Yahoo Finance Beyond Meat’s financial woes magnified through late payments
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Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comments provided from Beyond Meat and a clarification on where CreditSafe says it collects its data.
Struggling plant-based company Beyond Meat is having trouble paying its bills, with a third of its 2024 payments overdue to vendors by 91 days or more, according to data from Creditsafe.
Thirty six percent of the company’s bills for 2024 were 91 days or more late. In July alone, 32.8% of its bills were between 1 to 30 days late and and 13.2% were 31 to 60 days late.
“When a company has an erratic pattern of paying bills on time, it’s usually an indication of larger financial issues at play,” Ragini Bhalla, head of brand and spokesperson at Creditsafe, said in an email to Food Dive.
“The figures are highly inaccurate and we vehemently disagree with the characterizations,” a Beyond Meat spokesperson said in an emailed statement to Food Dive on the data.
Creditsafe collects its Trade Payment data through a global network of partners and trade payment contributors, it said in an emailed statement to Food Dive. It then matches this data to "our universe to provide a deeper level of insights into a particular company’s payment behaviors and to assess their credit risk.”
“What really stood out was how unstable the company’s payment behaviors have been over the last 12 months,” Bhalla added.
The maker of Beyond Burger and Sausage products also struggled with a similar issue during the last three months of 2023. Late payments 91 days or more overdue rose from 9.7% in October to 42.3% in November and 69.7% in December of last year.
Late payments can have a domino effect on the cash flow of companies that supply products to Beyond, according to Bhalla.
While the company is facing its own financial troubles and falling behind on payments, its suppliers are placed in a position of trying to keep businesses afloat and maintaining good relations with their customers, she said.
Beyond Meat has been struggling for several years, as the plant-based meat category has faced declining sales.
The company reported its ninth straight quarter of year-over-year revenue declines for the second period ending June 29. Beyond Meat also recently engaged with a group of bondholders to initiate discussions about a balance-sheet restructuring.
CEO Ethan Brown assured investors on its Aug. 7 conference call that the company was making progress on streamlining its manufacturing and holding down costs. Beyond plans to cut at least $70 million from its operating budget in 2024. It also discontinued its jerky line, launched in 2022 in collaboration with PepsiCo, due to declining popularity of the product in the U.S. region.
Brown said earlier this month that consumers and retailers are reacting positively to the company’s new product formulations that have an emphasis on health and wellbeing.
“The health and wellness marketing sounds dubious to us given that most consumers cite taste as the leading barrier to adopting the category rather than health,” TD Cowen analysts said in a research note.
Bhalla said close attention will need to be paid to whether Beyond’s suppliers put orders on hold if the issues persist for the remainder of 2024.