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Category: Alt Protein

  • Florida Will Soon Ban Cultivated Meat – Here’s How the Industry is Fighting Back

    florida cultivated meat
    7 Mins Read

    Florida will imminently ban cultivated meat from being produced or sold within state borders, with governor Ron DeSantis set to sign the bill that was passed in the Republican-controlled House last week. But the alternative protein industry is fighting back.

    “We’re not going to do that fake meat. Like, that doesn’t work.”

    These are the words of a lawmaker whose presidential campaign to undo all climate progress didn’t work (although the man who beat him out is worse). However, Ron DeSantis is still the governor of Florida, and despite support for the Republican seesawing over the last couple of months, his words are likely to come true soon.

    Last week, a Senate bill that attempted to ban cultivated meat in Florida was passed by the House of Representatives, meaning all it now needs a sign-off from DeSantis’s red pen. And given his rhetoric about what he calls “fake meat” (which it isn’t) and overarching views about the climate crisis – he believes humans, four million of whom could die due to climate change in 2024, are safer than ever – his approval of the ban is an almost certainty.

    This would mean, despite scientists, the USDA, and the FDA ruling that cultivated meat is safe for human consumption, Florida’s Big Ag lobby and livestock-loving policymakers have decided otherwise. The alternative protein industry, however, isn’t having it – and it’s pushing back with a new campaign.

    Why Florida wants to ban cultivated meat

    It all started in November last year, when Florida House representative Tyler Sirois proposed a bill (HB 435) seeking to ban the manufacturing and sale of cultivated meat within the state, imposing criminal penalties on anyone violating these rules. There was a list of penalties for non-compliance, with violators facing a misdemeanour of the second degree, alongside a fine between $500 to $1,000, and a possible license suspension or immediate stop-sale order.

    While that didn’t really go anywhere, two others have. HB 1071, sponsored by Republican House representative Danny Alvarez, has been passed by the House and will now go to the Senate. And SB 1084, introduced by Republican state representative Jay Collins in the Senate, has been passed in both chambers. It prohibits people from producing, selling, holding or distributing cultivated meat, with similar penalties of second-disagree misdemeanours, licence suspensions, and stop-sale orders.

    “There are many concerns right here and, until we have those studies and there’s proof positive that this process is going to work, we want to ban this in the state of Florida because it’s just not there quite yet, Collins has said, despite the USDA and FDA carrying out multi-year reviews to prove the exact opposite.

    The real reason, really, is an intention to protect the state’s livestock industry from competition from novel protein companies, perpetuate what has become a common right-wing neophobia of food tech, and mobilise voter sentiment against the “woke elite” in the climate change and alt-protein culture wars. It’s a crucial aspect considering that Republicans are looking to reclaim the White House by the end of the year.

    UPSIDE Foods Launches Give a Cluck Campaign

    As we await DeSantis’ inevitable sign-off, alternative protein companies are fighting back with awareness campaigns and op-eds. California’s UPSIDE Foods, which is one of the two manufacturers in the US to have been approved to sell cultivated meat, is asking what the fuck – sorry, cluck – is going on.

    The company argues that the bill “bans your right to choose your meat”. But instead of just restricting consumer choice, it also threatens innovation, the free market and the nation’s biotech leadership.

    “We understand cultivated meat may not be for everyone, but it’s clucking frustrating to see a state close their doors before they’ve even had a chance to taste it [only restaurants in California and Washington DC have served cultivated meat so far] – or really even learn about how it’s made and the potential benefits,” the company says. “It’s like killing your chickens before they hatch.”

    UPSIDE Foods says supporters of these bans are victims of online misinformation and have concerns over safety, competition with conventional meat, ethics, and economics. But it points out how the US food safety regulators have approved these products, adding that cultivated meat is “complementary, not competitive” and will co-exist with other meat production methods.

    The startup further notes that everyone should have the freedom to choose what they eat, and cultivated meat can potentially make people in an ethical dilemma feel good about meat-eating. Finally, it suggests that this ban – and other similar proposals across the US – will give other countries a competitive edge in producing a more “resilient and self-sufficient food system”.

    Therefore, UPSIDE Foods’ self-produced campaign is asking consumers to call or email DeSantis to veto SB 1084 and HB 1071. “Americans stand for freedom… not bans on freedom or free markets or choice,” said founder and CEO Uma Valeti.

    The meat industry is also against Florida’s ban on cultivated meat

    better meat co
    Courtesy: The Better Meat Co

    But it’s not just UPSIDE Foods that is pushing back – others have joined the fight too. Leaders from 38 VC funds have signed a letter against the ban, noting that becoming the only state to ban cultivated meat would stop it from attracting investment in research.

    “Passage of this legislation will have economic ramifications for Florida. Biotechnology and biomanufacturing are among the fastest-growing industries in the United States, with biomanufacturing leveraging biological systems to produce goods at a commercial scale, offering innovative solutions across various sectors including plastics, fuels, foods, and pharmaceuticals,” the letter reads. “In the short life of this emerging industry, investors have already put almost $3B in capital to work on this product, supporting thousands of jobs in this promising industry.”

    It continues: “Florida would uniquely choose to restrict a vital segment of the American biotechnology sector. Such a decision will raise strong doubts among investors about the state’s commitment to supporting emerging technologies, hindering future investments to the industry and Florida.”

    Meanwhile, industry leaders have voiced their concerns too. Writing for The Hill, Paul Shapiro, CEO of The Better Meat Co (which produces mycelium protein for blended meat), called the ban a “dumb mistake”. “DeSantis and other like-minded policymakers seeking to deny Americans the freedom to choose the meat they can eat may see a threat from innovative entrepreneurs working to bring cultivated meat to market,” he explained. “But those committed to a free market should ask if it’s really the state’s role to stamp out entrepreneurial competition to ensure incumbent industries always win.”

    He added that, despite progress, we’re “still a long way from seeing cultivated meat show up [on] grocery shelves, due to the industry’s lack of scale”. This was echoed by Didier Toubia, CEO of Aleph Farms (only the third company to have received regulatory approval for cultivated meat globally), who wrote in an op-ed for Fast Company about how what he sees as “continuous progress and learning”, critics view as “unwarranted delays or even downright failure”.

    cultivated meat regulatory approval
    Courtesy: Aleph Farms

    Toubia outlined that his one regret was not tempering consumer expectations about the mainstreaming of cultivated meat, which is “not a quick fix”. “Sceptics are right to point out that cellular agriculture cannot afford to remain stagnant; it must keep evolving in order to have its intended impact,” he wrote, adding: “By better qualifying our success and managing expectations, we can help people see cultivated meat as we see it: a marathon rather than a sprint.”

    But perhaps the most striking opposition to Florida’s ban comes from the very industry its lawmakers are trying to ‘protect’. The North American Meat Institute, the country’s oldest and largest trade association (representing 95% of the US’s meat output), has called the ban “bad public policy” in a letter to DeSantis.

    “Legislators and others who beat the ‘food safety’ drum in support of HB 1071 and SB 1084 do so at their peril, and the peril of others, because these bills establish a precedent for adopting policies and regulatory requirements that could one day adversely affect the bills’ supporters,” the letter states, suggesting that it could set a precedent for climate or health policies in other states that could ban conventional meat.

    “Restricting the sale and manufacture of cell-cultivated meat products limits consumer choice and denies Floridians access to food options,” it adds. “Decisions about what to consume or purchase should be left to the market and consumers, not dictated by legislation that hampers progress and competition.”

    What does it say about a state’s policy when the very group lawmakers are purportedly ‘protecting’ calls out its bullshit? I’ll let DeSantis be the judge of that.

    The post Florida Will Soon Ban Cultivated Meat – Here’s How the Industry is Fighting Back appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Kynda Teams Up with The Raging Pig Co to Unveil Zero-Waste, Affordable Mycelium Meat Burgers

    mycelium meat
    4 Mins Read

    German biotech startup Kynda is set to introduce a zero-waste mycelium ingredient for use in plant-based and hybrid proteins, starting with a partnership with The Raging Pig Company, which will use the Kynda-Meat to produce vegan burgers.

    Germany’s mycelium sector is heating up, with the newest product born out of the fungi soon to hit the market. Hamburg-based startup Kynda, which makes plug-and-play bioreactors and starter cultures for mycelium protein, is launching a zero-waste, biomass-fermented meat alternative ingredient that is already compliant with the EU’s novel food regulations.

    Kynda will unveil the first innovation with its ingredient at trade fair Internorga (March 8-11), partnering up with plant-based pork producer The Raging Pig Company to introduce mycelium burger patties. It will be a precursor to the product’s launch Kynda’s market launch in Germany later this year.

    “We are thrilled to showcase our mycelium-based products at Internorga in collaboration with The Raging Pig,” said Kynda CEO Daniel MacGowan von Holstein. “We’re beyond happy to team up with such a like-minded and purpose-driven company. This partnership signifies a huge milestone in our journey to revolutionise the food industry by offering truly sustainable alternatives.”

    Valorising sidestreams to produce sustainable proteins

    the raging pig company
    Courtesy: Kynda

    To make its mycelium ingredient, Kynda uses a range of food industry byproducts, with a particular focus on “underutilised streams such as soy-, oat- and rice-okara”, von Holstein told Green Queen. These sidestreams go through a submerged biomass fermentation process, where microorganisms are rapidly grown in a liquid medium, with the entire biomass becoming the end product.

    A key advantage of biomass fermentation is that it can drastically cut down the time it takes to grow proteins, compared to livestock farming or traditional fermentation. Kynda claims that its fungi strain and highly efficient proprietary process reduce the fermentation time from an average of seven to 10 days “for best practices” to just 48 hours.

    While the company is unable to disclose what strain it’s using, von Holstein confirmed that it was one that is compliant with the EU’s novel foods regulations, which means there are no regulatory hurdles, clearing the way for the product’s market entry.

    The mycelium ingredient will spark interest from manufacturers looking to produce more sustainable, affordable and nutritious alternative proteins. Kynda’s mycelium product emits 700% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than pea protein, which is used by industry giants like Beyond Meat. It also has a protein content of 37% in dry matter, contains all nine essential amino acids, and is low in fat and rich in fibre and vitamins. Moreover, the ingredient is said to be cheaper to produce than plant-based texturates, with the startup suggesting it could be used in both plant-based and hybrid meat applications too.

    This is what appealed to Raging Pig too, which was looking to “replace highly processed pea protein texturates in their products”, von Holstein explained. “As a B2B company, we can solve their needs with healthy, nutritious and sustainable Kynda-Meat,” he said.

    Kynda enters a red-hot mycelium market

    kynda mycelium
    Courtesy: Kynda

    “Our focus has always been on taste and sustainability. With Kynda’s nutritious and allergen-free ingredients, we’re able to significantly lower our production costs and are finally able to compete with heavily subsidised meat producers,” said Raging Pig co-founder Arne Ewerbeck.

    The company has swapped 17% of the pea protein obtained from high-moisture extrusion in its burger for Kynda’s mycelium ingredient. “By replacing highly processed raw materials with Kynda’s fermentation solution, we are answering the call of many consumers for healthy meat alternatives,” said Ewerbeck.

    Raging Pig marks Kynda’s first collaboration for its mycelium protein, but further partnerships with B2C companies in both foodservice and retail will follow later this year. Plus, the startup is in the middle of a $4M seed funding round, and last year received a non-dilutive grant from Germany’s food and agriculture ministry to scale up its fermentation platform and produce mycelium protein more efficiently.

    “We just received planning permission for our new facility, which will house our scaled-up 30,000-litre fermentation capacity,” von Holstein told Green Queen. “This will be built until the end of Q3 2024.”

    Kynda is one of several German companies working with mycelium, which has exploded in popularity over the last few months for its nutritional benefits, climate credentials and production efficiency. Infinite Roots, also from Hamburg, closed a $58M Series B funding round in January, which is claimed to be the largest mycelium investment in Europe. Berlin-based Bosque Foods is similarly using mycelium to create whole-cut chicken and pork filets, as well as bacon. (Like Kynda, both companies leverage agricultural sidestreams.)

    Estimates reveal that a third of all food produced worldwide goes to waste, amounting to 6% of global emissions, so using food industry byproducts to make alternative proteins is a shrewd move. And since mycelium can be scaled up rapidly and in a cost-effective manner, it has been touted as a potential for human nutrition insecurity and global hunger.

    That’s Kynda cool, isn’t it?

    The post Kynda Teams Up with The Raging Pig Co to Unveil Zero-Waste, Affordable Mycelium Meat Burgers appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • IWD 2024: Women-Led Plant-Based Companies Shaping the Future of Food

    international women's day
    4 Mins Read

    Today is International Women’s Day, a day all about raising visibility and awareness of women’s rights, and celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. Even though the climate crisis seems too tall a mountain to climb sometimes, so many women are using their voices and pushing for change through food, the most powerful tool of action. Today, we celebrate these women, and what their plant-based companies are doing to change the world.

    Hannah Carter and Polly Trollope founded OGGS, a UK-based vegan egg and baked goods company, in 2019 – since then, it has saved the equivalent of five million chicken eggs.

    Kimberlie Le is the co-founder of Prime Roots, a mycelium meat company that makes deli meats, charcuterie and bacon from koji, and was named one of Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for social impact in 2021.

    Aleah Rae Montague is the co-founder of Meat the Mushroom, which makes Shroomacon, a clean-label vegan bacon from king oyster mushrooms, and shot to fame on Shark Tank earlier this year.

    Another Shark Tank company that’s making vegan bacon is Umaro Foods, whose co-founders Beth Zotter and Amanda Stiles are using seaweed to make plant-based proteins.

    The plant-based sector is booming in India. On the meat analogue side, Bollywood actress Genelia Deshmukh co-founded Imagine Meats; Roma Roy Choudhury founded Evolved Foods; Pranjuli Garg co-founded ProMeat, Akanksha Ghai, co-founded BVeg Foods, and Nikki Arora Singh founded Blue Tribe Foods. And in the alt-dairy realm, there’s Sweta Khandelwal, who co-founded Better Bet; Aarohi Surya, founder of Dancing Cow; and Anushi Patel, founder of Soft Spot Cheese.

    Based in Indonesia, Helga Angelina Tjahjadi is the co-founder of the country’s first plant-based meat company, Green Rebel Foods, and vegan restaurant chain Burgreens.

    Vinita Choolani is founder of Singapore’s Float Foods, the maker of Asia’s first plant-based whole egg, OnlyEg. It recently secured a food safety certification for its Halal-certified facility to offer its tech to other manufacturers looking to ditch eggs.

    Astrid Prajogo is the founder and CEO of China’s HaoFood, which makes meat alternatives using peanut protein. Its latest innovation is vegan xiaolongbaos (soup dumplings), with the peanut meat replacing the traditional minced pork filling.

    Philippine Soulères Albrand and Sheryline Thavisouk are the co-founders of Le Papondu, a French startup whose vegan eggs come in shells.

    Liron Nimrodi is the co-founder and CEO of Zero Egg, an Israel-based plant-based egg company that is available in multiple countries now, including the US.

    Deniz Ficicioglu is the co-founder of Berlin-based BettaF!sh, which makes vegan tuna using European seaweed.

    Tanja Bogumil is the co-founder of fellow German startup Perfeggt, which is making pea-protein-based liquid vegan eggs that you can use in scrambles, carbonara and pancakes.

    Oyebola Adeyanju is the co-founder of Nigeria’s first plant-based food tech company, Veggie Victory, a Black-owned business rooted in its gender-balanced and social fairness values.

    Christie Lagally founded Rebellyous Foods in 2017, and has shaped the company into a leader in the vegan chicken sector.

    Courtney Boyd Myers is the co-founder of Akua, a New York-based startup that makes seaweed burgers from sustainable ocean-farmed kelp and has previously been named one of Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas for Food.

    Hailey Swartz is co-founder of Actual Veggies, a fellow New York company that makes chef-crafted, whole-food plant-based burgers, made from sustainably sourced crops from regional farmers.

    Canadian scientist Sujala Balaji is the founder of Rainfed Foods, a food tech company making plant-based milks from millets.

    Monica Talbert is the co-founder of The Plant Based Seafood Co, an all-female, family-owned brand making fish- and crustacean-free crab cakes, scallops and shrimps.

    Kerry Song is the founder of US plant-based meat brand Abbot’s Butcher, whose product range includes ground beef, chopped chicken, chorizo, and a burger.

    Michelle Lee is co-founder at Lypid, a vegan fat company whose first innovation, PhytoFat, was used in a vegan pork belly, and is now part of plant-based meatballs suitable for multiple cuisines.

    Hema Reddy is the founder of US company Crafty Counter, which makes WunderEgg, a range of plant-based boiled and deviled eggs, and egg patties.

    And Marissa Cuevas Flores and Fanny Villiers are co-founders of MicroTERRA, a Mexican startup leveraging the power of duckweed to make plant-based proteins and ingredients, with its latest innovation aimed at sugar reduction.

    This is by no means an exhaustive list – just a snapshot of all the female-founded companies doing incredible work for their communities, human health, and the climate crisis. Here’s to all the women in the world. More power to you and everything you do. Happy International Women’s Day!

    The post IWD 2024: Women-Led Plant-Based Companies Shaping the Future of Food appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Shark Tank Success Umaro Foods Raises $3.8M to Launch Seaweed Bacon in Supermarkets

    umaro
    5 Mins Read

    Californian plant-based meat producer Umaro Foods has secured $3.8M in a seed funding round to help it reduce production costs and launch its seaweed bacon into retail.

    The financing round was led by existing investor AgFunder, with support from Alexandria Ventures Investments, Climate Capital Bio, Ponderosa Ventures, and NBA all-star Chris Paul. It brings total investment in the vegan bacon producer to $6.8M, following a $3M round in 2022 (also led by AgFunder).

    The latest capital injection will help Umaro Foods amp up production and bring down the costs of its seaweed-based bacon, and facilitate its move into grocery stores.

    “People love our bacon because it nails the crispy, fatty texture of pork bacon,” Umaro Foods co-founder and CEO Beth Zotter told AgFunderNews. “Our innovative, seaweed-based formula is what differentiates our product from other brands and is now patented in the US.”

    Leveraging the ‘most scalable protein bioreactor’

    vegan bacon
    Courtesy: Umaro Foods

    Zotter founded Umaro Foods in 2019 (then known as Trophic) with chief technology officer Amanda Stiles as the “first and only company” extracting protein from ocean-farmed seaweeds. The startup shot to fame in 2022 after securing a $1M investment for 7% equity from Mark Cuban on Shark Tank.

    Umaro Bacon is already available at 250 restaurants and delis across the US, including Crossroads Kitchen, Plantega, Roam Burger and Choice Market. It’s in talks with universities to move its bacon into the catering sector as well. But now, it is casting a much wider net. “After achieving incredible traction in restaurants across the country, with sales growing sixfold in one year, we’re looking forward to reaching new customers,” said Zotter.

    Armed with the new financing, Umaro Foods will soon launch onto supermarket shelves, starting with a leading retailer on the west coast. The CPG products include bacon strips and bits, as well as a bacon, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich.

    The vegan bacon uses red nori seaweed as its key ingredient, which is supplemented with chickpeas, sunflower and coconut oil, agar and carrageenan, plus natural flavouring and colouring elements. “One reason bacon is so delicious is because it’s got a lot of fat [20g per serving],” said Zotter. “We’ve discovered a really innovative way to use the hydrocolloids in seaweed to hold on to high amounts of plant-based fat… That allows us to deliver that sensory experience that you get with bacon, which is what makes it so craveable.”

    Umaro Foods has patent-pending extraction processes for two types of seaweed: red and brown. The former shares similarities with conventional pea and soy processing, and forms the base of its current bacon product due to its red hue, high protein content, and ease of import (the startup works with a co-manufacturer in Canada to extract protein from seaweed imported from South Korea).

    But the red seaweed doesn’t have “those high-value hydrocolloids”, Zotter explained: “So our goal is to process both red and brown seaweeds, where we can get the protein out but also produce valuable side streams such as alginate, agar, and carrageenan, for which there are already established markets.”

    The idea is, at scale, Umaro Foods’ protein separation process will produce hydrocolloids as well. “The ocean is the world’s most scalable protein bioreactor,” the CEO added. “It covers 71% of the Earth’s surface and contains over 80% of the world’s chemically reactive nitrogen, so it’s sort of a no-brainer that that’s where we should be getting the bulk of our protein.”

    Sea-ing out the competition

    umaro bacon
    Courtesy: Umaro Foods

    The vegan bacon startup will additionally use the funds to move from a batch production process to a continuous one. “One of the things that makes meat alternatives very expensive is that they use techniques such as extrusion or fermentation that require large capital investments,” Zotter said.

    But its high-throughput, low-capex manufacturing process will enable it to produce vegan bacon at half the cost of conventional options from the likes of Hormel and Smithfield. Currently, Umaro Foods is producing the equivalent of 60,000 lbs of product every year, but once sales grow enough to allow its machine to operate at full capacity, it can make over a million pounds of vegan bacon annually, with a potential revenue of $20M.

    “It costs about half a million dollars to finance, so the payback time should be rapid,” said Zotter. “Our main goal in this next phase is to get to profitability. And this automated manufacturing process is going to be a key part of this.”

    She further outlined the company’s plan to streamline its sourcing so it can move closer to the raw material in Asia: “We’re looking for partners to scale that process, either via a joint venture or a manufacturing partnership. And that would be most likely with a large food processing company with a base in Asia.”

    Zotter added that Umaro Foods is open to developing a B2B arm for its seaweed protein, and is in conversations with other companies. But she reiterated that the current focus is to use it for its own bacon products. (The startup has previously suggested that it will look to develop pepperoni, salami and other cured meats from the seaweed too.)

    The company has also been working on a project with a specialist firm to selectively extract rare earth elements and platinum group metals from seaweeds, which is backed by a $2M grant from the US Department of Energy. “The DoE is looking at seaweed as a source of critical minerals, so they’re funding us to develop a way to integrate a minerals extraction process into our protein separation process,” Zotter noted.

    The seaweed protein sector is still in its infancy, and startups innovating with such ingredients have had a tough going – France’s Update Foods (which made algae milk) ceased operations in 2022, while seaweed-based seafood producer New Wave Foods was forced to shut just a few months ago. However, Umaro Foods has ridden the wave successfully.

    “Umaro’s results showcase its adaptability, innovation, and success in introducing new products to a competitive market, spanning both foodservice and retail,” said Sofia Ramírez Calvo, venture partner, AgFunder.

