion boards I posted that 4 fancy-packed Beyond Meat sausages each in it’s own cardboard cozy sells ounce-per-pounce for almost 7x what a big bag of pork sausage does (which is already 3 times the cost of the ground pork that goes into it.
I like the Morningstar fake bacon because it’s great with Peanut Butter spread on it and not as messy as cooking real bacon. Cook it in olive oil just long enough to get crisp so it can hold up the Peanut Butter. It’s like Bacon flavored crackers. Sliced banana and blueberry jelly is good on it too. It’s like a bread or tortilla sustitute and has a bacon taste. High Protein
