Beyond Meat

Founding

Ethan Brown founded the company in 2009 with the stated mission of combating climate change. Brown initially contacted two University of Missouri professors, Fu-hung Hsieh and Harold Huff, who had been developing their meatless protein for years. Upon licensing Hsieh and Huff's technology, Beyond Meat launched its first product, Beyond Chicken Strips , in Whole Foods location in 2012 and expanded nationally in 2013. In 2014, Beyond Meat developed its first plant-based beef product, Beyond Beef Crumbles, and has since expanded into plant-based pork. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals named Beyond Meat as its Company of the Year for 2013.

IPO and finance

Over the years 2013 to 2016, the company received venture funding from GreatPoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Obvious Corporation, Bill Gates, Biz Stone, the Humane Society and Tyson Foods. Tyson Foods purchased a 5% stake in Beyond Meat in October 2016, but sold its 6.5% stake and exited the investment in April 2019, ahead of the company's initial public offering. By 2018, Beyond Meat had raised US$72 million in venture financing. Beyond Meat is also backed by celebrity and athlete investors such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Jessica Chastain, Snoop Dogg, Liza Koshy, Chris Paul, Kyrie Irving, DeAndre Hopkins and others.In May 2019, Beyond Meat went public and trades on the United States Nasdaq exchange under the symbol BYND. It is the first plant-based meat analogue company to go public. On the day of its IPO, the company was valued at $3.8 billion and was the best-performing public offering by a major U.S. company in almost two decades. As of June 2021, Beyond Meat had a market cap of $9.44 billion. In November 2020, Beyond Meat announced sales had only grown by 2% year-on-year compared to an expected increase of 40% due to the impact of COVID-19 on foodservice sales. Beyond Meat shifted its focus to grocery, convenience stores, and other forms of distribution during the COVID-19 pandemic. By September 2022, the stock price had fallen to an all-time low, that was 93 % lower than the all-time high set in July 2019 and 74 % lower than at the start of 2022. In October 2022, the company announced a 19 % workforce reduction, or approximately 200 employees, due to revenue declines.

Manufacturing

In the United States, Beyond Meat has several manufacturing facilities in the United States, including in Columbia, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. In June 2018, Beyond Meat opened its second production facility in Columbia, Missouri, resulting in a three-fold increase of the company's manufacturing space. In 2020, Beyond Meat acquired a manufacturing facility in Devault, Pennsylvania. In Europe, Beyond Meat has two facilities in the Netherlands: a co-manufacturing facility in Zoeterwoude owned and operated by Dutch company Zandbergen, and an owned facility in Enschede. These two facilities service the distribution network across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.In China, Beyond Meat operates an owned manufacturing plant in Jiaxing. It is the company's first "end-to-end manufacturing facility" outside of the United States and began full-scale production in 2021.

Research and innovation

In 2018, Beyond Meat opened a 26,000 square feet R&D lab in El Segundo, California. In January 2021, Beyond Meat announced that it will be opening a new global headquarters in El Segundo, CA later that year. The company says the facility will house three to four times its current number of R&D team members once the campus is complete.