In July 2019, Beyond Meat’s stock price hit an all-time high of $234.90 per share. As of the writing of this column, that stock price is now $17.06 per share. Mike Tyson couldn’t have knocked that price out any harder.
Speaking of Tyson, last week, a high-level executive for Beyond Meat used Iron Mike’s playbook and allegedly bit the nose of another driver after a road rage incident following a college football game. Ironically, he spent 30 years at Tyson Foods in Alabama in their poultry sector. I can’t make this up. Let’s hope he has sign-on bonuses instead of stock options. Otherwise, he may have bitten off his own nose to spite his face. Either way, someone’s nose got stuck in the wrong end of somebody’s business.
The entire stock market is built around evaluating the optimism or pessimism within each individual company. All the algorithms, measurements, reports and indexes that drive stock prices simply play into whether there is optimism or not for the next quarter. When you talk about losses of over 80%, it’s hard to be optimistic about the sustainability of petri dish proteins.
Luckily for them, President Joe Biden included them in his Sept. 12 biotechnology sustainability executive order. I’ll grant that there were several wins for true protein production, but it makes me leery that they have a seat at the table in these conversations. This is one more example of government investing into areas that the private sector has clearly stayed away from. It’s hard to ignore the clear agenda in this arena.
Privately owned fast food chain Panda Express recently rolled out their “Beyond The Original Orange Chicken” as an alternative protein source for vegetarians wanting to enjoy the signature dish that has made the 2,300-store chain a success. The irony is that they used markets in southern California and New York City to gauge the success the item would have on all their menus.
In one review article I read, the author said, “Maybe that orange sauce is just so good it won’t matter what the product is. That’s their only hope, because that sauce makes any fried animal taste good.”
It appears to me that everybody in the food service industry is going to give it a shot simply to say that they have, but all the real data suggests nothing can compare to the real product—just ask anyone owning Beyond Meat stock right now.
On our side of the fence, optimism is brewing, especially on the cow-calf side. Over the last three weeks, there have been bull sales nearly every day in the Far West. Most of these sales have averaged higher than previous years, even on the heels of the extremely drought-stricken state of California. I spent the first couple weeks of September there attending the sales, and when you take a rallying calf market combined with several other factors, the future looks very optimistic, and we are seeing cattlemen position themselves for a good run. In fact, commercial bred females were bringing from the mid-$2,000s to the low $3,000s in special bred heifer sales at the end of July and first of August.
Overall, the production sales have been fantastic. I also think the quality and consistency from one program to the next have been very impressive. The California bull buyer is as data-conscious as a buyer in any region, and the bar continues to be raised each year. We find these bull buyers to be very astute when it comes to evaluating cattle and interpreting the data.
They make calculated decisions to drive phenotype forward while upholding a high standard of performance, maternal and carcass traits blended together. It comes as no surprise the seedstock breeders in that region are being rewarded for their efforts. As sales start kicking up across the country, this trend is holding true.
The overarching question is how high and how long we will have in this wave that is inevitably coming, both for seedstock and commercial producers. Those cattlemen and women that have been able to withstand the last several years are positioned to reap the rewards. And for that, I am very optimistic. — LOGAN IPSEN