    The true test, however, will be its performance in the crowded vegan bacon market – in the US. MyForest Foods, Prime Roots, Thrilling Foods, Upton’s Naturals, Tofurky, Lightlife and Meat the Mushroom (another Shark Tank success) are just a few companies innovating in this space, which estimates suggest is worth $1.3B.

    But given the inroads it has already made, Umaro Foods’s seaweed bacon could soon be swimming in success.

    The post Shark Tank Success Umaro Foods Raises $3.8M to Launch Seaweed Bacon in Supermarkets appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Oscar Mayer to Launch Vegan Hot Dogs via Kraft Heinz-NotCo Collaboration

    oscar mayer vegan
    5 Mins Read

    Chicago-based meat company Oscar Mayer, a subsidiary of Kraft Heinz, is launching a line of plant-based hot dogs, as part of an ongoing collaboration with NotCo. They will debut at Expo West next week.

    The two-year-old joint venture between Kraft Heinz and Chilean food tech company NotCo is launching its first plant-based meat product range: a vegan hot dog under the former’s Oscar Mayer brand.

    The NotHotDogs and NotSausages, which will be previewed at the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim (March 12-16), mark Oscar Mayer’s first foray into plant-based meat, and the fourth innovation born out of the Kraft Heinz Not Company venture.

    “We know people are hungry for plant-based meat options from brands they know and trust,” said The Kraft Heinz Company CEO Lucho Lopez-May. “In launching the joint venture’s first product in the plant-based meat category, we saw an opportunity to satisfy these consumer cravings, leveraging NotCo’s revolutionary AI technology and the power, equity, and legacy of the Oscar Mayer brand.”

    Oscar Mayer’s vegan sausages put flavour over everything

    vegan hot dogs
    Courtesy: The Kraft Heinz Not Company

    The plant-based wieners will come in original, Bratwurst, and Italian sausage flavours, and hit US supermarkets in Q2 this year. They’re said to replicate the ‘snap’ of the outer casing and the savoury, smoky taste experience associated with Oscar Mayer’s conventional products.

    It’s big news for three reasons: Kraft Heinz is the third-largest food company in North America, Oscar Mayer has been making meat products for over 140 years, and the release of a product in a category that has struggled of late is a sign of confidence in the plant-based industry.

    Retail sales of meat analogues dipped by 11% to just over $1B in the year ending January 28, 2024, with volume down by 16.5%. It has coincided with plant-based giants like Quorn and Beyond Meat losing sales (though the latter is doing better than expected), startups like New Wave Foods, Ordinary Seafood and Nowadays being forced to shut, and innovators like Meati and Impossible Foods enforcing staff cutbacks.

    Many companies have rejigged their product formulations and lineups to better serve consumer needs, but The Kraft Heinz Not Company said vegan hot dogs and sausage links remain underdeveloped and under-consumed, pointing to a gap in taste and texture expectations for consumers. This is why the Oscar Mayer vegan wieners – made from bamboo fibre, mushroom, pea protein and acerola cherry – are all about a taste-first approach.

    Multiple studies have shown that flavour continues to be the main factor drawing consumers to plant-based meat, as well as pushing them away. One global poll from 2022 found that the taste and texture of meat alternatives are as important as conventional meat products for more than 75% of consumers. Last year, a Mintel survey found that taste is the biggest reason putting off Americans from trying meat analogues.

    Yet another study revealed that taste is the top consideration for Americans when making grocery decisions, and the top barrier for trying plant-based meat (or purchasing it again, for that matter). And an earlier poll by food giant Kerry found that 73% of consumers feel vegan alternatives should mimic the taste of conventional meat.

    This is what Oscar Mayer is honing in on with its new vegan sausages. “What the consumer is expecting is a product replica, a product that looks and performs like the animal-based item,” Lopez-May told Axios, noting that the products will be the “first ones in the bun-length space”.

    Speaking to Bloomberg, he added: “Being able to borrow the flavour note, the flavouring systems, and incorporate those into a completely different matrix — it’s a massive technological accomplishment.” It’s a nod to NotCo’s tech platform, which leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to find the right combinations between thousands of different plant-based ingredients to replace animal-derived foods.

    Can consumers shake off the price tag?

    oscar mayer vegan hot dogs
    Courtesy: The Kraft Heinz Not Company

    Oscar Mayer’s announcement comes three months after Impossible Foods said it would roll out a plant-based beef hot dog later this year as well. That product was very much skewed towards the health aspect, and for good reason: hot dogs are the epitome of processed food, with such processed meats categorised as a Class 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization. Impossible’s product contained 50% less fat, twice the protein and zero cholesterol compared to an animal-derived hot dog.

    However, there has been a lot of clamour around plant-based meats, ultra-processed foods and their links to ill health. The overprocessed nature of vegan analogues can be off-putting to many consumers, especially at a time when health is the main reason six in 10 Americans eat meatless diets. But a survey of 2,000 Americans in October found that 82% of consumers eat UPFs, and 43% don’t believe they’re bad for health.

    Additionally, nearly two-thirds (65%) would be open to incorporating UPFs in their diets if additional health or nutritional benefits were listed on-pack, which rises to 85% for parents with children under 18. And in any case, Oscar Mayer’s plant-based hot dogs will likely be geared towards flexitarians who are looking to cut down on their meat consumption.

    So how do they compare to the company’s own beef franks? The NotHotDogs have 17% fewer calories, 44% less total fat, and 67% more protein, although their sodium content is 40% higher. The Kraft Heinz Not Company stresses that flavour is still the main focus – given they serve as an entry point to the plant-based category – and the sodium can eventually be lowered. “We wanted to make something that tastes great,” Kraft Heinz R&D president Robert Scott told Bloomberg.

    The vegan products will also be slightly more expensive, with the NotHotDogs priced at $5.99 for a four-pack, and NotSausage at ($7.99). In contrast, its bun-length franks cost $4 for an eight-pack. But there’s evidence that consumers could shell out: 67% of Americans say they’d willing to pay more for UPFs with more nutritious ingredients that deliver better health benefits, irrespective of their household income.

    The new Oscar Mayer plant-based hot dogs and sausages join a crowded category that already includes Field Roast, Tofurky, Lightlife, Upton’s Naturals and MorningStar Farms, and was estimated to be an $828M market last year. But the company will hope that its taste credentials help it stand apart. “At The Kraft Heinz Not Company, our goal is to create mouthwatering, plant-based foods that are delicious and accessible for everyone – from the devoted vegan to the plant-based curious,” said Lopez-May.

    The vegan wieners follow the launch of NotCheese Slices, NotMayo and NotMac&Cheese – a plant-based version of the famous Kraft dinner – which leverage the market expertise and distribution channels of Kraft Heinz and the AI-led technology and innovation of NotCo.

    Having already entered a new sector in plant-based meat, The Kraft Heinz Not Company now plans to expand into further categories, and has already begun expanding internationally.

    The post Oscar Mayer to Launch Vegan Hot Dogs via Kraft Heinz-NotCo Collaboration appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • BYND: 10 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Beyond Meat

    7 Mins Read

    Beyond Meat enjoyed a bit of a small rally recently, especially after its latest earnings call. However, there has been a lot of negative discussion about Beyond Meat and its stock price over the past year, which indeed continues to struggle.

    Is the negativity justified? Is it accurate? Is the product to blame? Is it CEO Ethan Brown? Below, I share the ten reasons investors of all culinary persuasions might be wrong about BYND. 

    1. Ceci N’est Pas Un ‘Consumer Staple’ 

    Beyond Meat’s IPO valuation was more aligned with tech companies during the dot-com bubble than with consumer staples/food companies, per the image below. This proved to be a real Achille’s heel for the stock, as tech companies trade at higher multiples and have faster growth trends. Food products are not SaaS, and these companies tend to have much slower growth than their tech counterparts. The markets eventually corrected for this, bringing the company’s stock price way down. 

    2. Path to Profitability: No P/E, No Love‘

    The media loves a founder with a ‘save-the-world’ dream. From Steve Jobs to Sergey Brin, Silicon Valley has trained us to love a visionary. Beyond’s CEO Ethan Brown may indeed make his vision a reality of shifting the global food system away from livestock meat eventually, but Wall Street analysts don’t want to hear about a future dream. They want to see consumer demand, revolutionary IP, and, more than anything else, a realistic path to profitability. 

    Financial analysts usually rely on a P/E ratio (share price per earnings) to evaluate a company’s performance and in the case of Beyond Meat, which has not achieved profitability yet, the ratio is negative, leaving analysts flummoxed. Additionally, analysts want to see revenue growth, not revenue declines, as is the case for Beyond Meat. Add to this that most Street analysts may not see the need to shift away from an animal meat food system, and it’s not hard to see why the stock has been battered by downgrade ratings.

    3. Consistency For The Win. Confidence For The Bigger Win.

    If analysts aren’t interested in the plant-based dream and are deprived of their crucial revenue growth and P/E metrics, how exactly can they analyze a company accurately and provide fair stock ratings? The answer is earning calls. Wall Street analysts tend to look to the CEO to accurately guide for financial expectations: Will the company be profitable? And if so, by how much? And when? They expect the CEO to be able to know their business well enough to accurately predict growth (or loss) from three months to a year out.

    Much of Wall Street is about managing expectations. Consistently hitting quarterly expectations in earnings calls gives analysts confidence that the CEO is in control of the business. Consistently missing quarterly expectations and not being able to right the ship quarter after quarter will do the exact opposite. This is what happened to Beyond Meat for too many quarters in a row. 

    4. ‘I Have a Dream’ vs. ‘Show Me The Money 

    Dreams are great but profitability is the holy grail. Beyond Meat IPOed during the exuberant 2019 bull market. The stock rose 163% in one day of trading, the largest bump for an IPO stock since the 2008 crash. While institutional investors make up 85% of the market, it’s the retail investors that got really excited about BYND, and this resulted in the stock’s price being driven way up. Irrationally so, some might say. Ever since, the company has struggled to show analysts a convincing path to profitability. 

    As of the last earnings call, the Street seems to have regained some confidence in Brown as a CEO and the stock in general. While U.S. sales were down, the company still beat expectations and sales were down less than expected ($73.7 million rather than $66.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2023). This is 10% better than expected for the US. Further, international sales were up 22% in retail and 34% in foodservice. 

    The stock was rewarded for this, but losing less sales than expected is hardly revenue growth. Even in forecasting out for 2024, the best the company could do was state that it would hold steady at around $345M, and lose no more. Not exactly growth. The company hasn’t been able to hold on to all of its gains, but there was a moment when it rallied for the company. So why did The Street react positively?  

    5. It’s The Spending, Stupid

    What was so different about the Feb 27th earnings call? Well, Brown shared that in 2023 the company brought operating expenses down to $107.8 million for the year, compared with $320.2 million in 2022, a two-thirds reduction in spending!

    It appears The Street had been waiting to see this kind of leadership from the company since its IPO. Could Beyond Meat run a fiscally responsible company?

    BYND was up 31% the day after the earnings call (Feb 28th, 2024), trading at $9.83, up from $7.52. It then surged 106% in after-hours trading. As of writing ten days later, it is $8.07.

    Less interested in big visions around the future of protein, analysts had been hoping for a solid balance sheet and a realistic path to profitability, or at least stopping the bleeding, controlled spending and management focused on the numbers, not the dream- all of which Beyond delivered.

    6. What’s Up with Consumer Demand? Inflation.

    While some vegans claim that Beyond Meat’s cleaner labels are the reason why the company is having trouble, the more likely explanation for declining domestic sales is inflation. The average grocery shopper is facing skyrocketing food prices. 

    The Beyond Meat brand is intended for meat eaters looking to make a smarter choice for themselves and the planet. With the cost of its plant-based patty up to double that of a heavily subsidized livestock meat burger, it’s no secret why mainstream consumers can’t afford them on a regular basis. 

    The company appears to be working hard on price parity, but it’s key not to ignore food inflation’s role when looking at the whole financial picture. According to the industry think tank the Good Food Institute, what matters most to alternative protein consumers is taste, price, and convenience. I have come to believe it is price, price, and price. 

    7. Covid, (Supply) Chains and China, Oh My!

    Often missing from Beyond Meat analysis is the bigger contextual picture. Since going public in mid-2019, the company has faced Covid-related complications (including restaurant closures), supply chain disruptions due to wars and pandemics, China’s economic crash, global inflation, and general societal angst. Even one of these externalities would challenge a healthy company- and yet Beyond has weathered all of these simultaneously. To still be standing and on the way to profitability is a testament to the young public company’s staying power. Can it continue to weather the storm?

    8. Big Meat vs. Beyond Meat

    In the past 18 months, the mainstream media has been relentless in its attacks on the plant-based meat sector. While many see the negative narratives as directed against the entire industry, in reality, as the only public company in the space, Beyond Meat bears the brunt of the hits and it’s undoubtedly had an outsized impact on the stock performance. 

    Lately, a slew of reports and investigations have detailed how Big Meat lobbyists are behind the attacks. Will analysts start to price in the cost of this misinformation?  Most likely not.  It is not their problem. The sector and the company are going to have to continue to deliver against misinformation by lowering prices and critical innovation. 

    9. Innovate or Die 

    All is not lost. Given the choice between innovating and dying, Beyond Meat has chosen to innovate. Despite expenses decreasing by two-thirds in 2023, the company released new ‘clean label’ products: AMA-certified cholesterol-free plant-based steak tips and a new burger patty made with avocado oil and fava beans that offers its consumers the same taste at a fraction of the saturated fat content.  

    The company is making it clear that it is hyper-focused on what works (healthier versions of its star products) and unattached to what doesn’t (Beyond Jerky, ending a distribution agreement with PepsiCo that didn’t perform well) as it journeys to profitability. This is what Wall Street wants to see. 

    10. So What Now? 

    A few things are transpiring. Firstly, coming off of COP28 and the push for financing food system change fast, the Street is beginning to process what many in the plant-based industry have known for years: food tech IS climate tech. Society won’t achieve its collective global net zero goals without investing in meat reduction, given the livestock sector’s emissions footprint. Beyond Meat’s future trajectory is inextricably linked to this reality. 

    Secondly, if Ethan Brown can continue to manage earnings call expectations, then analysts may welcome the CEO they want to see: an Ethan Brown dialed into the priorities of The Street; marching towards profitability, fiscal control, a commitment to products at price parity with meat and innovation-led R&D.

    No doubt, the company has a long way to go to get a justified stock price rally that can last, but with operational spending cuts and potential profitability on the horizon amidst the environmental messaging finally taking hold in the financial community, it may be a step closer to turning a corner.

    The post BYND: 10 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Beyond Meat appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • TiNDLE Foods to Preview Barista Oat Milk & Vegan Stuffed Chicken at Expo West

    barista oat milk
    7 Mins Read

    Vegan food manufacturer TiNDLE Foods is set to unveil a plant-based stuffed chicken range and a barista oat milk – its first foray into dairy alternatives – at this month’s Expo West trade event.

    A year on from acquiring London-based vegan dairy startup Mwah!, TiNDLE Foods will exhibit the first products born out of the deal at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, California (March 14-16), alongside a new lineup of plant-based stuffed chicken products.

    The Singapore-headquartered company is unveiling the new products after a big year, which saw it rebrand from Next Gen Foods, expand into US retail, and have a leadership shake-up, with co-founder and former CEO Andre Menezes passing the reins to fellow co-founder Timo Recker. In January, TiNDLE Foods debuted in Swiss retail as well – and now, it’s ready to showcase the innovations it has been working on.

    “By introducing more innovative foods into the mix, including our launch into the dairy category, we remain steadfast in our mission to transition towards a more sustainable food system,” said Recker.

    Stuffed chicken SKUs to debut on shelves in H2

    tindle stuffed chicken
    Courtesy: TiNDLE Foods | Composite by Green Queen

    TiNDLE Foods’s range of stuffed chicken products at Expo West will feature Chicken Parmigiana and Garlic & Herb flavours. “From day one, we’ve been committed to delivering excellence when it comes to taste and quality with our products. We first launched TiNDLE Chicken in restaurants for this very reason – to be able to work closely with chefs and culinary experts to bring the best possible experience to customers,” JJ Kass, US managing director for the brand, tells Green Queen. “The stuffed chicken line is the next step in our journey to bring that chef-driven experience into people’s homes.”

    She adds: “We are starting with a wholesome classic – chicken parmigiana – but there are endless opportunities for creative and seasonal fillings. With the growing trend of high-quality convenience meals in the frozen section, we feel this product is a game changer to have a restaurant-quality gourmet meal ready in the air fryer or oven in 10 minutes.”

    TiNDLE chicken is made from a blend of soy protein, wheat flour and Lipi, a proprietary plant-based emulsion that mimics the functionality of chicken fat. The product has around 16g of protein and 4.5g of fibre per 100g. “Ingredients and fillings will vary based on the SKU,” says Kass. “For example, the outer coating of the chicken parmigiana is made of golden breadcrumbs that allow for a perfect crunch, while the interior features a savoury tomato sauce and gooey plant-based mozzarella.”

    The new SKUs will be available for retailers to order in the spring, with the products expected on shelves in the second half of the year. TiNDLE Foods plans to release additional flavours too, such as Buffalo Ranch, Katsu Curry and Tikka Masala.

    The company is also making good on its promise of bringing its locally produced breakfast sausage – which has been available at restaurants including Mr. Charlie’s in Los Angeles, and Neat and Vegan On the Fly in New York City – to the CPG world. They’re now available for retailers to order in savoury and spicy editions.

    Barista oat milk part of multi-category superbrand aim

    tindle oat milk
    Courtesy: TiNDLE Foods | Composite by Green Queen

    Perhaps the more striking launch is that of the barista oat milk, marking TiNDLE Foods’ entry into the dairy alternatives realm a year after its takeover of Mwah! “Our mission extends beyond plant-based chicken, as we’ve always intended to introduce multiple products across categories,” Recker tells Green Queen. “As a global company, we aim to be a multi-category ‘superbrand,’ as it’s important for us to offer foods that appeal to a wide set of consumers, while excelling when it comes to taste and quality.”

    TiNDLE Foods will preview the premium oat milk at Expo West. It has been developed in collaboration with baristas internationally, who have helped fine-tune its steaming, frothing and blending capabilities. The result is a smooth and creamy milk that features an “exceptional stretch and beautiful microfoam”, which the company says rivals dairy.

    While the alt-milk launch doesn’t come as a surprise – TiNDLE Foods has always alluded to a multi-category model – it does veer away from the brand’s initial concept for the product. In August, a representative had told Green Queen that the company wouldn’t limit itself to single-ingredient milks (like oat or soy milk). “Instead, our process will be focused on finding the best consistency, flavour, and overall experience – and exploring all types of plant-based ingredients – so it delivers on the same creaminess and taste of cow’s milk,” they explained.

    “Our goal is to always look at what may be the right source for the right consistency and creaminess of the product being developed,” Recker says now, explaining why its first dairy alternative is an oat milk. “The Mwah! team’s expertise allowed us to create foods and beverages that emulate the same unique flavor and creaminess that comes from dairy, but using plant-based sources.”

    The barista oat milk – whose primary ingredients include water, premium whole oats, sunflower oil and sea salt – is being developed in Italy. “We knew we could create a creamy and indulgent milk product that offered benefits consumers were looking for and may not be able to currently find – such as an oat milk that used pure, whole ingredients and minimal processing,” says Recker.

    He adds that the use of whole oats creates “an excellent base in terms of function” and a wow factor for the high standards of baristas, with the product able to perform on par with cow’s milk in coffee. While launch details are under wraps, Recker hints it will be sometime later this year.

    TiNDLE Foods also previewed its gelato tech at last year’s Expo West, followed by a market test in select London locations in the spring, which provided a better understanding of the market. “Because of our acquisition of plant-based dairy startup Mwah! last year, we have the R&D capabilities and innovation framework to develop a range of dairy products, including gelato,” Recker notes, before reiterating that the current focus is on the oat milk.

    Luring non-dairy drinkers to meat alternatives

    tindle chicken
    Courtesy: TiNDLE Foods

    Having raised over $130M to date, TiNDLE Foods – which makes chicken patties, wings, tenders and nuggets, as well as breakfast sausages – has now expanded its foodservice and retail footprint as well, with the US, the UK and Germany being its biggest markets.

    Across each of these countries, the company witnessed a sales increase from 2022-23, which Recker ascribes to its retail launch and continued foodservice expansion. This bucked the wider trend among the plant-based meat industry, where giants like Beyond Meat and Quorn have struggled, and startups such as Nowadays, New Wave Foods and Ordinary Seafood have been forced to cease trading.

    In the US, retail sales of plant-based meat dipped by 11% to just over $1B in the year ending January 28, 2024, while meat-free products were among the worst-performing grocery categories in the UK, with sales down by £38.4M. “The category is still young and, when compared to that of the animal agriculture and meat industry, it’s still in its infancy,” highlights Recker. “We’re looking to change consumer behaviour at the most emotional and engrained level – shifting daily patterns and eating habits to an entirely different system.”

    Dairy alternatives similarly underwent a second consecutive year of decline, with sales volumes falling by 6.6% in the US, totalling 337.7 million gallons in 2023. “We want to be a growth driver for the category and bring consumers, who may be shopping in non-dairy, to plant-based meat,” says Recker. “There’s a great deal of potential to cross-promote between categories and to support our goal to transition to a more plant-based food system.”

    He adds: “We need to be diligent as a company and as an industry in getting out the best products possible. So many of the existing products today don’t meet the criteria for consumers when it comes to taste and deliciousness, and so it is vital that we deliver on all of the benefits that animal-based meat can offer today, which include taste, quality, and ultimately lower prices.”

    The post TiNDLE Foods to Preview Barista Oat Milk & Vegan Stuffed Chicken at Expo West appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Future Food Quick Bites: Vegan Goat Milk, US State Bans & A Chipotle Exposé

    vegan soup dumplings
    7 Mins Read

    In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Craig’s Vegan’s link-up with TikToker Tinx, a host of alternative protein bans in US states, and a vegan 30 Under 30 recognition.

    New products and launches

    Californian non-dairy ice cream brand Craig’s Vegan has partnered with TikTok influencer Christina Najjar (aka Tinx) for a limited-time The Tinx Sundae, which features a cashew-based vanilla ice cream topped with brownies, chocolate swirls, and rainbow sprinkles.

    tinx
    Courtesy: Craig’s Vegan

    British alt-milk producer Rude Health has introduced an organic version of its barista oat milk, which has been in development for four years. The four-ingredient milk will retail at £2.40 in independent stores and online, beginning March 11.

    In the US, alt-milk company Elmhurst 1925 has released four Multi-Serve Latte SKUs in Pistachio Crème, Maple Walnut, Caramel Cashew and Brown Sugar Oat flavours. They’re available online and will roll out in Sprouts locations this March, with a Toasted Vanilla Almond variant set to launch in the spring.

    Chinese food company MìLà is gearing up for a limited-edition run of its vegan jackfruit-based soup dumplings in the US, with pre-orders starting March 22 and lasting for about a month.

    Meanwhile, Next Level Burger and its now-subsidiary Veggie Grill have unveiled new limited-time menu offerings for March. The former has a mint-choc-chip-flavoured Lucky Leprechaun Shake, while the latter has a chocolate-flavoured Lucky Leprechaun Velvet Cake. Both have also launched a Spring Steak Salad, and the three items will be available from March 8 through to the end of the month.

    next level burger
    Courtesy: Stephanie Kelly Photography

    New York-based Beekman 1802, a personal care brand championing goat milk as its base ingredient, has reverse-engineered its products to unveil plant-based alternatives to its range, with a new vegan gel cleanser, toner and moisturiser.

    Aussie cleaning brand Wash Wild has launched a line of plant-based household cleaning and body care products – including laundry and dishwashing liquids, toilet cleaner and hand wash – which are formulated with over 99% non-toxic, biodegradable ingredients.

    For vegan Greek yoghurt fans, Hong Kong-based soy milk brand Vitasoy has introduced a lemon-flavoured version in Australia, which is available at Woolworths for AU$1.35 per 140g pack.

    Hong Kong-based OmniFoods has launched two new ready-to-eat products using its plant-based pork in 7-Eleven stores across the city.

    Japanese convenience store chain Family Mart, meanwhile, has rolled out two dishes with Dutch startup The Vegetarian Butcher‘s vegan chicken chunks. They’re available in 2,800 Family Mart stores in Tokyo.

    Also in Japan, Azuma Foods has launched a new raw vegan seafood range under its Green Surf brand, which features tuna, salmon and squid made from konjac.

    Fellow Dutch plant-based meat producer PLNT (a subsidiary of Jan Zandbergen) will showcase vegan lamb strops and chicken sausages made from pea, wheat and soy protein at trade show Alimentaria in Barcelona (March 18-24).

    vegan sushi
    Courtesy: Konscious Foods

    Canadian vegan seafood maker Konscious Foods will unveil three new products – Smoked Salmon, Kimbap Korean Veggie Rice Roll, and Salmon Avocado Roll – at Expo West (March 12-16) in Anaheim, California.

    And back in the US, plant-based industry veterans have launched the Earth Pass, a text-based service that delivers weekly discounts from planet-friendly brands across food, fashion, wellness and beauty.

    Policy and awards

    Two UK school caterers have won the inaugural national ProVeg School Plates Awards for climate-friendly menus. Waltham Forest Catering, which services 43 institutions, took the honour for public schools, while Plant Based School Kitchens won in the private school category for its menu at Our Lady of Sion school in Worthing.

    In Ohio, Kent State University has pledged to serve 30% vegan meals in both its residential and retail operations by 2026, in collaboration with the Humane Society’s Forward Food programme, which will train the school’s culinary team this semester.

    Meanwhile, as part of the same programme, half of all campus meals at the University of Texas are now plant-based, a year ahead of the 2025 goal.

    The University of Arkansas is hiring a senior research scientist to help launch an alternative protein centre of excellence, with the facility expected to facilitate pilot-level cultivated meat production and host emerging startups looking for space to build out their tech.

    cultured seafood
    Courtesy: BlueNalu

    US producer BlueNalu has become the first cultivated seafood company to join the National Fisheries Institute. It will also serve as a founding member of its inaugural Sushi Council.

    The West Virginia House has passed a bill that requires vegan, fungi-based and cultivated meat products to be labelled with one of multiple terms, including ‘imitation’, ‘analogue’, ‘meatless’ or ‘plant-based’.

    Similarly, the senate in Iowa has passed a bill mandating plant-based and cultivated meat products to carry labels like ‘meatless’ and ‘imitation’ as well.

    Florida’s senate has voted to approve a bill that would ban the sale and production of cultivated meat in the state, which will now go to the House for deliberation. Governor Ron DeSantis has been staunch in his support for the ban.

    Over in Europe, France has officially banned the use of meat-like terms on plant-based products, including ‘cutlets’, ‘bacon’, ‘sausage’ and ‘steaks’.

    In Denmark, meanwhile, meat processor Danish Crown was found in violation of consumer marketing law by the Danish Western High Court, which ruled that its ‘climate-controlled’ pork was misleading. The suit was filed by the Danish Climate Movement and the Vegetarian Society of Denmark.

    forbes 30 under 30
    Courtesy: Forbes

    Hungarian vegan activist Raul Vida, meanwhile, has become the first plant-based advocate to appear on the country’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list.

    In the US, TIME Magazine and Statista have named mycelium protein producer The Better Meat Co as one of the country’s Top GreenTech companies in their inaugural ranking.

    Finance, business and research developments

    British cocoa-free chocolate producer WNWN Food Labs has refreshed its B2B and trade branding to Win-Win, with the new logo and packaging a nod to its mission of creating a “win-win situation for cocoa farmers, food producers, consumers, and the planet”.

    After pulling out of the UK market last year, Nestlé has discontinued its pea milk brand Wunda, with its products withdrawn from the Netherlands and its website shut.

    San Antonio-based vegan eatery Plantology has launched a GoFundMe crowdfunding campaign to save the restaurant from closure, with a target of $80,000.

    In Los Angeles, plant-based omakase restaurant Kusaki has reopened after a four-month hiatus with a new Kaiseki-influenced menu, featuring dishes like Maitake Wontons, Watermelon Granita Nigiri, and Crispy Garlic Tuna Sashimi.

    kusaki los angeles
    Courtesy: Kusaki

    The Canadian government’s alternative-protein-focused innovation hub Protein Industries Canada has invested C$7.3M ($5.4M) to help Avena Foods create plant-based ingredients. The C$19.2M ($14.2M) project will see the oat producer develop oat and pulse ingredients for Big Mountain Foods, Danone Canada and Old Dutch.

    In Catalonia, the government is investing €12M in a facility located in Alcarràs, Lleida that will help companies with R&D and pre-industrial manufacturing of alt-protein ingredients.

    In more funding news, Australia’s Food and Beverage Accelerator and the Queensland University of Technology are injecting AU$3.9M ($2.6M) to transform its renewable biocommodities plant into a precision fermentation facility.

    San Francisco-based vegan dog food brand PawCo has raised $2M in a seed funding round, which it will use to open a second production facility in the midwest, expand R&D efforts, and develop new recipes and marketing tactics.

    Biotech startup Van Heron Labs, which leverages advanced tech like genomics, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to improve how cells are cultured and harnessed, has closed a $1.1M seed funding round led by FoodLabs.

    Mercy for Animals has unveiled a new Chipotle Exposed investigative campaign to highlight animal cruelty at one of the fast-casual chain’s chicken suppliers.

    Finally, a new study by the University of Exeter and meat-free giant Quorn has revealed that swapping animal protein for mycoprotein products can reduce LDL cholesterol by 10%, and total ‘bad’ cholesterol by 6%.

    Check out last week’s Future Food Quick Bites.

    The post Future Food Quick Bites: Vegan Goat Milk, US State Bans & A Chipotle Exposé appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Plant-Based for Everyone: Burger King Germany Makes All Vegan Products Cheaper than Meat

    burger king vegan
    5 Mins Read

    Burger King has made all plant-based products and meals cheaper than meat across its German operations to encourage increased vegan consumption. It will develop a new flower-shaped patty with The Vegetarian Butcher to differentiate beef burgers.

    Burger King Germany has made a groundbreaking move to make veganism more accessible to customers, with all plant-based dishes now cheaper than those containing meat.

    It has unveiled a new motto, ‘Plant-Based for Everyone’, to coincide with the announcement, which will see the markup for its vegan items like the Whopper, chicken nuggets and Long Chicken sandwich be reduced by 10 cents.

    It’s a landmark decision: the fast-food chain says it has the largest vegan range in German QSR, with a meat-free (sometimes vegetarian) alternative to almost every menu option. The price cuts play into consumer trends in the country, with a large EU-backed survey last year revealing that 39% of Germans find plant-based alternatives too expensive, making price the biggest purchase barrier.

    “Since the mid-1990s, we have been investing in vegetarian alternatives and have shown that fast food doesn’t always have to mean meat. As a pioneer, we offer by far the largest plant-based range in the German foodservice industry – and now even with a price advantage,” said Burger King Germany CEO Jörg Ehmer. “We are thus providing a strong impetus to try out plant-based options. Our goal: to offer guests freedom of choice – without compromising on taste.”

    A new flower-shaped vegan beef patty

    burger king nuggets
    Courtesy: Burger King Germany

    Alongside the price reductions, Burger King is working with Unilever-owned plant-based meat brand The Vegetarian Butcher on a new flower-shaped patty for its vegan beef burgers, which will be rolled out in the coming weeks. This is meant to help distinguish between the conventional beef and plant-based options, and follows the development of a breading with parsley sprinkles to differentiate between its chicken patties and nuggets.

    The Vegetarian Butcher has supplied plant-based beef and chicken analogues to Burger King since 2019. Their partnership exists in multiple markets, including the UK, Indonesia, China, the UAE, Mexico and Costa Rica (in the US, the fast-food chain works with Impossible Foods).

    For Veganuary, it launched the Veggie King Deluxe, which the company says was “very successful”, and now, it plans to develop more plant-based products for its menu. It cements Burger King’s vegan leadership in the European fast-food space, with a report last year noting that it has the highest number of plant-based mains across the leading chains in Europe.

    “We are the first choice in terms of plant-based options in the foodservice industry, and continue to drive the growing trend towards alternative protein sources in Germany,” added Ehmer. “For this, we are not only developing our products and processes further, but also focusing on greater product variety and easier access.”

    The company has established a credo for all its plant-based products: ‘0% meat. 100% flavour.’ This focus on taste is smart, given that flavour is the top motivating factor for choosing plant-based alternatives in Germany, with 55% citing it.

    Burger King follows consumer trends in Germany

    plant based whopper
    Courtesy: Burger King Germany | Composite by Green Queen

    Burger King Germany’s price cuts for plant-based meat represent a shrewd move, considering that it is the largest vegan market in Europe, and with a growing willingness to cut back on meat consumption. In fact, 59% of Germans reported eating less meat in 2022 than the year before – the joint-highest in the EU.

    This makes sense when you realise that Germany has the largest flexitarian population in Europe, with the EU survey putting that figure at 40%. An earlier USDA report, however, says as many as 55% of Germans follow a flexitarian diet. Burger King Germany’s marketing head Klaus Schmäing has previously said that flexitarians are the company’s main target.

    “The large group we want to address are flexitarians,” he said. “But beyond that, of course, also vegetarians and vegans.” (The EU poll found that Germany had the second-largest vegan population in the region too, at 4% of the population.) And last year, Burger King Germany revealed that one in every five Whoppers it sells are plant-based, and likewise for nearly one in four Long Chickens.

    So the demand is clearly there – and it’s something the government has identified too, having earmarked €38M in the 2024 federal budget to promote alternative protein consumption and a switch to plant-based agriculture, as well as open a Proteins of the Future centre.

    “With this decision on the protein transition, the coalition is taking a big step towards the transition to a sustainable food system laid out in the coalition agreement,” said Ivo Rzegotta, senior public affairs manager for Germany at the Good Food Institute Europe, an alternative protein think tank. “The agreed funding measures for research and transformation will put Germany on the path to becoming a leader in this emerging field.”

    Burger King isn’t the only company to reduce prices and make plant-based food more accessible in Germany. In October, discount retailer Lidl announced that most of its own-label products from the Vemondo plant-based range would be at price parity with or cheaper than conventional meat and dairy products, explaining that “conscious and sustainable consumption” is only possible if these foods are “affordable and more easily accessible for everyone”.

    Lidl’s announcement was swiftly followed by Kaufland, which dropped the prices of 90 vegan products to make them competitive or more affordable than their animal-based counterparts. Rewe Group’s BILLA and Penny have made identical moves, as has Aldi Süd.

    With its whopping decision, Burger King Germany has added itself to that list.

    The post Plant-Based for Everyone: Burger King Germany Makes All Vegan Products Cheaper than Meat appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • After a Year of Declining Sales, Tesco Sees Plant-Based Demand Grow

    tesco vegan
    5 Mins Read

    UK supermarket Tesco is witnessing a rise in demand for plant-based food, following a slight dip in sales last year. The retailer says the plant-based industry is now in its “second phase”, with whole cuts a key growth point.

    It’s no secret that the plant-based industry endured a challenging 2023, with sales of meat-free products in the UK (which include Quorn’s vegetarian SKUs too) falling by £38.4M. It was among the worst-performing grocery categories, with plenty of factors affecting the market, not least the cost-of-living crisis, concerns around ultra-processing, and dissatisfaction with the taste and texture of the products.

    The UK’s biggest retailer, Tesco, also witnessed a decline (albeit a small one), which it ascribed to a drop-off in interest from “dabblers and the merely curious” for the “biggest food trend this century”. But things are turning around, with the retailer noting that the plant-based revolution is moving into its second phase now, as demand rises for meat-free ingredients and whole cuts.

    The retailer’s plant-based food buyer Cate May said the “initial level of interest was inevitably going to drop off slightly”, but in this phase two, “we are seeing flexitarians now wanting to take more control over what they eat, whilst continuing to reduce their meat intake”.

    Whole cuts and whole foods drive Tesco’s vegan growth

    supermarkets veganuary
    Courtesy: Tesco

    In the last three months, sales for plant-based fish products at Tesco are up by 100% compared to the same period last year. Similarly, vegan steak and chicken breasts have seen a 20% hike, while meatless burger purchases have increased by 10%. Even traditional plant proteins like tofu and tempeh grew by 20%.

    Long touted as the “holy grail” of plant-based meat, whole cuts have slowly begun creeping into supermarkets across the world, and the steaks from Slovenia’s Juicy Marbles were one of the most notable successes for vegan food at Tesco. In fact, in the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, Tesco sold 100,000 vegan steaks, which it called “an unprecedented number for that occasion”.

    “Customers are starting to understand the versatility of plant-based ingredients and whole cuts, and are creating a wide variety of meals such as tofu stir-fries, meat-free curries using chicken alternatives or beans and pulses, and classic steak and chips using plant-based steaks,” said May.

    “Awareness is also starting to increase around the health benefits of making some simple swaps in their diet, for example, to reduce saturated fat whilst maintaining strong levels of protein by increasing the amount of plants and plant-based foods in their diets and then supplementing with more fresh veg.”

    To highlight the increased consumption of whole foods, Tesco commissioned a survey of 2,000 UK adults in December, and found that 46% of Brits are eating more vegetables than they were five years ago. For 47%, introducing more vegetables to their plates was a deliberate decision, with the main reasons being health (82%), environmental impact (25%), and cost savings (22%). Even Sunday roasts – or the equivalent family meals – have seen an uptick, with 48% of respondents saying their roast dinners involve more vegetables now. For 60%, this meant three or more different types of vegetables.

    This speaks to the prominence of whole-food plant-based mains on restaurant menus this Veganuary too: Burger King brought back its black bean burger; Wagamama, Pret A Manger and Zizzi highlighted mushrooms; Leon went all-in on gut health with a bhaji wrap; and Pizza Express introduced a veggie-packed calzone.

    Vegetable and meat consumption trends in the UK

    tesco plant chef
    Courtesy: Tesco

    To May’s point about flexitarianism, there has been a drop in meat-eating in the UK. Government data from 2023 showed that meat consumption was at its lowest since records began almost half a century ago. So it perhaps may come as a surprise that fresh meat was actually one of the fastest-growing sectors in terms of retail sales, which were up by £352.5M.

    However, inflation is key here: for example, the rise in sales for chicken (the top-performing food) was largely driven by a 13.4% price hike. This is why it wasn’t just meat intake that saw record lows among Brits – dairy went through the same thing. Those government figures also showed that Brits were eating 6% fewer fruits and vegetables than pre-pandemic levels.

    But the renewed optimism for vegetables – at least according to Tesco’s data – can be explained by inflation too. A 1,000-person survey in October found that 62% of Brits feel plant-based meats cost much more than their conventional counterparts, with a fifth citing costs as the biggest reason for reducing their intake of these alternatives. Whole foods like vegetables will always be cheaper than meat analogues, so are naturally an appealing option for consumers with squeezed wallets.

    This survey can explain the growing interest in whole cuts as well. For 66% of consumers, plant-based meat products taste much worse than their conventional counterparts, while 51% cite taste/texture as the biggest reason for reducing their consumption of meat alternatives. With whole cuts, which mimic the texture of muscle fibres in meat, consumers get the same mouthfeel and an elevated flavour experience.

    These products are thus effective gateways into plant-based eating for meat-eaters looking to become flexitarians. There’s some way to go, though. A 2,003-person YouGov survey published in January shows that only 13% of Brits consider themselves flexitarian, which is a three-point drop from two years ago. Conversely, 73% call themselves meat-eaters, a three-point rise from January 2022. The poll revealed that only 2% of Brits are vegans, and 5% vegetarians. In contrast, research by Finder – published in January as well – estimated that 4.7% of UK adults follow a plant-based diet.

    Either way, what’s clear is that food prices and associated health aspects are increasingly important for Brits, and vegetables will go a long way in alleviating those concerns. Tesco’s own-label Plant Chef range, which has over 180 items, features products like Vegetable Fingers, Spicy Bean Burgers and Katsu Style Veggie Crispbakes, alongside meat analogues too, in a bid to appeal to a wide range of consumers.

    Even after cutting its private-label SKUs by over 500, the grocer managed to grow value sales by 10% with an innovation focus on “fast-growing categories such as plant-based”, with the five new frozen Plant Chef ranges rolled out this Veganuary. It was also the retailer that introduced Wicked Kitchen to the world. With a strong plant-based pedigree, Tesco will be hopeful of turning the category’s fortunes around in the UK this year.

    The post After a Year of Declining Sales, Tesco Sees Plant-Based Demand Grow appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Vegan Sunny-Side-Ups: Yo Egg Makes US Retail Debut With Plant-Based Eggs

    yo egg
    5 Mins Read

    Israeli food tech company Yo Egg is launching its vegan sunny-side-ups and poached eggs in US retail, starting with stores in Los Angeles, before a nationwide move next year.

    A year after making its foodservice debut in Los Angeles, Yo Egg is moving into retail with its vegan fried and poached eggs, starting with the west coast.

    Headquartered in Los Angeles, the startup will introduce its plant-based eggs in the city through a distribution deal with Whitestone Natural Foods. This will mean its products – which are priced at $6.99 for a four-pack – will be available in the freezers of Hanks Organic, Besties Vegan Paradise, Rainbow Acres Natural Foods, Follow Your Heart Market and PlantX (XMarket Venice), among others.

    The company then plans to expand into California, New York and eventually nationwide next year. “We’re starting small with individual operators in the better-for-you natural foods category,” Yo Egg CEO Eran Groner told AgFunderNews. “Then we’re targeting regional players such as Bristol Farms, before going after accounts such as Sprouts and Whole Foods.”

    Pondering co-manufacturing to scale up vegan egg production

    vegan egg substitute
    Courtesy: Yo Egg

    Founded in 2021 by Groner and chef Yosefa Ben Cohen – who had developed the eggs with both restaurants and home cooks in mind – Yo Egg is the world’s first startup creating vegan fried and poached eggs, complete with runny yolks.

    Unlike other plant-based egg companies, which either produce a powdered version or liquid eggs to make omelettes and scrambles, Yo Egg focuses on pre-prepped frozen sunny-side-up and poached eggs that can be boiled or fried. Made from a base of sunflower oil and chickpea and soy protein, the eggs leverage the startup’s patent-pending tech for whites and yolks (which are sealed using alginate, a seaweed extract).

    The egg white system enables Yo Egg to produce the ideal structure for each format, and can be fried, poached or boiled. “It’s all about the phasing, timing and temperatures, not just the recipe, so it would be very hard to reverse-engineer it,” Groner explained.

    Meanwhile, the company can make 50,000 yolks each day with a single piece of equipment. “In a room that’s 200 square feet, we can have four such machines, so that’s 200,000 yolks per day, which – if you do the math – is already a scaled egg farm in the United States if you have 200,000 birds laying eggs,” he noted.

    Yo Egg currently has a pilot facility in North Hollywood, with which it can already compete with the prices of market leader Just Egg, whose scale is way higher (it recently announced the sale of the equivalent of 500 million eggs). But Groner, who said the company is hoping to bring retail prices down to $5.99 per pack, floated the idea of using a co-manufacturer too. “We would make the egg whites and the yolks and the co-manufacturer would form the egg, and we provide the plug-and-play equipment for that process. They form the egg and then they cook it, freeze it and package it,” he said.

    “This way, we maintain the IP, the recipe and the protocol of mixing, and the yolk manufacturing using our specialised equipment,” he added, stating that after line testing with “a fairly big manufacturer”, the eggs came out better than what Yo Egg’s own equipment can deliver.

    Yo Egg’s foodservice-first strategy

    vegan eggs
    Courtesy: Yo Egg

    Yo Egg, which has raised over $5M in funding, made its debut in US foodservice last February, targeting brunch spots in Los Angeles, including Real Food Daily, Flore Vegan, Swingers Diner, Coyote Grill, and Loma Linda’s Vegan District Asian Eatery.

    This was followed by a nationwide launch in April, with Yo Egg appearing on the menu at restaurants like Coletta and Beyond Sushi, and even the offices of Google. Its poached and sunny-side-up offerings are also part of menu options at fast-casual chain Veggie Grill (now owned by Next Level Burger).

    This foodservice-first approach is a tried-and-tested strategy in the plant-based sector. Oatly, for example, debuted in the US through specialty coffee shops, with word of mouth and barista approval stamps propelling it to widespread popularity before its retail launch. A similar route to market was taken by plant-based meat giant Impossible Foods, which has an outstanding foodservice record and was specified by Groner as a reference point for Yo Egg.

