British vegan entrepreneur Heather Mills, founder of legacy brand VBites, on what’s going wrong for the plant-based industry – and how it can move forward.
Having spent decades in the vegan food sector and collaborating with a small group of like-minded individuals to raise awareness about the urgent need to protect animals, the planet, and our health, we were delighted to witness the tremendous growth in this movement over the past five years.
We would like to take credit for it – and we definitely should, as far as making the best products are concerned at VBites.
However, the real reason for the growth was the sale of three vegan/vegetarian food companies for hundreds of millions of dollars: Quorn, Daiya, and then the IPO of Beyond Meat (which took its market cap to $12B at one point).
At the time, I warned these companies that they should have their messaging ready for the pushback from the meat and dairy industry. Unfortunately, they didn’t listen and that huge $12B valuation dropped to under $500M for Beyond Meat.
The meat and dairy industry became afraid because they did not have ownership and control of the vegan market and the boom, and put out dreadful products that turned people off going vegan.
Investor interest must be retained
In the UK, at VBites, we thought about this and got ahead of the game by replicating famous brands and manufacturing vegan alternates for them, such as Applewood vegan cheese, Domino’s pizza cheese, and numerous other supermarket labels of meat- and fish-free products.
Had these companies that obtained hundreds of millions of dollars focused on working with meat and dairy companies to replicate their brands as white labels, as well as their own brand, the Gartner effect may not have happened.
That’s why we created the first vegan burgers and cheese for McDonald’s and Burger King.
Going forward, there is no other choice than to push the reduction of global warming, the cruelty of animals, and the improvement of health by going vegan.
The most important thing is that greedy corporate investors stay invested in these companies for the long term, for the future of their own children, the planet, and the animals.
It’s not just the profit – the sector will become very profitable – however, it needs time and investment, and it needs to be well spent. I find the big corporations waste so much money and that’s attributed to this downfall.
It’s all about the people
Vegan startups mainly started with enthusiastic founders like myself. I had 30 years’ experience and made the same mistakes. However, I never had a huge investment.
A lot of these founders also were really knowledgeable in tech and brand marketing, but did not think of the bigger picture or understand how difficult it is to scale up kitchen products into large-scale, manufacturing products.
That requires a totally different expertise.
At the time, I contacted them and said: “Let us do the manufacturing for you, as we have the world’s largest 100% vegan manufacturing facilities and have been the experts for decades.”
They had no original IP and we suggested they get on with the genius of branding, but unfortunately, they ignored this and most of them went into administration.
We at VBites went through a similar situation when we were invested in, because the investors thought they knew what they were doing and didn’t listen to how to run a small family business. Bottom line, it’s all about the people.
However, I bought the whole thing back and turned it around within six months.
We have our online supermarket called Alternative Stores, which is growing 55% per month. We have 2,200 products, including the most innovative boiled, fried and poached vegan eggs. We’ve also created an egg albumen to go into food application.
To help the smaller family businesses that have been used for their innovations, then copied, private-labelled and dumped out of the supermarkets, we don’t charge for these brands to put their products on our website. This way, they can test the market without mortgaging their house and putting themselves into debt.
We have turned our companies around by working directly on the factory floor with the people who have been with us for many decades. The problem with big corporates is that they sit in their ivory towers and most of them have never run a business from the ground up, so they need to listen to the founders.
And if the founders are not experienced, they need to listen to the financial expertise of those who know what they’re doing.
I believe that there will be another plant-based boom because there has to be. There is no other option.
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