Laid off from Beyond Meat.

What Beyond Meat layoffs have meant for employees

You can match a Beyond Meat layoff to its round by its date and by the group the round drew from. The company announced the first in its second-quarter 2022 results, and for each later round its October 2022 8-K, its August 2025 8-K or its 2025 annual report gives the day the plan was approved, whether the board or management approved it, and the share of the workforce it covered. For the August 2025 cut the annual report gives a later, slightly smaller count than the 8-K announced, so the two documents don't match exactly, and it says that cut was substantially complete by the end of the third quarter of 2025.

Who was cut shifted from round to round. The October 2022 job losses spanned all levels of the company, Food Dive reported, and the October 2022 filing says the global chief growth officer's job was eliminated as part of it. The November 2023 cut and February 2025's North America and EU cut were drawn from what Beyond Meat calls its non-production workforce. The August 2025 cut, in North America, was meant to lower the cost of goods sold as well as operating expenses, its filing said, and the 2025 exit from China took nearly its whole staff there.

The reasons the company gave changed little. Each description of a cut from October 2022 on calls it a decision based on cost-reduction initiatives, and the first of them added a sharper focus on key growth priorities. The 2022 rounds came as the company cited pressure from inflation and intensifying competition, the Associated Press reported. Ethan Brown, the chief executive, called the October 2022 cut "an appropriate right-sizing of our organization" in a release Food Dive quoted, and in August 2025, saying he was disappointed with the second-quarter results, he said Beyond Meat was reducing its operating expenses "more rapidly and aggressively" to fit the revenue it expected, according to Food Dive's August 2025 report. If the question of why you left comes up in an interview, the filings give the company's stated reason, a cost decision announced to investors, and there's more on telling that story in explaining a layoff.

For the February 2025 North America and EU cut and the August 2025 cut, Beyond Meat's filings say the severance, benefits and related costs were provided, in all cases, to departing employees. The amount recorded for the August 2025 cut fell inside the range the company had estimated when it announced the cut. Both the 2021 annual report and the 2025 one say no Beyond Meat employee was represented by a labor union. The October 2022 filing also counted about $12 million in non-cash savings from unvested stock awards that would have vested over the next year, so unvested stock figured in the company's savings math as well.

The October 2022 filing allowed that local law and consultation rules could carry that cut past the end of 2022 in some countries, and the 2025 annual report notes that the company must seek the advice of the Netherlands Works Council before a variety of decisions about its operations there, where it owns a plant in Enschede. If you worked for Beyond Meat in the EU, the February 2025 announcement named the region alongside North America.

If your job was at the El Segundo headquarters or at the plants in Columbia, Missouri or Devault, Pennsylvania, which the 2025 annual report lists as the company's main US sites, the claim rules for each state are on California unemployment benefits, Missouri unemployment benefits and Pennsylvania unemployment benefits.