    “There are definitely advantages in launching a brand in foodservice before you go into retail. It’s easier to iterate quickly in foodservice, get rapid feedback, and iterate again. It doesn’t work like that in retail,” he explained. “What people like is that we’re going after every format of eggs. We’re starting with fried and poached eggs and we’re planning to launch a patty next quarter, where we already have major accounts signed up. This will be followed by hard-boiled eggs later this year, and a liquid yolk product next year.”

    Yo Egg will hope these innovations allow it to take a large slice of the vegan egg market, which is currently dominated by Just Egg (it represents 99% of all sales in the sector). Other retail players include Follow Your Heart, Hodo, Simply Eggless, WunderEggs and Neat Egg, alongside private-label offerings from Target and Kroger – but succeeding in this space is tough. Plant-based eggs make up just 0.5% of the total US egg market, as of 2022. In terms of units, while plant-based eggs grew by sevenfold between 2019-22 to reach 10 million sales, animal-based egg sales were around 2.3 billion.

    Additionally, the number of American households buying plant-based eggs was just 2% in 2022 – but the sector has outpaced dollar sales growth for animal-derived eggs, growing by 348% versus 67% for the latter from 2019-22, albeit with a much smaller base. So there has definitely been progress, but there’s room for a lot of progress too, given the scale of the conventional egg industry.

    “Consumers like the fact that animals are not involved and it’s better for the environment, but what really drives consumption is you have a third of the saturated fat, zero cholesterol, and less sodium [compared to chicken eggs],” explained Groner. “And foodservice operators love the fact that finally, they have a plant-based option on their menu that they can be proud of. It’s a surprising, innovative, versatile product.”

    The post Vegan Sunny-Side-Ups: Yo Egg Makes US Retail Debut With Plant-Based Eggs appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Blood Free: Disney+ to Release Korean Thriller Series Based on Cultivated Meat

    han hyo-joo
    6 Mins Read

    Disney+ has announced that it will release a new thriller TV series based on the premise of cultivated meat, called Blood Free, on April 10.

    In a year where we’ve already seen another instance of regulatory approval, more public tastings allowed, and a spate of applications amid a growing establishment of regulatory frameworks, cultivated meat is now coming to your screens.

    Disney+, the world’s third-largest streaming service, will next month release a new Korean thriller series based on cultivated meat, with a new poster confirming the novel protein’s central role in the story.

    The Disney+ Original K-drama will feature Ju Ji-hoon (Lucifer, Kingdom) and Han Hyo-joo (Dong Yi, Moving) in the lead roles, with the storyline blending mystery, technology and ethical dilemmas. The teaser poster of the series showcases a piece of cultivated steak branded with the letters ‘BF’ (for Blood Free) under a 3D printer, with tubes attached to both sides of it.

    On the Korean poster, the tagline reads: “Will you join us in this age of artificially cultured meat?” It’s accompanied with a caption stating: “Conspiracies, conflict and cultured meat. One brilliant woman and her protector face the dangers of a #BloodFree future.”

    Cultivated meat forms the backdrop of K-drama Blood Free

    blood free
    Courtesy: Disney+

    The 10-episode series, previously called Dominant Species, is a suspense thriller set in 2025. It revolves around Yoon Ja-yu (played by Han), who is the CEO of BF Group, a biotech company that has pioneered cultivated meat development. While the firm dominates the market share, Yoon is facing doubts and scrutiny both publicly and internally.

    Ju, meanwhile, plays Woo Chae-woon, a former Naval Academy graduate and soldier and current bodyguard who is haunted by past failures. He is chasing the mastermind behind a terrorist attack, and after following several different leads, he approaches Yoon – also a survivor of the attack – to offer protection.

    The cast includes Lee Hee-jun, who portrays prime minister Seon Woo-jae, who wants to take control of BF Group. Lee Moo-saeng plays the role of Onsan, Yoon’s friend of 20 years and a physiologist who developed the cell culture tech as a co-founder of BF Group. He developed the technology alongside bioengineer Kim Shin-gu (played by Kim Sang-ho).

    They are joined by Park Ji-yeon, who portrays the role of a lawyer and head of planning at BF Group, and Jeon Seok-ho, who plays an IT expert at the firm. The series is written by Lee Soo-yeon, who was behind the acclaimed 2017 series Stranger (an adaptation of Forest of Secrets), and directed by Park Cheol-hwan, who worked alongside Lee on the 2022 series Grid.

    Cultivated meat in pop culture, and the importance of accurate representation

    meat the future
    Courtesy: Meat the Future

    Blood Free signposts a major pop culture moment for cultivated meat, which is still a nascent industry and at a point where consumer buy-in is becoming increasingly crucial, considering that some politicians in the US and the EU are actively attempting to ban it (or have already done so).

    It’s not the first time these proteins have been on screen – it was the subject of the 2020 documentary Meat the Future, a Jane Goodall-narrated film that chronicled the story of Californian cultivated chicken producer Upside Foods (which is one of only two companies currently allowed to all cultivated meat in the US).

    Cultivated meat has been represented in onscreen fiction too. In 2009, the satirical workplace comedy Better Off Ted attempted to create “beef without cows” in a lab in the episode titled Heroes. However, it also highlighted the risks of misrepresenting cultivated meat to a wider public – the show’s food taster said the meat tasted like “despair”.

    It perpetuated two common perceptions of cultivated meat that remain to this day, and to the industry’s detriment. First, the idea that cultivated meat tastes bad or – in Better Off Ted’s case – just plain sad could be off-putting to people who are already unsure about these novel foods. And second, it associated cultivated meat with the ‘lab-grown’ moniker, despite the sector’s attempts to move away from it.

    This is because, at scale, cultivated meat is – like most foods – grown in bioreactors in a production facility, not labs. These cultivators are similar to the setup of a brewery. This makes ‘lab-grown’ a misleading term, and it’s one that carries the most uninviting tone to consumers. Research has constantly shown that consumers find ‘lab-grown’ to be the least favourable term (more so than even ‘artificial meat’), with 75% of Americans finding it unappealing.

    Blood Free has similar connotations, with the English poster reading: “Out lab-grown future has arrived.” While the representation of cultivated meat in popular media is a significant way to increase awareness of the term, it’s important that the circumstances around it – the terrorist attacks and the doubts faced by the CEO of a cultivated meat company – don’t turn consumers away from these foods, which are vital for a climate-friendly future.

    South Korea’s attitudes and support for cultivated meat

    cultivated meat regulatory approval
    Courtesy: TissenBioFarm

    The news of the release comes shortly after South Korea established a framework for the regulatory approval of cultivated meat, with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety now accepting applications from cultivated meat producers. Several local startups are expected to file dossiers in the coming weeks, ushering in a new era for meat in the country.

    The process takes up to 270 days and costs ₩45M ($34,000), with startups needing to file a comprehensive application to be considered safe for human consumption and allowed to sell their products.

    Consumer surveys have displayed a willingness to give these products a shot. A 1,100-person poll by the APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture in October found that 90% of South Koreans are open to trying cultivated meat at least once (though only 5% indicated they’d eat it regularly). Moreover, 39% were supportive of cultivated meat being sold at supermarkets and restaurants (with 14- to 29-year-olds leading the way), and just 10% were opposed to its commercialisation.

    In fact, 19% of Koreans said they would prefer cultivated meat over plant proteins. But price remains a significant barrier, with 65% citing it as the most important factor for eating these products, followed by taste and texture (62%). This is reflected in the fact that despite two-thirds of Korean households spending up to ₩50,000 ($23-38) each week on meat products, only 12% would be willing to pay ₩1,000-3,000 (75 cents to $2) more per 100g of cultivated meat.

    Calisa Lim, project manager at APAC-SCA, told Green Queen at the time: “We need combined synergies and efforts through investors, contract manufacturers, established stakeholders, startups, and government bodies to facilitate a thriving ecosystem for cultivated meat and seafood in South Korea.”

    Can Blood Free make Koreans – and the 150 million people who subscribe to Disney+ globally – hungry for cultivated meat?

    The post Blood Free: Disney+ to Release Korean Thriller Series Based on Cultivated Meat appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Eat Just Pauses Singapore Operations – But Plans to Double Cultivated Meat Production This Year

    eat just singapore
    6 Mins Read

    Californian cultivated meat producer Eat Just has paused its Singapore operations, three months after Huber’s Bistro stopped selling its Good Meat chicken. The production facility set to open in Q3 last year has also been shut, as the company says it’s reevaluating its strategy in Asia.

    2024 will mark the four-year anniversary of Eat Just’s historic regulatory approval for the sale of cultivated meat in Singapore. Since then, the Californian startup received clearance in the US too, and restaurants began selling its Good Meat chicken in both countries.

    However, you can’t find Eat Just’s chicken – or any cultivated meat, for that matter – in restaurants anymore. In Singapore, its product is no longer available at Huber’s Bistro, which was the only restaurant offering the chicken last year.

    And now, it has emerged that Eat Just has pressed pause on its operations in the island nation, with the company telling the Straits Times it’s reassessing its Asia strategy. “We’re evaluating various processing conditions, the unit economics, and a larger strategic approach to producing in Asia,” a spokesperson said.

    The Singapore newspaper has revealed that Eat Just is no longer producing in Singapore, with the $61M Good Meat manufacturing plant in Bedok – which was slated for a Q3 2023 launch – seemingly not in operation anymore, while the $120M factory for Just Egg in the city’s Pioneer area also cancelled.

    Manufacturing facilities shuttered, but products to return ‘very soon’

    cultivated meat singapore
    Courtesy: Eat Just

    The Strait Times visited Bedok Food City, the site of Good Meat’s 30,000 sq ft facility – last week, but employees from other companies in the building said Eat Just’s two units on the ground floor were closed. They added that these had rarely opened for about six months. One of the closed units had boxes full of air-purifying equipment sitting outside, and the other had benches piled up.

    The newspaper said a separate commercial plant that previously manufactured Good Meat’s chicken is not producing for the company anymore either. Eat Just said there was “no firm timeline” on when the Bedok facility would be operational, noting that the startup had “produced and paused and produced and paused” since it began selling the chicken.

    However, they added: “We’re planning to produce at least twice as much in Singapore this year than any year before.”

    Eat Just had announced that it had broken ground on a plant protein facility for its vegan Just Egg product in March 2022, stating that it would take about two years to complete. But when asked about progress on this, the spokesperson said: “We are not building a facility in Pioneer.”

    Meanwhile, the company indicated that Good Meat will soon be back at Huber’s Bistro, which offered the chicken as part of skewers and salads. The spokesperson said the products will return to the eatery “very soon”, once the supply is ready.

    The foodservice pause isn’t just in Singapore – Good Meat used to be available at the José Andrés-owned Washington, DC restaurant China Chilcano, but the eatery passed reservations for its tasting menu featuring the cultivated chicken back in September. “The most important activities for GOOD Meat are related to process development and lowering costs long-term. We are focusing our efforts and resources on those tasks at this time,” Eat Just’s global communications director, Carrie Kabat, told Green Queen last month.

    Eat Just looks to overcome challenges for a profitable 2024

    just egg singapore
    Courtesy: Eat Just

    This is the latest in a growing list of challenges faced by Eat Just over the last year. As the company – which has raised over $850M to date – aims for profitability in 2024, it is in the middle of multiple legal battles with suppliers and manufacturers over non-payment.

    Eat Just has been involved in at least seven lawsuits since 2019 – and while it has settled some of them, its case with bioreactor manufacturer ABEC is still ongoing. The latter sued the alternative protein startup for $100M, which included payments for changes to the scope of the work, alongside unpaid invoices. But last month, Eat Just filed a counterclaim alleging that it was ABEC that breached contractual terms.

    The Californian startup also shut down production on the facility that was going to house the ABEC bioreactors, which was announced in May 2022. Speaking to Green Queen in September, Eat Just CEO Josh Tetrick said: “In the past few years we have invested a lot of capital in the design and engineering for a large-scale cultivated meat facility, knowing we would have to raise additional capital to complete the rest of the facility.”

    He added: “Because of market conditions, we found ourselves in a position where it became very challenging to raise that additional capital. At this point, we’re re-assessing how we think about a large-scale facility in a more realistic way – which will still be very challenging.”

    But conversely, the company has made several strides to ensure it can break even this year. The news about its Singapore operations comes a week after Eat Just announced it had sold the equivalent of 500 million eggs since Just Egg’s launch in 2019. And in January, it relaunched its cult-favourite Just Mayo and Ranch lines.

    “Challenges, doubts, and unforeseen hurdles have not stopped Eat Just from continuing to drive innovation in plant-based foods to give consumers better choices and more ways to change the food system for the better every time they sit down to a meal,” the brand told Green Queen during the launch.

    Cultivated meat is still progressing in Singapore and elsewhere

    good meat chicken
    Courtesy: Eat Just

    It shows how it’s not all doom and gloom for cultivated meat. Kabat confirmed that Good Meat planned to resume tastings in the US this year, as did Upside Foods, the only other company to have the regulatory greenlight for cultivated meat in the US.

    And as for Singapore, the country still remains a hotbed for alternative protein in Asia – it was the world’s first to approve these novel proteins for sale, and it’s now expected to grant the next clearance in the sector, with Dutch company Meatable anticipating the go-ahead by Q2. This would make it the first European startup – and first cultivated pork producer – to be allowed to sell cultivated meat anywhere in the world. France’s Vital Meat and Israel’s Aleph Farms (which is already approved in its home country) have also filed dossiers in Singapore for their products.

    Additionally, last month, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore ruled that cultivated meat can be halal under specific circumstances. It was followed by South Korea inviting applications for safety assessments of cultivated meat for regulatory approval. Meanwhile, Australia’s Vow Food has advanced into a public consultation process for its cultivated quail in Australia and New Zealand, before it will enter a 60-day review period for ministers.

    “Transforming the global food system is a relay race, not a sprint,” said Mirte Gosker, managing director of alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute APAC. “With more than 150 companies operating in the cultivated meat sector worldwide, progress is bound to come in fits and starts, as has been the case in clean energy, electric vehicles, and other emerging technologies.

    “What matters most is that cultivated meat as a category succeeds, because there is no path to limiting global warming to 1.5°C without reimagining the way meat gets to our plates.”

    The post Eat Just Pauses Singapore Operations – But Plans to Double Cultivated Meat Production This Year appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • UK Regulator Eyes State Funding to Build Lab for Safety Testing of Cultivated Meat by Autumn

    uk cultivated meat
    6 Mins Read

    In what would be a major step towards the regulatory approval and commercialisation of cultivated meat, the UK is aiming to begin safety testing by this autumn, with the Food Standards Agency hoping to win government funding for the lab facilities.

    It was in August that Israeli cultivated meat producer Aleph Farms announced the submission of its dossier for regulatory approval from the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA). Five months later, the company became just the third in the world to receive the all-clear to sell cultivated meat – but this was in its home country of Israel, not the UK.

    However, Aleph Farms may be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon, with the FSA reportedly planning to start conducting safety tests for cultivated meat this autumn, according to the Grocer. The FSA is in talks with food companies and has issued a call for scientists to work alongside to pilot a ‘sandbox’ testing project, which will enable them to assess the novel proteins for human consumption.

    The FSA is seeking government funding for the labs that would be used to conduct the tests, with a bid to win financing through a £5M scheme announced by UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt last autumn.

    “Following the chancellor’s announcement late last year that new regulatory sandboxes would be created to help support transformative innovations in emerging sectors, the Food Standards Agency has signalled its interest in creating a sandbox environment for cultivated meat,” Linus Pardoe, UK policy manager at alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe – which has previously called on the chancellor to provide the FSA with a £30M injection – told Green Queen.

    Slow post-Brexit regulation drives UK producers elsewhere

    hoxton farms
    Courtesy: Hoxton Farms

    The FSA still follows pre-Brexit rules set out by the European Food Safety Agency, which classes cultivated meat as a novel food that requires premarket authorisation. These are said to be the strictest regulations around food safety in the world, and so far, no alternative protein company has received the go-ahead to sell cultivated meat.

    Publicly, Aleph Farms is the only one to have applied in Europe – though both filings were in countries outside the EU (Switzerland and the UK). Dutch company Meatable has announced it will soon apply in the Netherlands, after it cleared the route for public tastings of cell-cultured meat.

    In the UK, there was talk of fast-tracking the approval of these foods through a bilateral deal with Israel, with government and FSA officials visiting the country to taste cultivated meat and see how it’s regulated in the Middle Eastern nation. But this was just before its conflict with Hamas began, which has likely derailed any such deals for the time being.

    But now, even as many EU countries ban or attempt to restrict these proteins, cultivated meat regulation could be preparing for a shakeup in its former member nation. The FSA will next month present plans for an overhaul of novel foods (among other products) in its board meeting next month, in the face of criticism that it has been too slow to capitalise on post-Brexit freedom in this area.

    Speaking to Green Queen in August, Pardoe warned that the UK could risk losing momentum in the regulation race if it didn’t ramp up investment in the sector – countries like the US and Singapore had already approved cultivated meat for sale by then, and the Netherlands and Israel were making good progress. The prophecy has come true, with British cultured pork fat company Hoxton Farms considering a move to the US in order to speed up the regulatory green light.

    “We’re very confident we will get approval from the US FDA [Food and Drug Administration], so we’re considering building our first manufacturing facility outside the UK,” CEO Ed Steele told the Financial Times this week. “That’s not what we want to do, but we need to do what’s best for the company.”

    The Grocer has previously reported that an FSA-commissioned report by Deloitte in 2023 found that speeding up of novel foods regulation could help the UK meet its carbon reduction plans (the country has earmarked 2050 as its net-zero target). A GFI report from last year found that cultivated meat can reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of meat production by 92%.

    “We are actively engaging with CCP [cell-cultured product] companies to understand their novel technologies and understand how we can support innovation,” FSA deputy director of food policy Natasha Smith told the Grocer. “Engagement is ongoing, and we are continually speaking to industry about how to best manage applications and to set expectations about the approval process.”

    Increased funding supports cultivated meat progress in the UK

    cultivated meat regulatory approval
    Courtesy: Aleph Farms

    “Should it receive funding, the FSA will be able to use the sandbox to further develop its understanding of the key food safety considerations and nutritional value of cultivated meat, helping it implement the UK’s robust regulatory framework and build consumer confidence in this food,” said Pardoe.

    Regulatory sandboxes involve companies to test new concepts – in this case, cultivated meat – with real customers under the supervision of a regulator, as designed by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority.

    “If funding is granted, we can create a team in the FSA that works with the cell-cultivated product industry to agree on what should be included within their applications, address complex regulatory questions, and provide pre-application support to CCP companies,” said the FSA’s Smith.

    In August, GFI Europe urged the UK government to invest £390M in alternative proteins between 2025 and 2030, while a report by the Green Alliance suggested that, with the right combination of targeted investments and regulation, this industry could be worth £6.8B annually and create 25,000 British jobs by 2035.

    In that vein, earlier this month, government body UK Research and Innovation made an investment through its Technical Missions fund for University of Oxford cultivated meat researcher Hua Ye. And fellow state agency Innovate UK awarded close to a £500,000 grant to turn the northeast into a cultivated meat production hub, with the Centre for Process Innovation (CPI), MarraBio Ltd and Aelius Biotech working together to create cost-effective and low-emission cultured meat products.

    “Ensuring the safety of any new and innovative food product, including cell-cultivated products, is paramount, and we must continue to balance fast-paced technological advances and industry demands with protecting public health,” said Smith.

    One source told the Grocer that both the FSA and cultivated meat producers hoping to commercialise their products agree that proving the safety of these foods is crucial. “The sandbox is really zeroing in on cultivated meats specifically,” they said.

    As mentioned above, there has been a lot of backlash from EU countries like Italy, France and Romania, who have either outlawed the production and sale of cultivated meat, or are hoping to do so. Among the main reasons cited are to protect culinary heritage, livestock farmers, and human health.

    But the source argued that cultivated meat would be safer than conventional meat from a hygiene perspective. “You are talking about food being grown in what is essentially a sterile laboratory, in contrast to your average abattoir,” he noted. “It’s going to be a laboratory with scientists from the FSA looking all over it, I doubt it’s going to get any cleaner than that.”

    The post UK Regulator Eyes State Funding to Build Lab for Safety Testing of Cultivated Meat by Autumn appeared first on Green Queen.

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  • Heura Seeks Profitability After International Growth Spurs 22% Increase in Sales

    heura
    5 Mins Read

    Catalan plant-based meat company Heura has announced its year-on-year sales grew by 22% last year, thanks to increased distribution deals across Europe. The business now aims to be profitable by 2025.

    Weeks after closing a €40M ($43M) Series B fundraiser, Heura has revealed that it posted €38.3M ($41.4M) in turnover last year, marking a 22% increase in annual sales. The positive figures were bolstered by both international growth, where its sales rose by 63% from the year before – particularly in France (88%) and the UK (81%).

    The plant-based meat company also cemented its leadership in its home market, capturing what it says is a record 26% market share and boasting the highest repeat rates in the category (50% above the average). Meanwhile, Heura’s portfolio accounts for four of the top five most-sold products in this sector in Spain.

    “In a pivotal year of transformation for the plant-based sector, we emerged as a category developer leader, enabling other companies to accelerate the protein transition by introducing a licensing B2B division aimed at extending its impact to a global scale via breakthrough technologies,” said CEO Marc Coloma, who co-founded Heura with Bernat Añaños in 2017.

    Expanding distribution and new B2B model fuel Heura’s growth

    heura foods
    Courtesy: Heura

    The announcement caps off a year of successes for Heura, which makes plant-based alternatives to chicken, beef, pork and fish in multiple formats. The company ranked 10 on the UK’s Forward Fooding FoodTech 500 list (described as “the Fortune 500 of agrifood tech”), won the Pyme del Año 2023 (which recognises the contribution of Spanish SMEs to the UK economy), and secured the EU’s Marie Curie Grant.

    Outside of accolades, individual products experienced commercial triumphs too. The latest iteration of its signature beef patty, the 3.0 Burger, is the best-selling vegan burger in southern Europe, and has triple the rotation of the second-best brand in Spain. Meanwhile, the York-style ham slices launched in October became the top-selling plant-based deli product in its home market within three months, accounting for 52% of the category’s growth in Q4.

    Heura also inked several new distribution deals across Europe, including with Vueling, Hilton and Royal Caribbean in foodservice, and Intermarche (France), Auchan (Portugal), Pam (Italy), Colruyt (Belgium) and Waitrose (UK) in retail. Plus, it boosted its presence in Spanish schools via a collaboration with catering company Serunion.

    The other major development in Heura’s 2023 was the launch of its B2B licensing division, powered by its patent-pending Good Rebel Tech system, which was unveiled in April. The proprietary process involves a novel thermomechanical processing technique, which relies upon mathematical models similar to AI.

    “We are basing our approach and models on new scientific understanding of plant proteins that we generate in the tech lab,” Coloma told Green Queen in October. “We can improve [the] accuracy of our predictions, limit biases and, most importantly, develop breakthrough technological solutions which are based on new scientific knowledge; rather than optimising technologies that already exist based on published existing data.”

    The tech can create additive-free, affordable plant-based foods with superior sensory and nutritional values and fewer ingredients, using only protein, water and oil to structure the product. This is how its 11-ingredient clean-label ham slices were created, and it opens up a new business model for Heura, allowing the manufacturers to leverage the tech in multiple food categories. Just earlier this month, it entered a partnership with plant-based CPG giant Upfield (which is an investor in the company) to license its tech.

    The clean-label, nutrition-forward aspects will speak to a European population that is eating less meat, and primarily due to health, a reason cited by 47% of respondents in a 7,500-person survey last year. The poll further revealed that nutritional inadequacies of plant-based food were a concern for 24% of consumers. Globally, too, an Ingredion survey found that 78% would spend more money on products with ‘natural’ or ‘all-natural’ packaging claims.

    Heura finds success in a year of challenges for the sector

    plant based ham
    Courtesy: Heura

    It’s not all about health for Heura, of course. The climate is just as important, and an ISO-compliant life-cycle assessment has revealed that its products have a 70-98% lower environmental impact than their conventional counterparts. Last year’s sales represented water savings equivalent to 6,600 swimming pools, carbon savings of 36.5 million kg (which could power 4,600 homes for one year), and the sparing of 1.3 million animals.

    Heura’s €40M Series B financing was the second-largest publicly announced funding round for a vegan company in 2023, and took total investment in the business to €88M ($95M). The plant-based meat player had said it would use the funding to “boost its impact in the food industry”, accelerate international expansion, introduce new products, and explore more collaborative models beyond its own meat alternatives.

    Most notably, Heura said the investment would help drive the company towards profitability – and now, it has confirmed its aim to become profitable by 2025. To do so, the business has “transitioned from a hypergrowth approach to a sustainable growth strategy”, which has involved changes to “improve efficiency and focus on the milestones nearing profitability”.

    The financial results come just a week after plant-based meat giant Beyond Meat published its own Q4 earnings, which revealed an 18% decrease in annual revenue (which reached $343M), but a 2.5% reduction in net losses ($338M) from 2022 too. Its performance in the last quarter was better than analysts predicted, signalling a shift in fortunes for the company as well as the sector as a whole.

    While VC activity has largely slowed down and sales have been disappointing over the last year, some feel that the sector’s slump will turn around this year. Matthew Glover, co-founder of the Vegan Food Group, told Green Queen this week: “The signs are that the declines are reducing, and I think we’ll be cheering the news that the categories will be back in growth during this year.”

    While he acknowledged that double-digit growth won’t be a reality just yet for most plant-based meat companies – Heura has turned out to be an exception here – he added: “The economic climate generally seems to be improving, and there are some powerful advocacy programmes, which should help reengage consumers to the category.

    “Whilst it’s a tough trading environment, I do feel like we’re soon to be over the worst of it. The planet and the animals need us to be successful, and I’m confident we will be.”

    The post Heura Seeks Profitability After International Growth Spurs 22% Increase in Sales appeared first on Green Queen.

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  • New School Foods Ropes in Vegan Chef Matthew Kenney for ‘Culinary Council’ Ahead of Whole-Cut Salmon Launch

    matthew kenney
    6 Mins Read

    Canadian whole-cut plant-based salmon producer New School Foods has kicked off its New School Culinary Council of industry advisors, starting with vegan chef Matthew Kenney, who will help the brand make its commercial debut later this year.

    New School Foods, which produces whole-cut wild salmon from plants, has collaborated with Matthew Kenney to launch the New School Culinary Council (NSCC), an invite-only collective of international chefs and restaurateurs. The advisory hub will help guide the company through its upcoming launch in restaurants.

    Members of the NSCC will work closely with the Toronto-based startup to guide product development, recommend recipes, and support the adoption of its whole-muscle salmon. It reflects the company’s positioning of its seafood analogue as chef-led, with the use of plant fibres able to replicate the texture of fish muscle fibres, and recreate the same flavour, appearance and functional attributes.

    “From Day 0, we developed this product with chefs in mind,” said New School Foods CEO Chris Bryson. “As tastemakers, chefs and restaurateurs sit at the intersection between product and consumer – they represent a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to developing a product that consumers crave. If it won’t work for a chef, why would the consumer care?”

    Kenney agreed, noting that “there is no more demanding audience” for plant-based meat than professional chefs: “If your product does not look, cook, and taste like the real thing, you are better off in the grocery store, because chefs will not compromise.”

    Tapping into Matthew Kenney’s decades-long experience

    new school foods
    Courtesy: New School Foods

    The partnership will see Kenney develop new recipes with New School Foods’ salmon throughout the year, while highlighting menu flexibility and versatility of the whole-cut filet, which can be cooked in a host of different methods, including baking, roasting, sauteing, smoking and sous vide.

    “He’s a true expert in plant-based foods and immediately understood our product – what it can do, and what it could do,” Bryson told Green Queen when about the decision to team up with Kenney. “The first time he got the product, he took a series of filets and cooked them each in a different way, managing to take our product to whole new heights. He’s been extremely helpful at providing feedback for further improving the product, both in terms of the customer sensory experience, as well as the chef cooking experience.”

    In addition, Kenney will serve as an advocate and consultant for New School Foods, leveraging his experience and network to secure foodservice listings for the vegan salmon, especially in Los Angeles, where he currently lives. He will also provide ongoing feedback during regular sessions with the product development team ahead of its planned launch later this year.

    Kenney has been working in professional kitchens for over 30 years, with his company with dozens of restaurants around the world, including Plant Food + Wine, Plant City and Double Zero. A raw food pioneer, he was the founding partner of the infamous Pure Food and Wine vegan eatery in New York City, which was the subject of controversy in the 2010s after failing to pay its staff (Kenney left the establishment in 2005).

    However, since September 2022, at least 12 of his restaurants have shut, and investors, landlords and employees have accused Kenney of non-payments, with some paychecks allegedly bouncing even as influencers were given $10,000 worth of free food every year for promoting the establishments. The chef has acknowledged that some checks may have bounced, but denies that influencers would have been given more than $1,000 worth of food.

    To his credit, Kenney answered all questions asked of him in a wide-ranging interview with the Los Angeles Times – but the lawsuits and financial controversies give New School Foods pause when opting to work with him? “Not at all,” said Bryson. “We worked closely with chef Kenney for months before partnering, and his passion for both the product and the mission is clear. We believe that passion will carry over to many other chefs who will want to join New School Foods.”

    Better-tasting alt-seafood products will win over consumers

    New School Foods' vegan salmon
    Courtesy: New School Foods

    New School Foods, which first unveiled its salmon in February 2023, expects to add more chefs to its NSCC. “We have been working with a series of chefs over the last year,” revealed Bryson. “Matthew is our first official member given his deep experience with the plant-based space.”

    Adhering to the chef-forward philosophy, the company has no plans to sell its salmon in retail, instead focusing solely on restaurants. As for the pricing, Bryson said it will “depend on the relationship we have with each restaurant”.

    New School Foods has also been working with precision fermentation startup Liven Proteins and dehydration solutions provider NuWave Research on an $11.4M project partly funded by the Canadian government, which will combine its salmon production tech with Liven’s animal-free collagen and NuWave Research’s vacuum microwave technology to manufacturer whole-muscle plant-based salmon at scale. “[The collaboration is] to support our core product development and bring it to market,” said Bryson. “Liven is doing some great work that we hope to include in future product versions.”

    Its own version is made from a unique scaffolding technology that uses directional freezing to create scaffolds that mimic muscle fibres and connective tissues found in meat and fish. These are then infused with different proteins and flavours that mimic the taste, texture, structure and cooking process of conventional meat and seafood.

    The news comes just shortly after San Francisco-based New Wave Foods and German startup Ordinary Seafood were forced to cease trading, highlighting the challenges facing the alternative seafood industry. Despite vegan seafood outpacing the plant-based meat sector in sales from 2021-22, its retail sales only hit $14M, a minuscule 1% of the $1.2B made by the overall meat analogues category. Its contribution to the overall seafood sector is even smaller, representing just 0.2% of total sales.

    There have been some success stories too. Fellow Canadian Yves Potvin’s Konscious Foods has its frozen vegan sushi and poke bowl SKUs in over 4,500 retail doors in North America; Nestlé – the world’s largest CPG brand – introduced three plant-based seafood products in Europe and Asia recently; and Sweden’s Hooked Foods expanded into Germany with a listing in 400 REWE West stores in November.

    “While the market is going through an adjustment period, long-term, we expect this will be a very exciting sector,” said Bryson. “Customers are still looking for alternatives, and that shows based on the plant-based sector’s growth in Europe and US foodservice. But the products need to be better – in taste, texture, cooking experience, and clear nutritional benefit over meat/seafood. That will require better ingredients, and better processing technologies to more closely meet customer expectations.”

    “I speak from first-hand experience when I say that the products New School Foods developed are nothing short of a plant-based miracle,” said Kenney. “I was stunned by how versatile the product was – how it was a product that I could prepare any way I wanted. It cooks and transforms just like the real thing, raw-to-cooked transition and all, while delivering an amazing taste and texture experience.” 

    Israel’s Oshi and Austria’s Revo Foods also make whole-cut salmon – the latter was recently involved in a court case against the City of Vienna, which accused it of misleading consumers with its ‘vegan’ label on product packaging. The court has dismissed the suit.

    The post New School Foods Ropes in Vegan Chef Matthew Kenney for ‘Culinary Council’ Ahead of Whole-Cut Salmon Launch appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • The Livestock Industry Spreads Disinformation to Shape Policies – Here’s How to Fix It

    meat misinformation
    9 Mins Read

    Misinformation is rampant in the food system, with attacks on alternative protein becoming louder and more frequent. Robbie Lockie, founder of the newly formed Freedom Food Alliance, talks about the organisation’s research into meat and dairy’s crusade in a global election year.

    Over the last few months, a chunk of investigations have highlighted the link between animal agriculture lobby groups and their influence on policymaking around the world. One highlighted the livestock industry’s ties with EU members, which led to the bloc U-turning on its promised caged farming ban. Another found that the UN FAO watered down its reporting on meat and dairy’s climate impact after pressure from industry groups.

    Yet another looked at social media, where powerful far-right figures fuel the culture wars around meat-eating, and highlighted their use of a misleading study into cultivated meat. This was then used by lawmakers in the EU who are trying to restrict cultivated meat, before it has even been approved by the bloc’s food safety regulator.

    Now, a new report by consumer advocacy organisation the Freedom Food Alliance (FFA) sheds further light on misinformation and disinformation emanating from the meat and dairy industry, which receives 1,200 times more public funding in the EU than the alternative protein sector, and 800 times more in the US.

    A wide-ranging study that covers various examples of misinformation, the research explains how these can lead to policy changes affecting the food system – particularly the alternative protein space – at a time when reducing emissions is paramount and in a year where climate change is a key agenda for elections around the world.

    “Animal agriculture giants are waging a disinformation war, threatening public health and the planet,” said lead researcher Nicholas Carter. “Our report exposes their tactics of denial and delay and underscores the need for urgent action.”

    But first, let’s distinguish between misinformation and disinformation. The former can often start without malice, and could be “a simple misunderstanding or an error”, according to FFA founder Robbie Lockie. “Disinformation is a beast of a different nature, meticulously crafted with the intent to mislead and manipulate,” he adds. “It’s a deliberate act to cloud public perception, and it’s crucial we distinguish between these two to fight back effectively.”

    Big Beef’s viral disinformation campaigns to promote meat

    The report is expansive and looks at numerous instances of the livestock industry’s successful attempts to disinform policymakers and the public alike about the alternative protein sector. One of these is the #Yes2Meat campaign, which was a coordinated backlash attempt against the 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission report. Backed by scientists from across the globe, the study recommended halving the consumption of red meat and limiting dairy for a healthier and more sustainable food system.

    #yes2meat
    Courtesy: Freedom Food Alliance

    But a week before the full report came out, a campaign coordinated by the UC David CLEAR Center – founded and funded by livestock feed organisation IFEEDER – initiated the #Yes2Meat hashtag to dominate online conversations and spark conspiracy theories against the EAT-Lancet research. The effort was successful: response to the report was 10 times more likely to be negative than positive or neutral, thanks to the cultivation of doubt, false narratives and deflection to other issues.

    Lockie calls this the most “glaring” case study explored by the FFA report. “It wasn’t just an opposition to the Planetary Health Diet; it was a calculated attack against the very science that guides us towards healthier, more environmentally friendly dietary choices,” he explains. “This campaign sought to engrain the notion that meat is indispensable, blatantly ignoring the overwhelming evidence of its environmental and health ramifications.”

    He adds: “The attempts to sever the established connection between livestock farming and climate change are among the most audacious disinformation campaigns we’ve encountered.” You only need to look as far as the national Beef Checkoff programme run by the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board. While it began as an optional tax in 1985, it now mandates cattle producers to pay $1 for each live cow sold, which goes into a marketing fund designed to increase the demand for beef.

    beef checkoff program
    Courtesy: Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board

    The Beef Checkoff has spent $42M on its campaigns for this year alone, which are creeping into schools to influence children. The programme has used the money to promote beef – which is the food with the highest carbon footprint – with viral campaigns like ‘Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner’ promoting “regenerative grazing” and containing messaging like “meat substitutes are just that – substitutes”. It also got healthcare professionals to advocate for beef consumption.

    Other campaigns have downplayed the effects of meat production on the climate – notably, the sector pushing to use a new metric to calculate greenhouse gas emissions, called GWP*, which is skewed in its favour and has won a lot of support from politicians in several countries. But experts have warned that this is all but a misleading attempt to greenwash consumers.

    “These efforts deliberately twist scientific findings and amplify uncertainties, all to stall the essential policy changes needed for reducing meat consumption and moving towards a sustainable food system,” says Lockie. “It’s a stark reminder of the lengths some will go to protect vested interests over the well-being of our planet.”

    Using media, social networks and AI for disinformation

    News media and social networks can be highly effective disinformation tools out there, and Big Meat has been using them to its advantage. The report highlights the underreporting of animal agriculture in climate coverage – 93% of these stories never mention livestock farming – and how the media can reinforce industry narratives, oversimplify complex initiatives, and at times promote false information.

    Big Meat’s influence shapes up in the form of sponsored posts and promotional content too – sometimes created by its own members, and in other instances produced by media outlets. And this obviously influences consumer opinion, with a review of 285 million social media posts revealing that people find alternative protein unhealthy and bad for the planet, with dietary shifts framed as an ‘elite’ agenda to promote the culture wars surrounding these themes.

    climate change misinformation
    Courtesy: Freedom Food Alliance

    The FFA report outlines how industry-funded social media influencers and bots are creating the illusion of a balanced debate despite scientific evidence repeatedly imploring a dietary change towards more plants and fewer animals. Speaking of bots, the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing by the day.

    AI bots can exploit social media algorithms to increase their visibility and mimic human behaviour to spread convincing, viral disinformation – a problem that has been exacerbated by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) and the subsequent staff cuts and removal of content moderation roles. There is one striking example here: since December 2022 (two months after Musk finalised the deal), #ClimateScam has outperformed both #ClimateCrisis and #ClimateEmergency every month on the platform, both in terms of retweets and likes.

    soy boy
    Courtesy: Changing Markets Foundation

    “The advancement of AI brings about a new frontier in the dissemination of disinformation,” says Lockie. “The capability of AI to produce content that is convincingly real, yet fundamentally false, is alarming.” The tech has also been accused of being speciesist, which highlights an “urgent need for ethical frameworks and transparency” in how it’s used, especially to thwart potential misuse in spreading harmful narratives within the food sector.

    As for social media, Lockie believes there’s a “glimmer of hope” with governments and these platforms beginning to address the tide of disinformation. “The report calls for a firmer stance through enhanced regulations, robust fact-checking, and a united front among policymakers, NGOs, and the tech sector. It’s about laying down the groundwork to dismantle the mechanisms that allow disinformation to flourish,” he states.

    The ultra-processed food debate

    Another of the issues highlighted by the FFA is the misconceptions about plant-based meat and ultra-processed food. For years, the livestock industry has criticised meat alternatives’ long ingredient lists as shorthand for ‘unhealthy’. The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), a meat industry interest group, has been running coordinated attack ads since 2019, taking aim at their processed nature.

    One of its ads pit plant-based meat against dog food, with a side-by-side comparison of the ingredient lists asking consumers to guess which is which. Perhaps its biggest commercial came during the 2020 Super Bowl, where children in a Spelling Bee contest struggled with words like methylcellulose, a common emulsifier in meat alternatives. “If you can’t spell it or pronounce it,” concluded the ad, “maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.”

    While the plant-based industry has hit back, the CCF’s misinformation efforts have been successful, clouding consumers’ perception of these meat analogues, who group them with other UPFs and classify them as unhealthy. But experts have noted that not all UPFs are bad. “[Such marketing] campaigns play into concerns some people have around foods that are new – often called ‘food neophobia‘… Some campaigns really hone in on this, by using words like ‘fake’ and ‘unnatural’ to describe plant-based meats (which are safe, nutritious foods),” Churchill Fellow Jenny Chapman told Green Queen earlier this month.

    The meat industry also has clever ways to disregard the health benefits of plant-based meat. Take industry leader Beyond Meat, which last week announced a recipe overhaul for its beef and burger products, which – among other aspects – results in lower saturated fat and sodium content. But speaking to analysts in its Q4 earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Ethan Brown highlighted the deceptive misinformation tactics of Big Meat.

    “A favourite target is sodium levels, and the sleight of hand employed is to compare the Beyond Burger, which is seasoned, to an unseasoned ground beef burger,” he said. “The current Beyond Burger contains 17% of the daily recommended value of sodium, which when appropriately compared to seasoned beef burgers, often means less, not more sodium.”

    He added: “Nevertheless, Beyond IV achieves a 20% reduction in the amount of sodium, with the sodium content now registering at 14% of daily values. Quick math reveals that even if you were to have seven of the Beyond IV burgers in a single day, this consumption alone would not exceed the daily recommended value of sodium.”

    How to combat meat and dairy misinformation

    “Without decisive and collective action, we stand on precarious ground, especially as we navigate the controversies surrounding alternative proteins,” says Lockie. “Disinformation campaigns could seize on consumer fears, further muddying the waters.”

    The FFA offers a range of solutions. Media literacy is key, with consumers’ ability to evaluate information critically a major step towards battling disinformation. The report argues that scientists and experts should actively engage with the public to share accurate and accessible information, while transparent communication about research processes can help prevent misconceptions.

    There is a call for cross-sector collaboration to ensure a cohesive and consistent response against meat and dairy misinformation. Meanwhile, technology can be used for good too – think websites and tools that check for misinformation about the climate credentials of meat, algorithmic and automatic detection of fake news, and AI models to analyse aerial images of methane over dairy farms, for example.

    vegan misinformation
    Courtesy: Freedom Food Alliance

    The recommendations further include lobbying, community outreach and educational campaigns on behalf of non-governmental organisations, while administrative bodies themselves could set legal accountability measures for downplaying climate impacts, regulate industry climate transition plans, incentivise herd reduction, and update school curricula to remove livestock promotion and include climate- and nutrition-based food education.

    “Our report also sees a silver lining,” notes Lockie. “An informed public and stronger regulatory frameworks could significantly dampen the impact of these campaigns, fostering a more transparent dialogue around our food choices and their impact on the world.”

    He doubles down on the importance of public education. “Our fight against disinformation is incomplete without empowering consumers with knowledge. The report advocates for making information about food choices transparent, accessible, and engaging,” he says.

    “It’s about enlightening individuals with the science behind their diets and enhancing digital literacy to enable a more critical evaluation of information sources. Knowledge is power, and in this case, it’s the power to make informed choices about what we eat.”

    The post The Livestock Industry Spreads Disinformation to Shape Policies – Here’s How to Fix It appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Vegan Food Group’s Matthew Glover: ‘We’re Going Big, Because We Have To’

    matthew glover
    13 Mins Read

    Matthew Glover, co-founder of the Vegan Food Group, speaks to Green Queen about the decision behind acquiring its portfolio companies, the ambition to become a “vegan Unilever”, the challenging period for the sector, and the need for a plant-based checkoff programme.

    “I know… it’s a bit of an ambiguous title,” admits Matthew Glover, chief mission officer of the Vegan Food Group (VFG), the new company that evolved from plant-based chicken startup VFC Foods.

    Glover co-founded VFC with Adam Lyons in 2020, replete with wacky marketing, undercover chicken farm investigations, and – if sales are a barometer – a finger-lickin’ good product. The brand grew exponentially last year, with sales value up by nearly 200%, but things turned in a different direction halfway through.

    Fellow plant-based meat maker Meatless Farm was on the brink of collapse – and VFC swooped in to purchase its UK operations and revive its market presence. Months later, it acquired pie company Clive’s Purely Plants. And in January came the grand reveal. VFC was now VFG, a holding company that has rapidly become a leader in the vegan sector. Just yesterday, VFG announced the acquisition of 35-year-old German tofu manufacturer Tofutown, an indicator of its wider European ambitions.

    clive's purely plants
    Courtesy: VFC

    “I’d like to say this was always the masterplan,” Glover tells me. “But the reality is that circumstances came into play. VFC was making good progress, but like many startups, the progress wasn’t as fast as we’d hoped or expected.” The competition was fierce, the demand was levelling off, and the team sensed that businesses in this space would need to be proactive if they were to survive.

    “When we heard that Meatless Farm might be going out of business, we saw synergies with what we were doing, and felt the brand was too good to fail,” he recalls. The rescue of Meatless Farm is when the idea of VFG began to take shape. When the rebrand materialised last month, Glover stepped into the more active role of chief mission officer.

