Beyond Meat is soaring again — can the fake meat company turn the meme stock spotlight into a real future?
The faux meat maker’s stock is up more than 1,200% since October 16, but its core business is still a cash incinerator.
Sometimes it’s hard to nail down what makes a meme stock. The basic ingredients — retail enthusiasm plus soaring trading and options volumes — are obvious. However, throw in a garnish of short interest betting against the stock, maybe a helping of nostalgia and a low share price, and you have a near perfect recipe for the meme age. One aspect that seems to be completely irrelevant is what the company actually does: from video games to healthcare insurance providers, real estate tech platforms to doughnuts, the meme stock kingmakers are industry agnostic.
Their latest pick is Beyond Meat, an embattled maker of plant-based meat alternatives, which soared 128% on Monday in a frenzied trading session that continued into Tuesday, when BYND shares gained another 146%. And, if early trading on Wednesday is anything to go by, we might be in for a three-peat, with BYND currently up 66% since yesterday’s close amid a flurry of posts on Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets and excitement over the new Walmart deal.
In fact, data from Bloomberg reveals that Beyond traded more volume in the premarket on Wednesday than any other stock in America — and it wasn’t even close. Turnover in BYND clocked in at $3.37 billion, more than 5x what Tesla traded and 8x the amount of Nvidia that’s changed hands.
As Sherwood News’ Luke Kawa noted, the company traded more than twice as many shares on Monday as it’s sold pounds of faux meat in its (mostly miserable) history as a publicly traded company.
The surge in trading — nearly $6 billion real dollars changed hands in BYND yesterday — comes after a debt-swap deal, which massively diluted existing shareholders. Inspired, at least in part, by a YouTuber who saw potential in the company, as well as the possibility of a short squeeze, the retail buying spree has since ensued. Already spiking this week, the positive sentiment was buoyed further yesterday after the company announced plans to expand its distribution into Walmart.
If we’ve learned anything about meme stocks over the last few years, though, it’s that the attention can go as quickly as it comes. The OG meme stock, GameStop, managed to use its fame to transform itself, selling hundreds of millions of new shares and creating a formidable balance sheet with billions of dollars of cash on its books.
The question for Beyond might be: can it do the same? Because, even after the recent debt-swap deal, the fact remains that its core plant-based business is still incinerating cash. Once a $14 billion Wall Street darling amid the alternative meat boom, the company has since seen its sales slide and layoffs continue.
Since its 2019 IPO, the burger and mincemeat maker has spent nearly its entire public life in the red, only turning a profit across two quarters (Q3 2019 and Q1 2020) at the height of the plant protein craze. Demand has since started to shift back toward conventional animal products, while the brand’s higher prices have turned off cost-conscious shoppers. Indeed, cumulative net losses have reached $1.2 billion from 2018 through mid-2025.
The company’s gross margin has followed a similar trajectory: while it topped the typical 20% to 30% range for a food-processing company at the plant-based peak, it has since dropped to 11.5% as of the second quarter of this year.
