People hardly talked about things like vegan/vegetarian, chemical-free, GMO-free, hormone-free, gluten-free, and so on, a decade ago but it is a mega trend today and Beyond Meat is at the forefront of it.

Beyond Meat Inc. (BYND) is a plant-based protein (“meatless”) food production company headquartered in California that designs alternative food products to replace chicken, beef, and pork.  From “meatballs” to sausages and ‘ham’burgers, Beyond Meat is constantly expanding its product line to appeal to every type of customer, and as this trend of going ‘beyond meat’ gains traction, the company is likely to reap the benefits.

• Beyond Meat products are on the shelves of 4,500 grocery stores and in 27,000 restaurants which account for 58% and 42% of revenue, respectively.
• Its YoY sales grew 56.4% in October on the heels of a 49.3% growth rate in September which was significantly ahead of the 39.1% logged by the plant-based category as a whole.
• At the end of last year, Beyond Meat's products were available in 65 countries, but mainly through exports.
• This year it acquired a manufacturing facility in the Netherlands to facilitate Beyond Meat production and distribution throughout Europe and has plans to open a facility near Shanghai to increase the availability of its products in Asia.

Q3 2020 Financial Results (All figures are in USD and compared to the previous quarter.)

• Net Revenues: declined 16.7% to $94.4M
• Gross Profit: declined 24.3% to $25.5M
• Gross Margin: declined to 27.0% from 29.7%
• Net Profit (Loss): increased by 71.6% to $(19.3M)
• Loss /Share: increased to $(0.31) from $(0.16)
• Adjusted EBITDA Loss: reduced to $(4.3M) from $11.7M
• EBITDA Loss as a % of Net Revenues: declined to -4.5% from +10.3%

Management Commentary

Ethan Brown, President and CEO, commented as follows:

• "Our financial results reflect a quarter where for the first time since the pandemic began, we experienced the full brunt and unpredictability of COVID-19 on our net revenues and accordingly, throughout our P&L.
• Unlike the second quarter where record retail buying and freezer loading by consumers offset the deterioration of our foodservice business as COVID-19 stay-at-home and related measures set in, the long tail of retail stockpiling by consumers, coupled with continued challenges across the majority of our foodservice customers, led to Q3 results that were lower than we expected."

Stock Performance

Beyond Meat went public in May 2019 with an IPO at US$25/share and has never looked back trading at $150.50 as of today and now has a market capitalization of US$11.2 billion.

This article concludes our series of exclusive TalkMarket articles on the burgeoning plant-based food industry. The previous five posted articles were on Laird Superfood, Better Plant Sciences, The Very Good Food Company, Modern Meat, and Else Nutrition.