    “When Adam and I set up VFC, my motivation was removing animals from the supply chain, and Adam wanted the world to taste better. We were both very focused on the ethical imperative,” he says, explaining his new position. “The way I see it is: I’m here to keep the original values of the business front of mind as we grow and bring on more brands.”

    Why the Vegan Food Group acquired the brands in its portfolio

    So VFG made its first two acquisitions before officially being formed, and now is a company that houses four businesses with over 80 SKUs in more than 21,000 distribution points across the UK and the EU. Reflecting on the Meatless Farm deal, Glover says VFC was an admirer of the brand and product range: “There’d been so much invested over the years in marketing and product development that it seemed such a shame for the movement to lose such a big name.”

    He credits the progress made by the team, led by founder Morten Toft Bech (who exited the company after the sale), in terms of listings in major retailers and foodservice. Crucially, consumers liked the products. Moreover, the product range of chilled beef and pork analogues was complementary to VFC’s frozen vegan chicken. “By not cannibalising our VFC range we knew we could make our proposition stronger,” says Glover.

    Meatless Farm was also local to VFC, with both businesses hailing from Yorkshire, and the latter’s head of innovation previously worked at the former. “When the business instructed an administrator, we decided to take a look. The staff had all been laid off, and we knew that customers were being let down as the company had run out of cash,” notes Glover.

    meatless farm
    Courtesy: Meatless Farm

    “We knew it was going to be a huge challenge to get the supply chain back up and running, but suppliers and customers were generally very receptive in those early days and we gradually managed to get things moving again,” he adds. Meatless Farm returned to UK retail in September, three months after the takeover. “I had little involvement in the rebuild, and the VFC team led by [CEO] Dave Sparrow put in all the hard work.”

    The acquisition of Clive’s Purely Plants was a different state of affairs, however, given that it wasn’t in a distressed situation. Glover’s investment firm Veg Capital had bought 90% of the business in 2021, with Clive’s managing director Esther Pearson staying on at the helm. “She’d helped steer the company from a local supplier of organic pies in health food stores, to gaining national listings with Waitrose and Ocado, whilst moving to a larger manufacturing site in Dartmouth, Devon,” says Glover.

    “As Veg Capital is also the major investor in VFG, we began to see how having Clive’s as part of the group would make sense for both parties. VFG would have direct access to manufacturing, and a veg-led brand as part of the portfolio, whilst Clive’s would have access to the support of the wider VFG team and resources, and benefit from the additional sales and marketing,” he explains.

    “The integration is still ongoing, but the signs are good that Clive’s will play a leading role as part of VFG’s future development.” (Pearson remains a shareholder in Clive’s.)

    The cross-Europe move for Tofutown

    In the works for a while, Tofutown takeover was a major move, giving VFC access to its two manufacturing sites sprawling a combined 55,000 sq m, and a gateway into further European expansion. “There’s a number of reasons why we saw Tofutown as an attractive addition to the Vegan Food Group,” says Glover. “The fact that Germany is the biggest market for plant-based food in Europe was top of the list, providing so many opportunities to expand.”

    He adds: “The business also has an existing senior management team in place with an enthusiasm to grow and learn as part of a wider group structure. We’re very excited about how we can merge the start-up culture of VFC and Meatless Farm, with the established nature of a food company where manufacturing and delivering high-quality food is second nature.”

    While VFG is unable to disclose the acquisition sums, Glover did highlight the value of employees of the acquired brands. “It is indeed our priority to retain the workforce whenever possible. We believe that the success of our acquisitions is significantly enhanced by the contributions of these individuals, and we are keen on integrating them into our team, fostering a culture of growth, innovation, and mutual respect,” he states.

    vegan food group tofutown
    Courtesy: Vegan Food Group

    With a diverse portfolio of brands, could we see a blend of the different offerings in new product launches? “We’ll be looking at a variety of ways to enhance the brands, and co-branding opportunities could be a possibility. We’re particularly excited about expanding the Meatless Farm and VFC brands into Germany, and then using our base there to expand into other EU countries,” confirms Glover. (Tofutown products will soon be available in the UK as part of the deal too.)

    “As Tofutown is known for natural, organic, clean-label product ranges, then we’ll be looking at ways to leverage this expertise and create new SKUs, which could be private label, branded as VFC, Meatless Farm, Clive’s, or we may even bring new brands to market,” he adds. “The beauty of having significant manufacturing capacity and expertise is we can listen to our customers and create the products that consumers are buying.”

    Turning VFG into ‘a vegan Unilever’

    VFG made a significant statement upon launch, setting its sights on becoming “a vegan Unilever”. “Our strategy is to establish VFG as a leader within the plant-based food sector, where customers, suppliers and industry leaders look to us for what’s coming next,” explains Glover.

    “We’ll be offering a much wider range of options to customers, so they don’t need to deal with so many smaller suppliers,” he says. “Operationally, there are efficiencies and better buying power we can leverage, whilst providing our teams with a more diversified portfolio of brands to manage. There’s likely to be flexibility with some brands managed in-house (like VFC and Meatless Farm), with other brands being stand-alone subsidiaries.”

    VFG aims to become profitable this year, with a goal of collecting €100M in revenue. Unilever, meanwhile, turned over nearly €60B last year, with its nutrition and ice cream divisions alone bringing in €21M. Becoming a vegan Unilever is a lofty ambition – does Glover fear it could almost become an albatross?

    “Only if we fail, but we’ve no intention of failing,” he says. “We believe we have a very good strategy and a team that can develop our model into a large plant-based CPG company. We’ve got strong financial backing from mission-aligned investors who are keen to support us on this journey. The early signs are good, but I’ll reflect on your question in a couple of years and let you know!”

    vegan food group
    Courtesy: VFC

    When laying out this goal initially, Glover had said: “Imagine a ‘vegan Unilever’, but with the majority of future profits being donated to effective animal charities and diet change initiatives – that’s what we’re creating at the Vegan Food Group.” This is where his role as chief mission officer comes in. “As we grow the team both organically and through M&A, we’re bringing on staff who don’t necessarily have the activism background or know about all the impacts of animal agriculture. I see my role as making sure we don’t lose sight of why we’re doing this as a company,” he explains.

    VFG is majority-owned by Veg Capital, which is committed to donating 100% of its profits from its stake to effective animal charities. “We see our work as a virtuous circle, working on both the supply and demand side of the equation,” notes Glover.

    “We expect to be profitable in 2024 if all goes to plan, with consistent profits feeding through over the coming years. As the group will be focused on fast-track growth (either organically or through acquisition), then we’ll likely be reinvesting profits back into the organisation for the next few years,” he adds. “The most likely time that we’ll be able to fulfil our charitable ambition is after an exit event, but there’s a lot of work to do before we get there.”

    Glover will additionally assume the role of group chair at VFG, which will see him support Sparrow and the leadership team to navigate the M&A opportunities and advise on the organic growth of its existing brands.

    A vegan checkoff programme to support plant-based meat

    Alternative protein as a whole suffered from dwindling sales and waning consumer interest globally last year. In the UK, meat-free products were among the worst-performing grocery categories last year, with sales declining by £38.4m, and volumes down by 4.2%.

    “We can’t hide away from the fact that plant-based meat categories have been in decline over the past year, or two,” says Glover, before pointing out that the British downturn isn’t as severe as it has been in the US. “There’s a multitude of factors at play, including the cost-of-living crisis, meat industry misinformation campaigns successfully turning consumers away, as well as products not meeting expectations. Retailers reducing shelf space hasn’t helped.”

    Courtesy: VFC

    There has been a disconnect with consumers too, many of whom perceive plant-based meat to be unhealthy because they’re ultra-processed foods (UPFs), despite experts suggesting that not all UPFs – which are a mark of processing, not nutrition – are bad for you. “The meat industry has been adept at sowing seeds of doubt about the processed nature of meat alternatives and the healthfulness of plant-based diets, contributing to consumer scepticism,” says Glover. And government support for these systems doesn’t help.

    In the US and the UK, meat and dairy industries collect government-backed funds from livestock producers to help fund promotional campaigns that encourage the consumption of these foods. These schemes, called levies in the UK and checkoff programmes in the US, enable the animal agriculture industry to “develop large multi-million-pound category campaigns” transmitted nationwide. With plant-based companies facing tough times, promoting the category to the public “with all its benefits is one way to get businesses moving again”.

    In line with that notion, Glover is working with Indy Kaur, founder of vegan consultancy firm Plant Futures, on the plant-based industry’s own checkoff programme. “We are looking to level up with this, consolidate funding and create a campaign which can fairly compete and give consumers a reason to choose to eat plants and not animals,” he outlines.

    The project will take “best practices from the meat and dairy industry”. Glover – who is also the co-founder of Veganuary – cites the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board’s anti-Veganuary drive last month, as well as the US Milk Processor Education Program’s ultra-successful Got Milk? campaign as “proven models driving demand” for meat and dairy. “We’ll be doing the same, with plants,” he says.

    For the majority of its funding, the vegan checkoff project aims to raise at least £3M from donors and investors, which would be supplemented with businesses’ marketing spend, though Glover acknowledges that these budgets are tight. “We are starting with a UK pilot, a test-and-learn methodology and potentially starting in the north where we know meat consumption is disproportionally higher than the south. Backed with a fast follow, [we’ll go] nationwide around Q3 with US rollout soon after,” he says.

    plant based meat uk
    Courtesy: VFC

    “We’re going big because we have to. We’re aiming for all plant-based protein businesses in the UK and US to sign up, whether they can financially contribute or not. We are speaking to a lot of businesses and expect to have spoken to most in the plant-based protein space by the end of Q1/start of Q2,” adds Glover.

    He notes that this will also help “take the burden off the shoulders of young businesses who need support” in the current climate. “There’s no holding Indy back, and she’s working with the smartest minds and a global network of advisors – it’s impressive,” he says. “We all know the future market potential for plant-based remains huge and this checkoff is designed to unlock this. We’re in it together, and that’s exactly how we are designing [the] checkoff from day one.”

    Giving consumers what they want

    Going back to VFG, which has teased more acquisitions in the near future, I ask Glover about the profile of the businesses it wants to take over. “There’s no target number of brands to acquire. Instead, we’ll look at every opportunity on merit and decide whether the brand or manufacturing site adds value, whilst not cannibalising our current range,” he explains. “We’ll focus primarily on frozen and chilled meal occasions where we already have expertise and relationships with buyers and suppliers.

    “Ideally, we’re looking at companies which are already established, have gained decent distribution and have a run rate in excess of €3M,” he says, adding: “And the products have got to be good.”

    That last point is crucial. A 1,000-person survey last year found that 66% of Brits are unhappy with the taste of plant-based meat, and 62% find them too expensive. For 51%, taste and texture are the main reasons for reducing their alt-meat consumption, but on the flip side, 39% are eating these products because of their flavour and texture. Attitudes around health were also mixed.

    Does Glover know what people really want? “Oh gosh, I wish I had the definitive answer, as it’d make it far easier to scale VFG if we knew exactly how to appeal to the broadest range of consumers,” he responds. “Unfortunately, we’re navigating a nuanced interplay of factors.

    vegan fried chicken
    Courtesy: VFC

    “Taste and texture often stand at the forefront; people choose plant-based options that don’t compromise on the sensory experience traditionally associated with animal products. However, achieving this without the additional price tag remains a challenge for the sector,” he explains. This is significant, as the price gap will always deter the budget-conscious.

    “Health considerations are also a driving force, with many turning to vegan options for a diet seen as cleaner and more beneficial. But there’s been a meat industry-sponsored backlash in the media, which has discouraged some consumers,” he says, referring to the aforementioned misinformation campaigns.

    “Beyond these immediate concerns, broader issues play into consumer decisions. Environmental sustainability and ethical considerations are increasingly influencing purchasing behaviours,” suggests Glover. “Convenience, too, cannot be overlooked, with the demand for easy, quick-preparation vegan options rising.”

    Additionally, there are some cultural and informational challenges as well. Over half of Brits want more information about plant-based meat, with occasional and former frequent eaters most likely to want more details. “Our societies have been centred around meat consumption for thousands of years, supported by over a century of targeted advertising by the meat industry. This deep-rooted history creates a significant barrier to changing dietary habits overnight,” he says.

    vfc chicken
    Courtesy: VFC

    This is why winning back consumer trust and shifting dietary dynamics are complex tasks that “will undoubtedly take time”. It would mean improving products’ functionality and prices, as well as involve transparent communication to combat misinformation. “As we move forward, understanding and addressing these multifaceted consumer needs and concerns will be crucial for the growth and acceptance of vegan food in the broader market,” says Glover.

    He believes it will still be a tough year for plant-based companies. “I can’t see growth being back to the double-digit figures we had previously, and a lot of companies are running on empty financially,” he explains. However, the VFG co-founder says the economic climate generally seems to be improving”, and signals that the “declines are reducing”, with advocacy campaigns like the checkoff programme aimed at reengaging consumers. “I think we’ll be cheering the news that the categories will be back in growth during this year.”

    The post Vegan Food Group’s Matthew Glover: ‘We’re Going Big, Because We Have To’ appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Bye Bye Jerky: Beyond Meat Posts Better-Than-Expected Q4 Sales, Plans Price Increases for 2024

    beyond meat earnings
    7 Mins Read

    Plant-based giant Beyond Meat witnessed an 18% decrease in annual net revenue in 2023. Despite posting losses in Q4 too, its sales were better than expected, sending the company’s shares soaring and signalling a turnaround in fortunes for 2024.

    Fresh from a product revamp with new recipes for its beef and burger analogues, Beyond Meat’s stock jumped by 78% yesterday after it posted higher-than-expected numbers in the last quarter of 2023. Quarterly revenue dropped by only 2% – compared to a 26% decline from Q2 to Q3 – to $73.7M, better than the $66.7M predicted by analysts. For the full year, the Californian company’s revenue fell by 18% to $343M.

    “In 2023, Beyond Meat undertook extensive initiatives to reset the business toward sustainable operations and, ultimately, profitable growth. Much of this reset is now coming into view,” said CEO Ethan Brown. He added that the company’s plans for this year include reducing operating expenses, changing pricing structures, and right-sizing its production footprint, and rolling out the Beyond IV line of products.

    “We believe these sweeping changes, together with measures we plan to pursue this year to bolster our balance sheet, will strengthen our near-term operations as we pursue our vision of being the global protein company of the future,” Brown said.

    Beyond Meat discontinues jerky and forecasts improved margins

    beyond meat jerky
    Courtesy: Beyond Meat

    Beyond Meat’s Q4 net losses doubled from the previous quarter, reaching $155M. These were heavily impacted by the one-off charges of $85M from its global operations review last year, which was launched last November to reassess elements of the business that don’t line up with profitability plans (this also involved a potential restructuring of its China operations). The company finished the year with $10.6M in capital expenditure, 85% less than 2022.

    It further managed to bring down its operating expenses by 19% to $259M, following a year where it laid off 19% of its global non-production workforce (about 65 employees), consolidated its operations from 13 co-manufacturing locations in North America to just one, and discontinued its slow-selling beef jerky line (which it launched in 2022 through a partnership with PepsiCo).

    “These refinements allow focus and resources to be put against our latest product platform renovation, Beyond IV, and other SKUs,” Brown said in an earnings call to analysts and investors, outlining why the company decided to discontinue the jerky, despite its position as the top-selling vegan jerky. He added that the reformulated beef products and its other analogues have a higher growth potential in the US, and that the changes reflect the business’s increased focus on Europe.

    Moreover, the alt-meat giant’s yearly losses shrunk by 2.5% at $338M, and the significant restructuring and cost-cutting activities last year mean it is able to forecast improved margins for 2024 (these were in the negative in 2023).

    Beyond Meat has an outstanding debt of $1.1B – owing to convertible notes (a type of investment that begins as a loan and turns into equity) that are due to be paid back in 2027. “We’re doing everything that we need to do to fix the fundamentals of the business so that we are a lower cash consumption business with a longer-term goal, obviously, of getting to sustained free cash flow positive,” said CFO Lubi Kutua.

    US sales falter but McDonald’s deal boosts European performance

    mcdonald's mcplant
    Courtesy: McDonald’s

    Beyond Meat witnessed a 32% fall in year-over-year sales in its home market in 2023. Despite pricing its products lower in grocery stores, retail revenue dropped by 27%, while foodservice figures were also down by 26%. It reflects the larger decline in US retail sales of plant-based meat, which dipped by 11% to just over $1B in the year ending January 28, 2024.

    Brown ascribed this to the polarisation and politicisation of plant-based meat in the US, noting that the biggest consumption barrier for Americans is the health attributes of these products. While half of US consumers found meat alternatives healthy in 2020, that number fell to 38% in 2022. And this loss in faith has since continued, with a Mintel survey from last year showing that nutrition is the second-biggest reason (35%) for Americans’ reticence to try plant-based meat. “It’s not just the animal protein players and their lobbyists, it’s actually members of the pharmaceutical industry, which I find to be kind of disturbing, actually,” said Brown.

    Beyond Meat has made health the focal point of its marketing efforts, with its latest marketing drive honing in on the Beyond Steak, which was certified as ‘heart-healthy’ by the American Heart Association (AHA). It has continued to do that with its new Beyond Burger and Beef, which has undergone a recipe change that now includes avocado oil, fava beans and red lentils, and has 60% less saturated fat, 20% less sodium, 20% more calcium, and 12% higher potassium content.

    “The current climate of misinformation and efforts by incumbents – including, sadly, pharmaceutical interests – to poison the plant-based meat well push us to accelerate gains in the health profile of our product platforms,” noted Brown, adding: “We had to right the message. We can do that by yelling from the rooftops about the benefits of our existing products, or we can just try to make them even more healthy and unassailable.”

    The company’s performance internationally, however, has improved by 18% from 2022-23, with both retail and foodservice sales up. This is thanks in large part to its European deal with McDonald’s, which uses the Beyond Beef patty for the vegan McPlant burger. Brown highlighted that the business had witnessed “continued traction at McDonald’s across countries such as Austria, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, UK, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, and Switzerland”.

    Beyond Meat to increase prices in the US this year

    When Beyond Beyond Meat announced its product reformulation last week, Green Queen reported that the new burger and mince would be more expensive, given the use of premium ingredients like avocado oil. Now, it has emerged that this will coincide with a larger overhaul of the company’s pricing structure, which will see some of its products in the US become more expensive. Brown insisted that this “does not reflect an abandonment of our long-sought price parity goal, which we in fact achieved in certain very specific offerings”.

    “Pricing just wasn’t as effective a tool,” he revealed. “We probably ended up selling a lot of our products to the same consumer at a reduced price. So we learned that and moved away from it.” Outlining the reasons for the higher markups, he said restoring margins was important, while the pricing programmes the company previously implemented failed to convert early adopters into the mainstream.

    “In certain areas, there will be more of a delta between animal protein and ourselves, but in others, there will not be. And so, this is not a kind of crude application of a price increase. We have some very important partnerships and relationships where getting on the product line, there won’t be much change,” explained Brown.

    “In retrospect, the noise and swirl surrounding the category reached decibels that were perhaps sufficient to ground out pricing and other messages,” he noted, adding that the new cost structure would take on a tiered approach across its product lines. “I do think there’s a real opportunity to continue to offer outstanding innovation year after year that does have a more premium price on it, while you continue to offer some of the rest of your portfolio at lower pricing.”

    This is something Beyond Meat’s chief communication officer, Shira Zackai, highlighted last week. “Based on the significant nutritional benefits and elevated taste profile of these new products, we feel confident in the value we will be providing to consumers relative to their cost,” he told Green Queen.

    The price hikes will be implemented in the US this year, but in markets like Europe, Brown admitted that the company had to adjust retail prices, which were “just too high”. Kutua highlighted that a big reason for this is the higher level of private-label penetration in Europe compared to the US. He explained that the company narrowed the price gap with its competition two years ago in Europe, but it still carries a premium in certain categories, and over time, the goal would be to further bridge that gap – though it’s not an immediate concern.

    One thing the company will look to do in 2024 is expand its presence in German retail, which would be a shrewd move considering it is Europe’s largest plant-based market. Beyond Meat forecasts its 2024 revenues to be level with last year’s, between $315-345M, with Q1 sales for this year also expected to remain in the $70-75M range.

    “We’re cautious in our optimism,” said Brown. “We’ve obviously had some tough years, but by making these changes and creating the sustainable baseline for which we can grow, we’re going to create some room for ourselves to execute and get back on track for growth.”

    The post Bye Bye Jerky: Beyond Meat Posts Better-Than-Expected Q4 Sales, Plans Price Increases for 2024 appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Future Food Quick Bites: Fresh Oat Milk, Maple Leaf Merger & Vegan Easter Eggs

    future food quick bites
    4 Mins Read

    In our weekly column, we round up the latest news and developments in the alternative protein and sustainable food industry. This week, Future Food Quick Bites covers Oato’s oat milk launch in retail, Maple Leaf Foods’ consolidation, and a spate of alternative seafood developments.

    New products and launches

    A week after announcing its financial results for 2023 and promising product expansion, Oatly has launched a new line of oat milk creamers in four flavours for the US market: sweet and creamy, mocha, vanilla and caramel.

    oato oat milk
    Courtesy: Oato

    UK startup Oato has secured a listing for its fresh oat milks at Scottish supermarket Booths. The barista whole oat milk comes in 1l bottles shaped like cow’s milk.

    London-based oat milk chocolate brand HiP (Happiness in Plants) has upgraded its vegan Easter eggs, which are now 50% bigger and contain chocolate buttons inside. They’re available in Salted Caramel and Cookies No Cream flavours.

    In the US, plant-based milk maker Mooala has introduced single-serve versions of its banana milk in Sprouts stores nationwide. The range is available in chocolate, vanilla and strawberry flavours, and priced at $1.49 per 8oz bottle.

    Chicago-based dairy company Truly Grass Fed has launched a premium gluten-free oat milk line in original and extra creamy variants, which are available at select The Fresh Market locations, and at Lowes Foods and Natural Grocers soon.

    Meanwhile, US food tech startup microTERRA has unveiled a duckweed-based ingredient aimed at sugar reduction. The innovation amplifies sweetness perception to help cut back on sugar in food and beverages without compromising on any functional attributes.

