Beyond Meat (BYND) – One Company One Story

Welcome to another story and another video in my One Company One Story series.
This time, Beyond Meat (BYND).

Here comes the amateur legalese.

I began investing in companies and their stocks in the late 70s, but am not a certified investment professional.

My style and history of investing is described in Dream. Invest. Live., a book I wrote by request – which came out as the Great Recession (the Second Great Depression) began. Bad timing, eh? https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0035XVXAA

My personal finance blog (a blog about my finances) is: https://trimbathcreative.net/

I am not investment professional. This is not financial advice. 

Beyond Meat seems like a natural response to a natural issue. We like meat. Unfortunately, raising animals for meat has ethical issues (for some), climate issues (for some), and issues around land and water and runoff issues (for some). Solution: make food that tastes the same (or close enough) without using animals. Beyond Meat has created food that is an analogue to meat. Make it tasty enough, affordable enough, and available enough and the market may be bigger than ‘for some’ and ‘for others’. We, er, they have the technology!

For a while I noticed talk about replicating steaks and recognizable pieces of animal muscle, but many meals are ground meats, as in burgers and sausages. That’s a large market.

Companies start small. The meat industry is enough and entrenched in thousands of years of culture. David taking on Goliath doesn’t compare.

Another way of looking at it takes advantage of that. If we need alternatives to such an enormous industry, starting a business in an alternative can have enormous rewards.

The company was founded in 2009, in the Great Recession (the Second Great Depression, for some). Without much surprise, the early potential met some un-tasty realities; but, they continue to learn and improve. They have several manufacturing facilities and joint ventures with companies like McDonald’s.

What could go wrong? A pandemic. 

The details of their hoped-for recovery deal with a hoped-for temporary situation. In the long term, the situation doesn’t just remain the same but becomes more pronounced. There is the potential that the recovery will happen as they’ve gained experience and the brand has developed name recognition.

Hoped-for recoveries are optimisms. The investment community hasn’t shared that optimism. The stock is just above $10 after a post-IPO stock price of over $200. Layoffs have happened and sales are down. An optimist could see an opportunity to buy. A pessimist could see an example of expectations of bad news. Everyone is always guessing. If investing was rigorously logical and mathematical there would be no risk and less chance of a reward (pending some phenomenal economic restructuring.)

I intend to buy some of their products, eventually, but I am in the fortunate position of having a local rancher who raises cattle, pigs, lamb, and chicken, and sells their meat in their store and in the local markets. I like what they do, and I like supporting local agriculture. But then I think of the hundreds of millions of meat-eaters who have no such connection, who are already buying highly-processed food. Processing plants instead of processing animals can make a lot of profitable sense.

I hope they survive and thrive. I’ll be watching.

The video: