(VIDEO) MrBeast's $1 Million Grocery Store Challenge Breaks YouTube Record After 202 Days of Eating

NEW YORK — YouTube's biggest creator has set a new personal benchmark with a challenge that kept four contestants inside a grocery store for more than six months and asked them to eat their way through millions of calories of food.

MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, said his latest video, "Eat Everything In A Grocery Store, Win $1,000,000," became the most-watched video of his career in its first 24 hours after it was uploaded Oct. 3 to his channel, which has about 520 million subscribers.

"New video is our most viewed video ever in 24 hours," Donaldson wrote on X, adding that more than 10,000 viewer comments had called it the channel's best video ever.

The roughly hourlong video drew more than 70 million views in its first day, according to Donaldson's YouTube analytics dashboard, which he shared publicly. By Oct. 5, it was approaching 100 million views, and later reports put the total above 125 million.

Donaldson also said viewers had collectively spent more than 1 billion minutes watching the video, with the average viewer staying for more than 20 minutes, an unusually long watch time for YouTube.

From $250,000 to $1 million

The record-setting upload is a sequel to a challenge that began earlier this year.

In April, Donaldson released "Last to Leave Grocery Store, Wins $250,000," in which he bought an entire grocery store and challenged participants to live inside it, with the prize going to the last person remaining. That video has since surpassed 203 million views.

After 67 days, four contestants were still refusing to leave. Rather than wait them out, Donaldson changed the rules. He offered to restock the store and raise the prize to $1 million, but only if the four worked together to clear all of the food inside.

The new task was enormous. The restocked store held roughly 4.3 million calories of food. In the video, Donaldson explained that if the four contestants each ate 2,000 calories a day, it would take them more than a year to finish everything. Any food that spoiled would be deducted from the final prize.

202 days inside the store

The contestants did not have to eat every calorie on their own. Throughout the challenge, Donaldson introduced ways for them to shrink the remaining total, including bringing in guests to help eat and allowing food to be donated as part of various challenges.

The ordeal stretched on for months. By the time it ended, the contestants had spent 202 days inside the store, more than six and a half months.

In the end, they cleared nearly all of the 4.3 million calories, with only 6,614 calories going to waste, and secured the $1 million prize.

Donaldson promoted the project before its release as a "mini movie," reflecting his trademark approach of turning extreme challenges into lavish, cinematic productions.

A record at a milestone moment

The video's success comes as Donaldson marks nearly two decades of making online content. In the same post on X, he suggested he does not believe his career has peaked.

"Even though I've been making content for 17 years now I still think my best days are ahead," he wrote.

The grocery store videos follow a familiar formula for the creator, whose channel has grown into the most-subscribed on YouTube by staging increasingly elaborate stunts with large cash prizes. Long-form challenges that span weeks or months, with contestants competing for life-changing sums, have become a signature of his biggest hits.

The approach also reflects a broader shift in Donaldson's content toward longer videos. While many YouTube creators chase short clips designed for quick viewing, the grocery store sequel ran about an hour, and its strong average watch time suggests audiences were willing to stay for an extended story.

Viewer reaction

The video quickly drew tens of thousands of comments, with many viewers praising the contestants' endurance and the payoff of following a challenge that began months earlier. Within days, the video had collected more than 90,000 comments on YouTube.

The sequel's structure, which brought back contestants from the original video and gave viewers a long-awaited resolution, appeared to resonate with fans who had followed the story since April.

Beyond YouTube

Donaldson's business ventures have expanded well beyond his YouTube channel in recent years, including snack brands, a competition series and other media projects. But his main channel remains the engine of his brand, and record-setting launches like this one reinforce his position as the platform's most-watched individual creator.

Donaldson has not said whether the grocery store challenge will return for a third installment. But with the sequel now his fastest-performing video ever, fans are already speculating about what he might attempt next.