    New York-based company InnovoPro has developed a plant-based barista product with chickpea protein, which can remove the need for buffers and emulsifiers in high-protein beverages and fruit shakes.

    ichiran vegan ramen
    Courtesy: Ichiran

    Japanese ramen chain Ichiran is introducing a vegan tonkotsu ramen kit in the US, which is the result of six years of R&D. Comprising a liquid broth concentrate, tamen oil, togarashi seasoning and Hakata-style noodles, it will be available from tomorrow.

    Californian plant-based meat player Beleaf has inked a new distribution partnership with Dot Foods to expand the presence of its meat, shrimp and egg analogues nationwide in the US.

    US fast-casual chain Pokeworks has expanded its partnership with vegan seafood producer Impact Food, which will see the eatery serve the latte’s vegan tuna in its Bay Area locations.

    It’s a big week for seafood news. Dutch plant-based brand Vegan Zeastar will open a pop-up restaurant Zèta, a vegan eatery at Grote Markt in The Hague. Running from March 5-10, it will showcase dishes using its vegan crab, shrimp and sashimi.

    Fellow Dutch vegan producer The Vegetarian Butcher is launching its first fish SKU, called Krosse Flosse. The breaded product is now available in Germany.

    the vegetarian butcher fish
    Courtesy: The Vegetarian Butcher

    And Brazilian plant-based meat startup Future Farm is reformulating its entire product range to elevate the taste and texture attributes of its vegan chicken, beef and seafood analogues.

    Finance and closures

    British vegan sweets startup Tasty Mates has bagged a £60,000 Dragons’ Den investment for a 15% stake from Peter Jones, though negations are still ongoing over a lower share.

    UK vegan burger chain The Vurger Co has shut its doors over a year after it was rescued from administration, citing post-pandemic challenges and insufficient government support.

    the vurger co
    Courtesy: The Vurger Co

    Across the Atlantic, Brooklyn-based specialty mushroom company Smallhold, which specialised in vertical farming, has filed for bankruptcy, after it emerged that the business was in worse financial shape than previously disclosed.

    Portland, Oregon’s fermentation-focused vegan deli and restaurant Fermenter is also closing. But it’s a positive sign, as the team is revamping the concept for a launch in April. The brand, meanwhile, will live on through products and classes.

    Policy and corporate moves

    Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods is merging its meat and plant protein businesses – includafing Lightlife and Field Roast – into a single unit to simplify its operations and drive growth across all categories.

    Dutch cultivated pork producer Meatable has appointed industry executives Lorne Abony and Patricia Malarkey to its board of directors as it awaits the regulatory greenlight in Singapore ahead of its planned launch later this year.

    eu cultivated meat
    Courtesy: Meatable

    France has officially banned the use of meat-related terms on the product labelling of plant-based alternatives, which includes 21 terms – although ‘burger’ is not on the prohibited list.

    And in the UK, the Green Party mayor of Worcester, Louis Stephen, has taken meat off the menu for the council’s receptions to serve an exclusively plant-based menu to highlight food’s impact on climate change.

    Check out last week’s Future Food Quick Bites.

    The post Future Food Quick Bites: Fresh Oat Milk, Maple Leaf Merger & Vegan Easter Eggs appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Vegan Food Group to Acquire Germany’s Tofutown in Latest Consolidation Deal to Drive Profitability

    vegan food group
    5 Mins Read

    Following its rebrand from VFC Foods last month, the newly formed Vegan Food Group is set to acquire German tofu manufacturer Tofutown for an undisclosed sum. With four businesses under its portfolio, the company aims to bolster revenue beyond €100M and become profitable this year.

    The Vegan Food Group (VFG) will soon complete its third plant-based M&A deal in less than 10 months, taking over 35-year-old German brand Tofutown. The deal will allow VFG to scale up total revenues to over €100M and set it on a path to profitability this year.

    It’s part of the company’s mission to become “a vegan Unilever”, as co-founder and chief mission officer Matthew Glover noted during the rebrand from VFC Foods last month. The move to become a holding company – which now comprises VFC, Meatless Farm, Clive’s Purely Plants, and Tofutown – allows VFG to become “one of Europe’s largest plant-based manufacturers”, and the latest acquisition delivers on CEO Dave Sparrow’s promise that there would be more takeovers to come.

    “VFG will now be a major player in plant-based food, with a significant manufacturing scale across three sites, employing over 300 staff, and with a strong network of strategic manufacturing and supply chain partners,” said Sparrow. “This acquisition allows VFG to fast-track our growth across the UK and the EU in chilled, frozen, and ambient products, in both branded and own-label retail, as well as foodservice.”

    “There’s a number of reasons why we saw Tofutown as an attractive addition to the Vegan Food Group,” Glover told Green Queen. “The fact that Germany is the biggest market for plant-based food in Europe was top of the list, providing so many opportunities to expand.”

    Why the Vegan Food Group decided to buy Tofutown

    tofutown
    Courtesy: Vegan Food Group

    “The business already has significant scale with circa €60m revenue, 300 staff and manufacturing capacity, producing a wide range of 100% natural, organic tofu, spreads, and meat alternatives,” Glover said of Tofutown. “[Founder] Bernd [Drosihn] and the team have invested heavily over 40 years developing a business with distribution into major retailers and foodservice across Germany, which we can continue to develop.”

    Headquartered in Wiesbaum, Tofutown supplies major retailers including Aldi, Lidl, DM and Edeka. It has two manufacturing sites sprawling a combined 55,000 sq m, with the Lüneburg, Lower Saxony facility one of Europe’s largest plant-based factories, “with the capacity to produce a wide range of new plant-based lines”.

    “Joining the Vegan Food Group is an exciting opportunity for Tofutown to successfully continue Bernd’s vision over the coming decades,” said Touftown CEO Markus Kerres. “With Germany and the UK being the two biggest markets for plant-based foods, we’re well-positioned to thrive over the next decade.”

    The tofu maker joins VFG’s growing family of vegan brands, a portfolio the company says will continue to expand with more M&As on the way. “We’ll be looking at opportunities to expand our brands into Europe through the distribution already in place, whilst expanding the current Tofutown product ranges into the UK market,” said Glover.

    “The business also has an existing senior management team in place with an enthusiasm to grow and learn as part of a wider group structure. We’re very excited about how we can merge the startup culture of VFC and Meatless Farm, with the established nature of a food company where manufacturing and delivering high-quality food is second nature.”

    Consolidation deals ‘vital’ for rapid plant-based growth

    vegan food group tofutown
    Courtesy: Vegan Food Group

    VFG was launched in 2020 as a vegan fried chicken brand by Glover and Adam Lyons, and after witnessing strong growth, has evolved from a challenger brand into a sector leader. Last year, the group rescued plant-based meat company Meatless Farm from the brink of bankruptcy, purchasing the latter in a £12M deal for its UK operations (VFC paid just a small portion of the sum, keeping the brand assets intact).

    This was followed by the acquisition of Clive’s Purely Plants in October, which positioned VFC as “a formidable player” in the market, according to Sparrow. “What excites us the most is the diverse range of products we can offer consumers, from enticing meat alternatives to wholesome and delicious vegetable-based options, making us one of the most diversified players in the category,” he said at the time.

    Moreover, 2023 saw VFG’s sales value grow exponentially by 199.3%, according to NielsenIQ data for the Grocer’s Top Products survey. However, it still represented a small chunk of the overall UK meat-free sector, which experienced major headwinds in a consumer landscape hit by the cost-of-living crisis. Vegan meat analogues were among the worst-performing grocery categories in the country, with sales declining by £38.4m, and volumes down by 4.2%.

    With manufacturers like Plant & Bean and LoveSeitan ceasing operations – and VBites being bailed out of administration – and Nestlé and Heck pulling products from their plant-based meat ranges, it’s been a challenging year, and that’s before you take note of the lack of investment in the space.

    “In the context of flat or declining category demand, consolidation, and M&As are vital for rapid growth in the plant-based sector. These strategies allow companies to scale, innovate, and navigate through resilience challenges more effectively,” explained Glover, who is also the co-founder of Veganuary. “Combining resources and expertise through M&As enables businesses to expand their market presence and improve supply chains efficiently, which is crucial when organic growth is hard to achieve.”

    He added that in a tough fundraising environment, acquisitions allow brands to circumvent the risk of running out of operational cash, save valuable product lines, and emerge stronger from the current market slump. “Ultimately, consolidation and M&As are not just about growth; they’re about sustaining the innovation and competitiveness of the plant-based sector in a rapidly changing market,” he noted.

    VFG’s purchase deal with Tofutown, which will see the former acquire all shares, is pending final authorisation, but is expected to close soon. It is the latest in a rapidly growing line of M&A deals in the vegan sector, including Australia’s v2foods’ buyout of ready meal brands Soulara and Macros, Indian company Nourish You’s purchase of alt-dairy startup One Good, and Next Level Burger’s acquisition of Veggie Grill (and its Más Veggies taco chain) in the US – all of which have come in the last couple of months.

    The post Vegan Food Group to Acquire Germany’s Tofutown in Latest Consolidation Deal to Drive Profitability appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Op-Ed: What Do the Meat Industry, Far-Right and Major Internet Conspiracy Theories Have in Common?

    climate misinformation
    7 Mins Read

    With 2024 a year of major elections around the world, Caitlin Smith, senior campaigner at corporate watchdog Changing Markets Foundation, highlights the non-profit’s research into alternative protein misinformation on social media, and why it’s more important than ever for our leaders to take a stand for human and planetary health.

    Despite high levels of red and processed meats being linked to negative health outcomes like cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, alternative proteins continue to struggle to break through the public narrative and have also increasingly become the target of numerous social media attacks. Our recent investigation, Truth, Lies, and Culture Wars offers some insights into why and our new explainer video provides a snapshot of social media posts that our investigation (together with Ripple Research) discovered. 

    Over a 14-month period (June 2022 to July 2023), we found over one million examples of misinformation surrounding meat and dairy mostly on X (formerly Twitter), with spikes in misinformation around key political and media moments. 78% of misinformation focused on ‘disparaging’ meat and dairy alternatives, pushing forward cultural polarisation and attacking alternative proteins and diets as unhealthy or bad for the environment.

    Conversely, 22% of misinformation ‘enhanced’ meat and dairy, exaggerating their health benefits, such as praising ‘the carnivore diet’ and claiming vegan diets would make you unhealthy. To a smaller extent, this misinformation also focused on the environmental benefits of meat and dairy.

    This is a big claim, considering methane is around 80 times more warming than C02 over a 20-year time period, with animal agriculture being the single largest source of man-made methane emissions globally. This potent gas is already estimated to be responsible for 0.5°C of warming since industrialisation, and addressing methane emissions urgently is essential to ensure we don’t pass climate tipping points. One of the readily available ways to do this and to improve people’s health, is to reduce meat and dairy consumption in favour of a more plant-based diet – not something that Big Meat and Dairy want to hear.

    Debunking livestock-industry-backed misinformation campaigns

    We were able to trace misinformation back to people who have established financial links with the meat and dairy industry. For example, professor of animal science Frank Mitloehner, who leads the industry-funded CLEAR Centre at UC Davis, has pushed misinformation aimed at undermining alternative proteins, by sharing quizzes comparing Beyond and Impossible burgers to dog food.

    meat misinformation
    Courtesy: Twitter/X

    A similar narrative has been successfully pushed by Rick Berman, a lobbyist and the founder of the Centre for Consumer Freedom – an outlet funded by the meat industry and restaurant chains, which placed ‘Fake Meat or Dog Food?’ adverts in prominent newspapers, as well as placing an ad questioning the ingredients in “fake meat” during the 2020 Super Bowl. The CCF not only attacks these products, but also links proposals for shifting diets to an ‘elite conspiracy’, claiming that these are narratives put forward by people like Bill Gates to get you to eat bugs and shift away from meat consumption for their own profit-making.

    Other examples include adverts funded by milk processors, and fronted by celebrity Aubrey Plaza, disparaging plant-based milk alternatives, calling them ‘Wood Milk’. A campaign advert, which has had a complaint made against it with the US Department of Agriculture, suggesting the advert could be illegal.

    Another tactic that was prominently featured in our research was to undermine scientific research on the impact of animal agriculture and promote other types of research to discredit alternative proteins. A pre-peer-reviewed study by UC Davis on cultivated meat, claimed that this was 25% worse for the environment than beef. The study’s media journey started, when it was published in an article by the New Scientist magazine on 9 May 2023, which lead to many other media stories.

    Though it has since been criticised by a number of academics for its methodology and misleading comparisons, the study and related media coverage caused a huge spike in social media conversations and was seized upon by right-wing media and political figures, which linked it with the various conspiracy theories.

    Since our report was launched, the findings of the discredited UC Davies study, which still hasn’t been peer-reviewed, even made its way into the official discussion documents submitted by Austria, France and Italy to the Council of the European Union, claiming that investment into cultivated meat should be stopped, because it could be more damaging for the environment than producing conventional meat.

    Online misinformation has hurt the alternative protein sector

    Misinformation surrounding meat and dairy has not only appeared during policymaking discussions, but it has also impacted the profits of plant-based meat companies. Pricing challenges with many meat burgers, still much cheaper than plant-based alternatives, have been compounded by the lack of clarity on the health benefits of some alternative proteins. When households are under increasing pressure with the ongoing cost of living crisis, the move to switch to plant-based alternatives to processed meat, appears to have been swayed by this lack of clarity on the health implications for the consumer.

    ethan brown
    Courtesy: Beyond Meat

    Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown was quoted in the Guardian last year stating: “This change in perception is not without encouragement from interest groups who have succeeded in seeding doubt and fear around the ingredients and process used to create our and other plant-based meats.” Granted, this is the opinion of the opposing side, but it is still a strong indication of the impact that misinformation is having. Investment to influence the public narrative is high, even going as far as developing an MBA, Masters of Beef Advocacy, to educate individuals to push industry favourable information online.

    Our research found that a mere 50 accounts captured 50% of engagement with misinformation online, and nearly a quarter of all the misinformation we found focused on pushing the negative health impacts of alternative proteins, across meat and dairy alternatives. This included focusing on the ingredients and production processes – highlighting large factories and labs, nutrition, claims that cultivated meat causes cancer, negative health outcomes from consuming alternative proteins, and capitalising on trends like ‘frankenfood’. 

    As elections across the world loom this year, including in the EU, the fight for the dominant narrative is heating up. Misinformation spikes at key political moments and a good example of this, highlighted in our research, was the attempt to reduce livestock numbers in the Netherlands in 2022, after a High Court ruling that nitrogen pollution needed to be urgently reduced. In response to the ruling, the Government offered financial buyouts to farmers, budgeting 25 billion EUR to support this process. However, opposition to the policy was significant, and at the same time, misinformation online was high, with much of the narrative linked to conspiracy theories.

    In this instance, misinformation focused on conspiracies about land-grabbing from the Government, feeding into the far-right agenda of populist politicians like Geert Wilders, advocating against environmental policies. Ironically, the majority of voices on this topic which were feeding Wilder’s narratives, were coming from outside of the Netherlands – something which might ordinarily be against Wilder’s usual position on ‘foreign influence’.

    climate misinformation
    Courtesy: Twitter/X

    Far-right commentators like Eva Vlaardingerbroek were also prominent voices during this time. Vlaardingerbroek is an ex-member of far-right political party Forum for Democracy (FVD) and has been invited to the Tucker Carlson Show and on Fox News to comment on the struggles of Dutch farmers. She is firmly behind misinformation narratives, such as that livestock does not have any impact on climate change and that this is all part of an elite agenda to control people’s lives and to make people weak.

    Alt-protein has a big hill to climb, but politicians need to stand up

    Online misinformation on meat and dairy is benefitting big industries and there are many overlaps in the narrative between misinfluencers, and the meat and dairy industry interests. In the EU alone, the climate and environmental policy U-turns that have taken place have been stark. By the Commission’s own accounting, many of the flagship ‘Farm to Fork’ initiatives have been dropped, and as the Commission comes to the end of its term, the far right in Europe has hailed this as a win for farmers.

    When EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced the pesticide reduction policy was scrapped, Bayer saw an immediate increase in the value of its shares. Topics like cultivated meat have been utilised as an easy scapegoat to distract from the bigger issues of the devastating climate and environmental impact of industrial farming and the significant health impact of overconsumption of red and processed meat. In the EU, meat and dairy production is responsible for 53% of the bloc’s total methane emissions – yet they remain a policy blind spot.

    With such powerful opponents, the alternative protein industry has a big hill to climb to reach the same level of influence across its marketing, lobbying, and online presence. Although there has been some pushback by companies like Beyond Meat, it is difficult for this nascent industry to fight the influence big farm lobbies and big meat and dairy companies have on media outlets, and social media platforms to counter misinformation online.

    The public and politicians must have the accurate information they need to make decisions about our health and the environment. Watch our explainer to find out more about the kinds of misinformation to look out for and whose interests it’s putting forward – it’s probably not yours.

    The post Op-Ed: What Do the Meat Industry, Far-Right and Major Internet Conspiracy Theories Have in Common? appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Price Parity: 6 Steps to Make Plant-Based Meats Cheaper Than Conventional Meat

    plant based price parity
    7 Mins Read

    With even the cheapest plant-based meat products usually more expensive than conventional protein, cost remains a key consumption barrier for vegan alternatives – a new report shows how these can reach price parity.

    Plant-based meat has had a challenging year, with the higher cost of living, attitudes around ultra-processed food, and misinformation about these products contributing to dwindling sales globally.

    Many studies have identified the major factors that hold consumers back from eating these products. While taste and texture are regularly cited as the main barriers, alongside health/nutrition, price is key too. Despite a spate of launches over the last few years, and advancements made in the flavour and mouthfeel department, plant-based meats still cost on average than their conventional counterparts.

    plant based meat price parity
    Courtesy: Hannah Ritchie

    Alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute has revealed that in 2022, plant-based meat was 67% more expensive than animal meat. Likewise, research by data scientist Hannah Ritchie last year showed that even the cheapest plant-based meat alternatives are higher in price than animal-derived meat, suggesting that the former don’t just need to be at parity with the latter, but rather much cheaper.

    So how do we get there? A new report by British chef and writer Anthony Warner for New Food Innovation delves into solutions to make meat alternatives cheaper than they currently are. The whitepaper outlines how textured vegetable protein (TVP) is usually much cheaper than meat, as the former is combined with a bunch of other ingredients to enhance the end product, things get a little trickier.

    On average, hydrated TVP only makes up 20% of a plant-based burger’s ingredient cost. Fats and oils account for another 20%, emulsifiers and gelling agents 15%, and crumbs, seasonings, etc. 5%. But the real expense is in the flavourings to recreate the taste of beef and mask any native flavours in the plant protein, contributing to 40% of a vegan burger’s cost.

    plant based meat expensive
    Courtesy: New Food Innovation

    This is all before you consider the costs of processing – hydration, specialist equipment, time-consuming processes, specialist handling, efficient mixing and wastage are part of the manufacturing cycle, which can comprise up to thrice as many steps as conventional meat production.

    Here’s how the plant-based meat industry can step over these hurdles and provide cheaper products to reach price parity with meat.

    1) Tweak your flavour focus

    A 1,000-person survey last year found that taste is the biggest deterrent for plant-based meat consumption for Brits (66%), followed closely by price (62%). Taste and texture are also the most common reasons for reducing consumption of meat analogues (40%) in the UK. Clearly, it’s a key factor to unlocking cheaper alt-meat. But as noted above, it’s the costliest too.

    A typical burger formulation will have a savoury base element, a top-note meat flavour, a grill flavour, and a masking flavour. Masking is important as many plant proteins can have an unappetising taste, but using more specific masking agents can help reduce costs. Flavour companies can molecularly analyse the tasting notes in specific proteins to identify the best masking options – this targeted approach can bring savings compared to previous trial-and-error methods.

    The flavour industry is dominated by a few companies, which means sometimes, food manufacturers end up overpaying. A push to improve plant-based flavourings has meant higher research and marketing costs, which are often passed on to the producers, but market consolidation and sourcing flavours from a single supplier can help these meat alternatives get closer to price parity.

    Another solution could be to use non-natural flavouring agents, which are cheaper and can offer a wider gamut of taste notes, especially with grilling and smoking. This comes without any “obvious penalty on labelling”, given that they can be described as ‘flavouring’ instead of ‘natural flavouring’.

    2) Leverage enzymes and in-built emulsification and gelling properties

    methycellulose
    Courtesy: Impossible Foods

    Gels and emulsifiers like methylcellulose are omnipresent in plant-based meat and have key functional attributes, but these can make up between 10-15% of the total cost. While some companies are developing alternatives to methylcellulose, these are still expensive. The report recommends enzymatic solutions – especially those based on transglutaminase – which, while needing time and heat, require low levels of dosing and achieve “considerable cost savings”.

    Emulsifiers are easier to remove, but they’re rarely used in high enough proportions to significantly impact the price of the final product. However, eliminating them will obviously cut some costs, and a greater understanding of existing ingredients’ functionality can help manufacturers make use of the natural emulsification, foaming and gelling properties of plant proteins.

    3) Switch the processing and prolong the shelf life

    Short shelf life for chilled plant-based meats prevents long production runs and adds to wastage. The industry can learn from the bakery sector when it comes to shelf-life extension, including the use of buffered vinegars, fermented acids and natural sorbate sources.

    But it’s the micro issues that are most important to tackle. Using air-classified protein concentrates – which are cheaper and much more energy-efficient – over isolates is one solution, although they can be harder to work with and would need some refinement. Many high-quality TVPs are now being made entirely from plant protein concentrates, rendering cheaper and more climate-friendly ingredients.

    4) Diversify the protein type

    heura chicken
    Courtesy: Heura

    It’s easier to create plant-based analogues of lower-value, processed meats, but more premium cuts are harder and costlier to achieve – vegan bacon being a prime example. New extrusion processes can help overcome this obstacle, with a better understanding of their impact on finished products and the development of novel processes to improve meat-like structures enabling the creation of next-gen extruded plant proteins.

    Many of these processes can help produce high-quality meat structures from plant concentrates, and their focus is less on burgers and sausages, and more on chicken, beef, lamb or pork chunks, strips and pieces to be used directly in dishes like pies, ready meals and stir-fries. These cuts of meat analogues only require small modifications to existing extrusion processes, meaning they’re similar to existing TVPs in terms of price and labelling. Plus, they don’t require any gelling, emulsification or tropical fats to deliver acceptable products.

