What if you bought Beyond Meat in 2020?
Hype · Fad. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.0× · S&P 500 same money: $2,092
$1,000 in Beyond Meat at the start of 2020 would be worth about $40.00 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
Beyond Meat makes plant-based burgers and sausages designed to taste like meat. Its May 2019 IPO was one of the most spectacular of the decade, with the shares soaring several times above the offer price on hopes that it would transform the global meat industry. Partnerships with fast-food chains, McDonald's among them, seemed to confirm the story.
Reality proved slower. Many consumers tried plant-based meat once and did not come back, price premiums over beef persisted, and competitors from Impossible Foods to supermarket own brands crowded the shelves. Sales declined from their peak, losses mounted and the company burned through cash, relying on convertible debt raised during its boom years. Restructuring that debt in 2025 involved issuing large numbers of new shares, and despite a brief, wild meme-stock surge in late 2025, the price ended up a small fraction of its early highs. The meat industry, meanwhile, continued much as before.
The lesson: Being early to a big idea is not enough when adoption stalls, and a company priced for disruption suffers badly when growth turns to decline.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $75.00 | $40.00 | $2,092 |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2020, turning $1,000 into $40.00. The S&P 500 from that same year: $2,092.
On this day
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Beyond Meat is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
Play Sixty-40More in Hype
- What if you bought GameStop?
- What if you bought AMC Theatres?
- What if you bought Peloton?
- What if you bought Nikola?
- What if you bought Tilray?
- What if you bought GoPro?