MW How Beyond Meat sank from a $14 billion plant-based protein powerhouse to a penny stock

By Bill Peters and Tomi Kilgore

There's a lot more to Beyond Meat's fall from grace than just falling sales and mounting losses

Beyond Meat cleared one listing hurdle by filing its annual report, but still has to get its penny stock to trade for dollars before clearing the next one.

Beyond Meat appeased Nasdaq regulators this past week by finally filing its 2025 annual report, but there's still another matter the onetime alternative-protein darling has to deal with to keep its stock from being delisted.

Maintaining its stock listing is crucial for the company, as it provides a way to raise needed capital. But the listing threat pales in comparison to the company's problem of falling sales and mounting losses.

The former Wall Street darling (BYND), which some believed was protected by a moat built by its focus on research and the groundbreaking use of pea-based proteins, is facing a fundamental crisis of cash, competition, confidence in management and a consumer for whom fake meat's novelty wore off in the face of rising prices.

That, as well as massive shareholder dilution, has pushed the stock into "penny stock" territory - it has closed below $1 every day since Jan. 15. - from its peak well above $200.

Beyond, which recently dropped the word "meat" from its name, has not yet responded to a MarketWatch request for comment.

For a frustrated shareholder, it certainly doesn't help that the company disclosed Friday that Founder and CEO Ethan Brown got a six-fold increase in pay in 2025.

So what happened?

The blowout IPO that was

The company went public on May 2, 2019, after the initial public offering priced at $25 to value the company at that time at $1.46 billion. The public couldn't get enough of the stock, as it closed its first day at $65.75, or 163% above its IPO price, to mark the best debut for an IPO of its size in 19 years.

The mania continued for a couple of months, as the stock rose to its record close of $234.90 on July 26, 2019. At that price, the company's capitalization was $14.14 billion.

When the stock peaked at its record close of $234.90 on July 26, 2019 - nearly 10 times the IPO price of $25 - the company's market cap was $14.14 billion.

The stock closed Friday at 60 cents. At that price, Beyond Meat's market cap stood at $270.6 million.

The four Cs that sank Beyond Meat

Investors hoped the company would appeal to environmentally-conscious and vegetarian-curious consumers - or with anyone concerned about the meat industry and animal welfare - and take off in a fashion similar to plant-based milk.

None of that has gone as planned.

One of the four Cs that sank Beyond Meat is cash - BTIG analyst Peter Saleh said the company ended 2025 with $206.5 million in available cash, after burning through $160 million of it last year. He estimated that the company's current cash position will last four about six more quarters.

On March 31, Beyond Meat actually reported a rare quarterly net profit, but that was only because it booked a one-time $548.7 million non-cash gain for a debt restructuring. Just from its business operations, losses more than tripled to $132.7 million, while net revenue dropped 20% to $61.6 million, which was the lowest total since the first quarter of 2019.

Next is competition - Rival food companies quickly rolled out their own plant-based fares to try to ride Beyond Meat's coattails. But the real competition was with "real" meat. As Zak Stambor, a retail analyst at eMarketer, noted, the share of people who don't eat meat in the U.S. remains small, pointing to a Gallup poll from 2023 that found 4% of people in the U.S. identify as vegetarian, while 1% identified as vegan.

"If you can't also capture pescetarians or just regular old omnivores, that limits the total addressable market," he said. "It just isn't as large as investors had initially thought."

Next is the consumer - Stambor also noted that the stock hit fresh lows in 2022, as inflation spiked and shoppers scrutinized their food budgets more closely. Circana said the price gap between more-expensive meat alternatives and the real thing kept widening since 2022, to $4.20 per pound in 2024. Sales of U.S. meat-alternative products overall have fallen every year since 2022, with the most pronounced year-over-year drop of 7.4% arriving in the 52-week period ending on March 28 this year, according to Nielsen data.

"Some people who had been purchasing Beyond Meat because they had thought it was healthier, or because of novelty, decided maybe I'll just stick with the old tried-and-true and save a little money," Stambor said.

Investors had something else to chew on. The company disclosed Friday that while the stock plunged 78.2% in 2025 - it's worst-ever performance - Founder and CEO Ethan Brown total compensation for the year was about six times what it was the year before.

And then there was confidence, in management - the company was late filing its audited 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission because it had discovered a "material weakness" in how management oversaw its financial reporting regarding provisions for excess and obsolete inventory.

While management was working to strengthen internal controls, the company said it "can give no assurance that our remediation plan will fully remediate the identified material weaknesses or that additional material weaknesses will not arise in the future."

Then there's the issue of the big jump in Founder and CEO Brown's total compensation.

While shareholders suffered - the stock plunged 78.2% in 2025, the worst year it had since going public - the company disclosed Friday that Brown's total compensation for 2025 was valued at $29.85 million, up from $5.02 million the year before. That increase included an annual base salary raise of 17.5% to $587,500, and 26.7 million in stock awards, up from 4.5 million in stock awards the year before.

Massive shareholder dilution

From a straight stock-price perspective, once the shine started to fade on Beyond Meat, it was shareholders that paid the price for the fundamental problems.

A major debt restructuring, that gave a non-cash boost to the bottom line, and helped the company's balance sheet, came at a huge cost to shareholders.

The big blow came last September, when the company said the debt restructuring included the issuance of up to 326.2 million shares, as well as new notes that could be converted into common stock. In a subsequent filing, the company acknowledged that the restructuring would result in "substantial dilution" to current shareholders.

Here's what that means.

In this past week's 10-K, the company said it had 463.56 million common shares outstanding. When the company went public, it had 58.31 million shares.

A shareholder who owned 1% of the shares outstanding after the IPO would now only own 0.13% of the shares outstanding even if they didn't sell any shares. That alone would be enough to send many investors away.

Threat of delisting continues

On Thursday, the company disclosed that it had received a de-listing warning on April 6 from the Nasdaq because of the late filing. But at the same time, the company filed its 10-K to regain compliance with that obligation, even as the material weakness has not yet been corrected.

However, the higher listing hurdle to clear is the one disclosed in early March, that it needed to get its stock back above $1. The company said in its 10-K that it would consider a reverse stock split - a technical way to raise the stock price by combining shares outstanding.

Stocks tend to rise when companies enact a traditional stock split, to make each stock more affordable for investors, because it implies an expectation that prices will continue to rise, and given the psychological benefit of investors being able to buy more shares. In the same way, a reverse stock split is a psychological negative, because it appears to imply that the company doesn't expect the stock price to rise on its own.

-Bill Peters -Tomi Kilgore

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April 12, 2026 09:00 ET (13:00 GMT)

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