Founded in 2009 and floated ten years later, for a few quarters the plant protein specialist's market capitalization flirted with a threshold of almost $10bn.
The company's market cap has literally evaporated over the past three years, now standing at a mere $250m. This is in stark contrast to the speculative mania that prevailed in the not-so-distant past.
It's true that, out of nowhere, Beyond Meat saw its sales leap from $16m in 2016 to $465m five years later. This was enough to whet the appetites of some adventurous investors, even though the company had never generated a single cent of profit for its shareholders. On the contrary: it had simply burned cash in ever-increasing proportions.
The last three fiscal years - 2022, 2023 and 2024 - marked a clear downturn in growth, with sales falling back to $326m over the last twelve months. This turnaround called for a halt to the hemorrhaging of cash, and this was achieved: in total, operations consumed $437m in 2021, compared with barely $106m in 2024.
Hence the central question, a sort of chicken-and-egg dilemma applied to corporate development: does slowing growth reduce cash-burn, or reducing cash-burn slow growth?
In any case, Beyond Meat now has the capital structure of an LBO - with an enterprise value of $1.3bn, four-fifths of which is covered by debt - and it's not clear how it will manage to ensure its solvency, short of a substantial capital increase.
MarketScreener's analysts note that a large number of institutional shareholders - in this case financial institutions - have increased their equity stakes despite the stock market rout. Do they know or are they up to something?
In any case, they are not being imitated by the management team, who are rushing to sell on the market the shares they receive free of charge as stock options. Stock options which, as is all too often the case, seem unwarranted in every respect.
Over the past five years, they have cost the company a total of $142m, while accumulated operating losses totaled $931m over the same period - as much money passed from investors' pockets to management's as the company's value collapsed.
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