“In a year of splashy news for plant-based meat — skyrocketing sales! the new McPlant! —one of the biggest developments in the field went oddly underreported.
In the last three months of 2020, some of the biggest companies in the world announced major moves into the plant-based meat space.
In September, Tesco — the UK’s largest supermarket chain — announced plans to increase sales of plant-based products 300 percent by 2025. Last month, Unilever — the world’s 19th largest food and beverage manufacturer — set a new annual global sales target of $1.2 billion from plant-based meat and dairy within the next five to seven years, about five times what it forecasts it will make from plant-based sales in 2020. And a few days later, Ikea announced that half its restaurant meals and 80 percent of its packaged food offerings would be plant-based by 2025.
Those announcements were just the latest notable steps some major restaurant chains and food companies took in the last year or so toward plant-based products. This isn’t Big Food’s first foray into plant-based meat and dairy, though. Over the last few years, some food companies have acquired plant-based startups or launched their own meatless meat products. But these latest announcements — pledging to significantly increase plant-based sales by 2025 — represent a much bigger investment in the future of animal-free protein than we’ve seen in the past.
These moves have largely been made in response to growing consumer demand. The last few years have seen the new wave of meatless meat achieve something of mainstream status, and the pandemic has only added to the momentum. Concerns about the spread of the coronavirus at meatpacking facilities and supply-chain troubles at grocery stores early in the pandemic seemed to contribute to greater demand for meatless meat.
Some of these companies are touting their pledges as initiatives to help them meet their broader sustainability goals, which is a good bet. Meat, milk, and egg production accounts for 14.5 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and in numerous reports scientists have called on world leaders to use dietary change as a tool to curb emissions. Despite animal agriculture’s outsized impact on the environment, governments have been slow to enact policies to reduce animal product consumption, so these corporate pledges are meaningful steps in the fight against climate change and our hyper-industrialized farming system.
To be sure, these recent pledges are voluntary, and progress on corporate sustainability has been mixed. A recent Bloomberg analysis found that out of 187 companies that set climate pledges to be achieved by 2020 or earlier, three quarters of the companies met their goals — but some goals were quite modest, and a tenth of companies didn’t even report their progress.
So time will tell if companies make good on their word to significantly increase their plant-based offerings. For now, these moves are worth cautiously celebrating. Plant-based meats account for a tiny portion of US meat sales, but the upside seems obvious to the industry. Big Food isn’t composed of nonprofit organizations, and the largest among them have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize returns. A move to invest more in plant-based food suggests they think there’s a real market here.
Plant-based food enters the mainstream
Once a niche sector reserved for vegetarians, plant-based food has crept into the mainstream over the past few years. The percentage of vegetarians and vegans has remained low — about 5 percent and 3 percent respectively — but the number of “flexitarians,” people who often turn to plant-based foods instead of animal products, seems to be rising. (There is no standard measure of how much or how little meat is included in such diets, however.)
In 2018, more than one in three Brits said in a consumer survey that they had recently reduced their meat consumption, up from 28 percent in 2017. Similar trends have been reported in US consumer research, as 36 percent now say that they follow a part-time carnivorous lifestyle. During those years, the market for plant-based foods in the US grew to $3 billion, and today it’s at $5 billion.
So what happened? How did plant-based food go from niche to mainstream?
According to insiders, health and sustainability are the driving forces.
‘We see several trends in plant-based food and beverage driving people to enter and explore the category,’ says Domenic Borrelli, who oversees plant-based products for yogurt maker Danone, which in 2018 pledged to triple its worldwide plant-based sales to around $6 billion by 2025. ‘Some are following the latest wellness trends, incorporating plant-based alternatives into their diets as a step toward their personal health. … Some choose plant-based for dietary reasons, such as lactose intolerance. Consumers also opt for dairy alternatives to be mindful of our planet.’
Earlier this year, Panera Bread announced that it plans to make half of its menu items vegetarian or vegan by 2021, citing sustainability goals and its growing base of flexitarian customers, and Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, announced plans to open its first plant-based food production facility in China.
Sodexo, the third-largest foodservice company in the US, which provides food at hospital and university cafeterias, is also backing plant-based food. Last year, it committed to reduce carbon emissions by 34 percent by 2025, and anticipates that half of its carbon reduction target globally will be achieved through changes in its supply chain, including increasing plant-based purchases.
‘In order to achieve this target,’ says Lara Seng, who manages sustainability initiatives for Sodexo, “we must address the emissions related to our supply chain, of which 70 percent result from animal-based food purchases in the United States.”
Indeed, industrial animal agriculture is wreaking havoc on our planet. The rearing of livestock is not only a major driver of climate change; it’s also a leading cause of other environmental problems like soil degradation, water and nutrient pollution, and biodiversity loss. Raising animals for food is a resource intensive practice: One-third of the planet’s arable land is used to grow crops as farm animal feed, and those crops are responsible for nearly one-third of all the water used in agriculture.
‘Of note, a half-gallon of Silk [the plant-based milk brand] takes significantly less water to produce than traditional dairy milk,’ Borrelli says.
You might think that consumer awareness around the health and sustainability benefits of plant-based foods especially among millennials and Gen Z is the main driver of the trend. But that’s only a small part of the story.
Research suggests that people primarily choose food based on three factors — taste, price, and convenience. And for a long time, vegan food was — to put it kindly — gross, expensive, and hard to find. But that began to change when leveled-up versions of plant-based meat became available.
Startups like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods poured many years and many millions of dollars into research and development, innovating plant-based products that rivaled the taste, texture, and even the smell of their animal-based counterparts. Rather than market them to vegetarians, these startups appealed to flexitarians and meat-eaters, partnering with athletes like Kyrie Irving and Shaquille O’Neal and celebrities like Snoop Dogg, Kevin Hart, and Octavia Spencer to appear in their advertising.
At the same time, according to Julie Emmett of the Plant Based Foods Association, “new data-driven initiatives like placing plant-based meat in the meat department” drove sales even higher. And finally, plant-based burgers on Burger King and White Castle menus turned the plant-based trend into a food industry mainstay.
Then the pandemic hit.”
View the whole story here: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22196077/impossible-foods-tesco-ikea-panera