Beyond Meat has launched plant-based Chicken Pieces at Kroger stores across the US, marking a new iteration of its first-ever product, and the return of a fan favourite.
At the behest of its fans, plant-based giant Beyond Meat has brought back the cult-favourite product that kickstarted the company’s journey.
The El Segundo-based firm has reintroduced Chicken Pieces, a successor to its first-ever product, Chicken Strips, which was discontinued six years ago.
According to the company, the new unbreaded chicken is one of Beyond Meat’s “most highly requested products”, teasing its release on its Instagram page with a post that featured countless comments from customers asking for the chicken and debuting it at Expo West in Anaheim, California this past March.
The launch comes days after a two-decade-long study showed that regularly eating chicken could double the risk of death from gastrointestinal cancers, raising fresh concerns about advice from bodies like the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which has supported a shift to white meat as a planetary and human health solution.
“After several years of research to raise the bar on taste, clean ingredients, and nutrition, Beyond Meat is reintroducing our unbreaded chicken platform as Beyond Chicken Pieces,” a company spokesperson told Green Queen.
“As a company dedicated to rapid and relentless innovation to create the most delicious and nutritious plant-based proteins, and following the introduction of our breakthrough unbreaded chicken strips, we are excited that we have truly raised the bar with this newest iteration of unbreaded chicken,” they added.
The evolution of Beyond Meat’s chicken
While Beyond Meat may be best known for its beef burger patties today, when it first entered the retail market, it was with a plant-based chicken range, launching grilled strips in a frozen format in 2013.
That product was the result of 20 years of research by University of Missouri professors Harold Huff and Fu-Hung Hsieh, whose formula was licensed by Ethan Brown, founder and CEO of Beyond Meat.
The firm launched the Chicken Strips in the US market in 2012 and garnered a cult following among its customer base. However, the product failed to impress food journalists like Mark Bittman, then an influential columnist at the New York Times, who called it “bland, unexciting and not very chicken-like” when trying the strips unadulterated.
As Beyond Meat introduced its beef and sausage analogues in the years ahead, it discontinued the OG chicken product in 2019, the same year it went public.
The company did not respond to Green Queen’s question about why the frozen chicken strips were withdrawn from the market in the first place, though an FAQ section on its website at the time said: “We’re constantly innovating and renovating our products based on consumer feedback. Unfortunately, our Chicken Strips weren’t delivering the same plant-based meat experience as some of our more popular products.”
It added: “But, there’s good news. We have a team of chefs and scientists who are working on getting an even better, tastier version of Beyond Chicken Strips back on retail shelves and restaurant menus as soon as possible.”
Now, after six years, they’re finally back, this time as pieces rather than strips. “Made from simple ingredients including avocado oil, which is high in heart-healthy monounsaturated fats, Beyond Chicken Pieces offer 21g of clean plant protein per serving with only 0.5g saturated fat, no cholesterol, no GMOs, and no added hormones or antibiotics,” the company spokesperson told Green Queen.
Like many of Beyond’s recent products, it carries certifications from the American Heart Association’s Heart-Check and the American Diabetes Association’s Better Choices for Life scheme.
Will consumers take to unbreaded vegan chicken pieces?
Beyond Meat’s unbreaded chicken pieces are made from soy protein, wheat gluten, natural flavours, avocado oil, potato starch, pea fibre, potassium salt, yeast extract, spices and seasonings, and salt. They’re available at 1,900 Kroger stores, with each 10-oz pack setting you back $8.99.
While it may be the company’s most requested product, introducing a pre-cut unbreaded chicken analogue is an interesting choice. There are several other products like this on the market, including from The Vegetarian Butcher and Vivera, but they tend to be a hard sell for meat-eaters, which is the focal consumer demographic for plant-based meat companies.
In a 2,700-person taste test of American omnivores, only 37% liked the market-leading vegan chicken strips and chunks, falling to 25% for the average brand, as opposed to 67% who liked the animal-based benchmark.
Taste-testers complained of a bland, earthy and chemical flavour, as well as a weird aftertaste in the average unbreaded plant-based chicken chunks. In fact, even the plant-based leader was preferred over its conventional counterpart by just 15% of participants.
When it comes to unbreaded chicken analogues, people prefer whole-cut filets over strips or chunks. “One of the biggest R&D opportunities across all categories was juiciness [or] tenderness,” explained Caroline Cotto, director of Nectar, the research agency that conducted the taste test. “That played out in this category clearly where perhaps the smaller pieces have more problems retaining their moisture.”
Beyond Meat restates core focus amid whole-food demand
Plant-based meat continued to see declining sales in the US last year, dropping by 7%, just as traditional proteins like tofu, tempeh, and seitan witnessed a 7% hike in sales. This comes as consumers are looking for more whole-food options. In the UK, plant-based meat brand THIS’s Super Superfood and Oh So Wholesome’s Veg’chop, which pack plants in protein-rich blocks, lean into this trend.
Beyond Meat did not respond to questions about market decline or the impact of the Trump administration’s policies on its business though the company said that its “core product portfolio is intended to replicate beef, pork and poultry”. When asked how it plans to straddle the line between meat alternatives and whole foods, it pointed to the Sun Sausage line it launched last year, which the spokesperson called “an important and exciting expansion of our product portfolio”.
The Sun Sausages contain a base of yellow peas, brown rice, red lentils and faba beans, which are complemented with avocado oil, oat bran, oat fibre, and other ingredients. While the brand has touted a “clean and simple ingredient list”, each of the three flavours contains over 20 ingredients.
Beyond Meat has been doubling down on the health messaging over the last year, battling vast amounts of misinformation from the meat industry with a new documentary, Planting Change, released last week.
“There’s also a very strong countercurrent, which is this narrative around being highly processed and full of questionable ingredients, which is a manufactured narrative. It’s not one that actually has science behind it or much truth to it,” Brown said in an earnings call in February.
He has previously stated that it would be arguable “whether Beyond Meat is, at its core, a plant-based meat company that delivers health and wellness, or a health and wellness company that makes plant-based meat”.
The company’s revenues were down by 5% in 2024, though the rate of decline had slowed substantially, with losses shrinking by 52%. That said, it decided to suspend its China operations and laid off 9% of its global workforce in the last quarter of 2024. Now, it’s preparing to debut a new steak product made with mycelium, and will announce the financial results of Q1 2025 next week.
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