Beyond Meat Goes Public

Beyond Meat, founded in El Segundo, California in 2009 by Ethan Brown, priced its initial public offering at $25 a share and began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker BYND on May 2, 2019. The stock opened around $46 and kept climbing, closing its first day up 163 percent, the best-performing public offering by a major US company since 2000, during the dot-com bubble. It was the first company built entirely on plant-based meat to go public, and investors who had spent years treating veganism as a niche suddenly had to price it as a market. Beyond Meat's later struggles would test how much of that first-day number was real appetite for the product versus a hungry stock market, but for one Thursday, a burger made from pea protein outperformed almost every US listing in two decades.