    5) Valorise the sidestream to cut food waste

    When a protein is concentrated, something is always left over – for example, producing a protein-rich fraction from legume flour will leave a carbohydrate- and fibre-rich fraction, and utilising this is key to making cheaper meat alternatives. This already happens in the meat and dairy industry: think whey from cheese production and rendered animal fats.

    Sidestream valorisation is essential for driving down costs and competing with animal agriculture. Some carb-rich streams can be used in food production as a source of starch to thicken soups or make extruded snacks, but they can also be used as feedstock for the fermentation sector to possibly increase protein yields.

    “There are several projects currently in the research stage that will help increase the utilisation of plant-based side streams, and if the market is to grow as predicted, this work is going to have to increase in urgency,” the report notes.

    6) Look local to find cheaper plant protein sources

    fava bean protein
    Courtesy: Meeluinie

    Current plant proteins are dominated by soy, pea and wheat, which often travel vast distances as part of a complex supply chain. While these still usually have environmental benefits over meat, this isn’t an ideal scenario. The research points to provenance and local sourcing as a major opportunity for plant-based meat.

    For example, in the UK, fava beans are an important crop, but are mostly exported or used for animal feed. While these aren’t as easy to transform into TVP as soy or yellow pea, and come with flavour challenges, extrusion and masking tech has helped bridge this gap, with the first TVP made entirely from fava bean concentrate soon to be available to manufacturers in the country. (Beyond Meat’s reformulated beef is a case in point, adding fava beans in its new recipe.)

    “There is much work to do. Some short-term solutions can produce significant results. Other approaches are likely to take more time, particularly those that require us to shift consumer understanding,” the report concludes. “But it is definitely possible that, if companies can maintain focus, a lot of plant-based products can be shifted towards price parity over the next couple of years. And if a few medium-term projects and research streams are implemented, we may even move beyond that point.”

    The post Price Parity: 6 Steps to Make Plant-Based Meats Cheaper Than Conventional Meat appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Precision Fermentation: Industry Stakeholders Release Refined Definition as Alt-Protein Sector Heats Up

    precision fermentation
    6 Mins Read

    The Precision Fermentation Alliance (PFA) and Food Fermentation Europe (FFE) have together announced a refined definition of precision fermentation to provide clarity and distinction from other food technologies, in the face of rapid advancements in the sector.

    While it has been in use for over 30 years – in insulin, rennet for cheese, and vitamin supplements – most people only first heard of precision fermentation in recent years for its use in alternative protein applications.

    But more and more technologies are flooding the future food industry, while the precision fermentation sector itself has witnessed a chunk of advancements lately. This is why it has become so important to better understand what the technology is all about.

    That’s the basis of the work done by industry bodies the Precision Fermentation Alliance (PFA) and Food Fermentation Europe (FFE). Both organisations were founded early last year, with the aim of serving as an industry voice to advance regulatory compliance, unlock public and private investments and partnerships, and educate consumers about the tech.

    To help clarify what it entails and clearly differentiate it from its alternative protein counterparts, the two bodies have now announced a refined and expanded definition of the technology: “Precision fermentation combines the process of traditional fermentation with the latest advances in biotechnology to efficiently produce a compound of interest, such as a protein, flavour molecule, vitamin, pigment, or fat.”

    “As more companies are commercialising new food production technologies and ingredients, we found that there was a need to further refine the definition of precision fermentation to help educate the food ecosystem about the differences between similar technologies and resulting products,” Irina Gerry, vice-chair of the board of directors at PFA and chief marketing officer of precision fermentation company Change Foods, tells Green Queen.

    How precision fermentation is different from other food technologies

    new culture cheese
    Courtesy: New Culture

    The PFA and FFE clarify that precision fermentation stands apart from traditional or wild fermentation and natural breeding techniques by leveraging the latest bioengineering techniques. “We wanted to draw a distinction between natural or traditional fermentation that we use to make beer, yoghurt or kombucha, and precision fermentation, which is leveraging the latest advances in biotechnology,” explains Gerry. “By using biotechnology, we are able to programme microorganisms to produce specific molecules that they would not make otherwise.”

    During precision fermentation, a specific molecular sequence – derived from digitalised databases instead of animals or plants – is inserted into a microorganism to give it instructions to produce the desired molecule when fermented. At the end of the fermentation process, the resulting compounds are isolated and filtered out from the fermentation broth, separating them from the microorganisms that produced them. This is in contrast to biomass fermentation, where the entire biomass (including the cells) is the product.

    “Since the first DNA sequence was performed in the 1970s, scientists have sequenced many plant and animal species. These sequences are now catalogued in digitised databases globally, and many are accessible online,” says Gerry. “For example, one can copy the DNA sequence of whey protein, such as beta-lactoglobulin or lactoferrin, transfer it into a microorganism, using bioengineering techniques, and create a unique milk-protein-producing strain.

    “These microorganisms will produce the desired whey protein during fermentation, which can be later filtered out, creating a whey protein isolate that is equivalent to whey protein that comes from cow’s milk, but without any direct involvement of the animals. This technique is a defining feature of precision fermentation.”

    This is also a key aspect that separates precision fermentation from cell cultivation. Sourcing molecular sequences from digitalised databases eschews the need for animal involvement in any stage of the process, which is different from cultivated meat, where a small sample of cells is taken from a live animal. And unlike cell cultivation, precision fermentation focuses on using microorganisms to produce specific compounds of interest, rather than growing an entire cell or biomass.

    This is evidenced by what leading precision fermentation companies are doing – using microbes like fungi, algae and bacteria to produce specific proteins, fats, vitamins, and flavouring and colouring agents, which can be combined with other ingredients to make. Cultivated meat companies are, instead, creating the end product, such as chicken and beef.

    “Ingredients made via precision fermentation would be required to go through the standard regulatory approval process,” confirms Gerry.

    Progress for precision fermentation outlines need for education and scale-up

    precision fermentation egg
    Courtesy: The EVERY Company

    “While some applications of precision fermentation may be new, the technology itself has been safely used in food and medicine like producing insulin for over 30 years,” notes FFE president Jevan Nagarajah. “We are excited to contribute to the understanding of precision fermentation and its role in advancing food innovation.”

    Nagarajah is the founder and CEO of Better Dairy, a member of FFE, alongside Formo, Imagindairy, Onego Bio, Those Vegan Cowboys, Bon Vivant, and Standing Ovation. The PFA, meanwhile, counts Change Foods, Perfect Day, The EVERY Co, Helaina, Imagindairy, Remilk, Motif FoodWorks, New Culture and Onego Bio as its members.

    Many of them have made strides in recent weeks. Just last week, Perfect Day announced its partnership with Unilever, with its precision-fermented whey protein forming the base for a new lactose-free chocolate ice cream by Breyers. This came two weeks after fellow CPG giant Nestlé launched the Better Whey protein powder under the Orgain brand, made from precision fermentation as well.

    This year has proven to be a significant one for regulation too. New Culture became the first company to attain self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) status for animal-free casein earlier this month, a week before Vivici obtained the certification for its whey protein. That came a month after Imagindairy received a ‘no further questions’ letter for its precision-fermented whey from the FDA. In 2023, Remilk (also producing whey) joined Perfect Day on that FDA GRAS list, alongside The EVERY Co, which earned its third GRAS notification late in the year for egg proteins.

    Aside from these launches and regulatory breakthroughs, investors have had an eye on this space too. Perfect Day itself is closing a $90M Series A funding round (announced last month), but other companies have secured smaller capital injections recently too, including casein producer Standing Ovation (€3M) and bioactive protein maker Triplebar ($20M). And this May, the EU will open applications for investments totalling €50M in precision fermentation and algae-based food startups as part of its Horizon Europe scheme.

    Moreover, there have been some manufacturing and scale-up milestones. Imagindairy unveiled an industrial-scale facility with a 10,000-litre fermentation capacity, Daisy Lab ramped up production for its beta-lactoglobulin whey powder and diversified into lactoferrin protein, Yali Bio created what it claimed was the world’s first yeast-derived breast milk fat from precision fermentation, and Bond Pet Foods reached a scaling milestone alongside Hill’s Pet Nutrition to develop pet food products – all in the space of a month.

    All this underlines the progress made by the precision fermentation space, as well as the need for further education. “One of the reasons we created PFA is to help educate consumers about precision fermentation, its benefits and the types of ingredients that can be made. Precision fermentation has a long and safe history of use in food. It is the same technology that is used to make insulin, vitamins and natural flavours today,” says Gerry.

    “Scaling [up] manufacturing and reducing costs of production is critical for these ingredients to be able to effectively compete with animal-derived ingredients,” she adds. “The industry is addressing it in multiple ways. We see new types of private and public funding, university training programmes, industry partnerships, and contract manufacturing companies getting established to support these efforts. It won’t happen overnight, but the process is underway.”

    The post Precision Fermentation: Industry Stakeholders Release Refined Definition as Alt-Protein Sector Heats Up appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • While French Ministers Fight Alternative Protein, Health & Climate Experts Call for Dietary Guidelines to Reduce Meat

    france dietary guidelines
    5 Mins Read

    As France restricts plant-based meat labels, pushes to ban cultivated meat, and encourages factory farming, nutrition experts and climate activists are urging the national dietary guidelines to recommend a reduction in meat consumption.

    In November, a large European survey – which included 750 French citizens – revealed that 57% of people in France have reduced their meat consumption. For 38%, health was the biggest reason, while 29% picked the environment as the greatest motivation.

    However, a new 3,000-person poll has found that French consumers are eating more meat (over 700g per week) than what’s recommended by the national dietary guidelines (600g weekly). Benoît Granier, food manager at the Climate Action Network (RAC) and co-author of the study, illustrated the conundrum: “There is a significant portion of the French who feel they eat less meat, or who want to eat less. But meat consumption itself is not decreasing.”

    His organisation collaborated with the French Nutrition Society (SFN), which includes a host of public and private sector nutrition experts, for the new report, which is calling on the national guidelines to suggest cutting meat consumption by at least 25% each week – a total of 450g – in the upcoming update. “Today, we can no longer just think in terms of human health alone,” said public health expert and SFN member Nicole Darmon. “We’re also thinking in terms of the planet’s health.”

    Dietary guidelines should consider meat’s climate and health effects

    cultured meat ban
    Courtesy: Gourmey

    Currently, the French National Nutrition and Health Program (PNNS) recommends eating a maximum of 500g of red meat and 150g of processed meat – taking into account both categories’ links to cancer, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes – while favouring poultry consumption, for which there no limit has been set.

    But the researchers argue that these guidelines don’t account for the growing number of studies shedding light on the animal agriculture industry’s environmental impact. Research suggests that veganism can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, land use and water pollution by 75% compared to diets rich in meat, which accounts for 60% of the food system’s emissions.

    One study revealed that just replacing 50% of our meat and dairy consumption with plant-based analogues can bring down agricultural emissions by 31%, halt deforestation and reduce biodiversity loss. And this latest French survey revealed that diets contribute to 22% of the country’s emissions.

    “With half as much meat, if we eat more fruits and vegetables, legumes, fruits and whole grains, we can check all the boxes in terms of nutrition,” said Granier. The RAC and SFN’s recommended meat intake would mean capping consumption to four meat-based meals a week, which can be done without any compromises by making some adjustments.

    A health research review has previously revealed that swapping 50g of processed meat with 28-50g of nuts daily can lower the risk of death by 21% from any cause, while the risk of cardiovascular disease – the second-most common cause of death in France – can be decreased by 25% if 50g of processed meat is replaced by nuts or legumes per day.

    Serge Hercberg, former president of the PNNS, welcomed the call from the SFN and RAC. “It is really essential to take into consideration this environmental dimension,” he said. “Today, many countries say it needs to be done, but very few have done it.” One of those is Denmark, which became the world’s first country to prioritise a plant-based transition in its national action plan last October. That same month, South Korea also prioritised vegan food production and alternative protein consumption in its national strategy.

    France wages war on alternative protein amid push for factory farming

    france meat consumption
    Courtesy: Umiami

    The big problem, Granier outlined, is that “everything around us encourages us to eat a lot of meat”. He explained: “Even the current recommendations are not widely followed. Everything is mobilised for us to consume things that are contrary to the PNNS.”

    It’s a nod to the French government’s policies, which heavily favour the traditional meat industry. In September, the country announced its intention to ban 21 terms – including ‘steak’, ‘beef’, ‘ham’ and ‘grilled’ – from plant-based meat product labels, which attracted backlash from vegetarian groups. “This new draft decree reflects our desire to put an end to misleading claims… by using names relating to meat products for foodstuffs that do not contain them,” said agriculture minister Marc Fesneau. “It’s an issue of transparency and loyalty which meets a legitimate expectation of consumers and producers.”

    Two weeks later, the nation U-turned on its factory farming stance, with Fesneau calling on farmers to produce more and cheaper meat to “take back the market from imports”. But, as the SFN and RAC study points out, while over 30% of meat eaten in France was imported (and 50% of chicken), a reduction in meat consumption wouldn’t hinder farmers. “The challenge is to prioritise meats that are French, from more sustainable farming, with public policies to support breeders in this transition,” he explained.

    Food in France has seen an 11% inflation, forcing many to seek the cheaper meat Fesneau is promoting. “30% of French people now have the means to pay more for quality,” Pascale Hébel, a consumption analyst for data consultants C-Ways, told the Guardian. (In contrast, 50% could afford higher-quality meat in 2017.)

    But the recommendations of the study – limiting red, processed and poultry meat consumption to a maximum of 450g per week – would actually make for a 10% cheaper diet on average, with the authors imploring that social and economic inequalities be taken into consideration in the national nutritional recommendations.

    France is now also hoping to ban cultivated meat, as part of a collective effort including a dozen other states pushing back against these novel proteins. The proposed bill would forbid producing, processing or marketing cultured meat in the country “in the interests of human health, animal health and the environment”.

    However, Hercberg argued that consumers should make their own minds up about meat consumption. France’s Climate and Resilience Act mentions eco labelling on product packaging as one of its key goals, accompanying the Nutri-Score labels already adopted by the country. A 2020 analysis of three global YouGov polls totalling 10,540 participants found that 80% of French citizens find carbon labelling a good idea.

    While France is set to introduce its eco-labelling scheme this year, will the government take into account the impact of meat for its dietary guidelines?

    The post While French Ministers Fight Alternative Protein, Health & Climate Experts Call for Dietary Guidelines to Reduce Meat appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Italy Rethinking Its Plant-Based Meat Labelling Ban to Avoid ‘Conflict with Italian Companies’

    italy plant based meat
    5 Mins Read

    Despite its hard-line stance on alternative protein in the last few months, Italy is reconsidering its ban on using meat-like terms on plant-based product labels, with Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida indicating that he doesn’t want to have any conflict with local manufacturers.

    It’s been an eventful few months for Italy and its adventures with alternative protein. In November, it became the first country to ban cultivated meat, citing health reasons, a risk to the country’s tradition, and a need to safeguard the livestock industry.

    However, this wasn’t the only ban introduced by Italy, with another legislation going slightly under the radar. As part of the cultivated meat legislation, the country also prohibited the use of meat-related terms like ‘steak’ and ‘salami’ on the product packaging of plant-based meat, which alternative protein think tank the Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe says is consumed by half of Italy’s population.

    Labelling is a hot topic of debate in countries across the world, but perhaps it carries even greater weight considering Italy’s position as the third-largest vegan market in the EU, with a 21% sales hike from 2020-22. Agriculture Minister Lollobrigida appears to be changing tact, with the government reconsidering the move after backlash from food industry groups.

    Food industry group argues that consumers aren’t confused

    italy plant based ban
    Courtesy: VegFather

    The decision comes after Unione Italiana Food, which describes itself as Italy’s leading association for direct representation of food product categories, hit back at the government’s labelling ban by appealing to the EU Commission and requesting the removal of the article about plant-based food.

    Outlining its intention to introduce the legislation, Italy’s government submitted a Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS) notification to the EU, which meant the country needed approval from the bloc if it wanted to ban cultivated meat and plant-based meat labels, with other EU members getting the chance to weigh in on the decision as well.

    In response to this notification, Unione Italiana Food had outlined its stance. As a group with over 550 companies and €51B in turnover, which offered a broad range of plant-based products, it noted that these have “nothing to do with food consisting of, isolated from or produced from cell cultures or tissues derived from vertebrate animals”.

    Unione Italiana Food argues that the protection of consumer information and the correct regulatory framework was already in place and that at the national and EU level, food labels are regulated by EU parliament rules. The bloc passed a landmark ruling in 2020 that rejected calls to ban the use of meat-related terms on plant-based product packaging.

    “It does not appear that consumers are confused by plant-based products’ denomination – on the contrary, they are generally consumers who read labels and who are very clear about the nature of what they are purchasing,” the association wrote. The European Consumer Organisation BEUC conducted a survey in 2020, which found that over 85% of Italians did not have any concerns with plant-based products using meat-like terms, as long as they were clearly labelled as vegetarian. “These names… do not give rise to risks of misunderstanding, also because they are always followed by the specification ‘vegetable’,” wrote Unione Italiana Food in its comment.

    “It’s not possible to change the names of products that have been around for 30 years,” the group told local newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. “This way, 20 million Italians who consume them knowingly will be confused. Our labels allow consumers to easily find and choose the products they intend to bring to the table without the risk of confusion on the shelves. Instead, the prohibition will end up generating confusion and disorientation.”

    GFI Europe’s public affairs consultant, Francesca Gallelli, had said at the time: “Eliminating the possibility of using familiar terms to facilitate product recognition undermines transparency, generating confusion for consumers where none currently exists, as demonstrated by surveys.”

    Supply chain discussions are needed as plant-based sales grow

    plant based meat labeling ban
    Courtesy: Atlante/Vivera

    Italy soon withdrew this notification, as it knew that the proposal would be rejected by the EU. This was followed by the formal ban, which many stakeholders felt would not hold, as it likely violated EU law. “We are the first nation to ban [cultivated meat], with all due respect to the multinationals who hope to make monstrous profits by putting citizens’ jobs and health at risk,” Lollobrigida said after the ban.

    While the noise was louder for cultivated meat, it’s plant-based meat products that were more affected, given that they’re the ones currently in the market. But now, it seems the Agriculture Minister is going back on his own words.

    “The last thing I want is to create conflict with Italian companies, so we have decided to start a process with Unione Italiana Food to develop a shared plan for the use of meat terms on plant-based products,” he told local reporters. “Our objective is to combine the needs of the industry with the protection of the consumer, who must not be misled.”

    While the deadline for the process was set to be February 16, Lollobrigida has said that it wasn’t an “imperative” date and that more discussions with supply chain players were required. He noted that the request “does not affect the entire law” of cultivated meat, but only the individual article about plant-based products, which is why he is happy to discuss it.

    “If it were a problem from this point of view, we could make an evaluation,” he said. “Through a gradual process, for example, we could decide not to change the names of the flagship products of some companies and instead modify those that are less well-known.”

    With plant-based sales in Italian retail and foodservice growing by 2.8% last year – in a global landscape where sales have regressed for these products – Unione Italiana Food will hope the conclusion is a positive one.

    The post Italy Rethinking Its Plant-Based Meat Labelling Ban to Avoid ‘Conflict with Italian Companies’ appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Society’s Burden: How Taxpayers Carry the Crushing Costs of Livestock Production

    5 Mins Read

    From pollution and destruction to disease, the societal costs of livestock meat production are an incredible burden.

    In 2020, the average American ate almost 280 pounds of meat, a figure which is very likely higher today.  Many European and Latin American countries, not to mention Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Hong Kong also eat a large amount of animal meat. In most industrialized nations, animal proteins are at the center of the average person’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner plate. But what of the costs to our collective health and environment? This past December, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) released a paper showing that our food systems, which we know to be based on animal proteins, externalizes $12.7 trillion in costs to society. That is an estimated 10% of global GDP.

    Why does meat cost society so much? 

    There is no shortage of research linking excess meat consumption to chronic disease. Both the Journal of American Medicine (JAMA) and The National Library of Medicine show that regularly eating processed meats (bacon, sausage, deli slices, hot dogs) can cause heart disease. The World Health Organization qualifies processed meats as carcinogenic. Further, meat consumption is associated with rising levels of diabetes and obesity, as per the National Library of Medicine. All this illness costs the average taxpayer dearly: from debilitating personal illness to skyrocketing healthcare costs, not to mention severe environmental damage and considerable economic loss.

    For example, a 2018 Milken Institute report suggested that the $1.1 trillion in U.S. healthcare costs for chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity, as determined by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is closer to $3.7 trillion when lost economic productivity is included. “This is equivalent to nearly 20 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP),” according to the report authors.   

    The FAO paper, published during the UN climate conference COP28 where sustainable and healthy food systems advancements were part of the main programming for the first time, noted that 73% of the $12.7 trillion cost to society was due to dietary pattern-induced productivity losses. In laypeople’s terms, we pay for our addiction to meat and other processed foods in more ways than at the grocery store.

    Another societal cost of our meat-dependent food systems, perhaps not reflected in the $12.7 trillion, is our growing antibiotic resistance. Livestock animals are raised in cramped conditions where disease is rampant, and as such, require enormous amounts of antibiotics (over 70% of all antibiotics produced globally are used by the livestock industry). By consuming meat, we ingest those pharmaceuticals and develop a resistance to them.

    Then, there are the environmental costs of our current food system, which the FAO report says “have an expected value corresponding to about 20 percent of total quantified hidden costs [$2.6T] caused by agrifood systems. Of these, more than half pertained to nitrogen emissions (mostly from runoff to surface waters and ammonia emissions to air). These were followed by the contributions of greenhouse gas emissions to climate change (30 percent), land-use change costs (14 percent), and water use (4 percent).” 

    Big Meat’s media tricks and the taxpayer burden

    Through sophisticated media campaigns that follow the PR playbook of other polluting industries such as fossil fuels and tobacco, the livestock industry has convinced the average consumer that meat is healthy, a non-negotiable part of their cultural identity, and that they can’t live without it. Made aware of the significant costs and tax burden of livestock meat production detailed above, would most people choose differently? 

    Alas, the duping of society by the Big Meat lobby is quite seductive. Take, for example, a Big Mac. What appears to be one of the cheapest meals/foods available to a US consumer, is actually quite costly upon further review, in large part because of external costs (see above) and substantial meat production subsidies. According to a paper by the American Institute for Economic Research titled ‘The True Cost of a Hamburger’, “the United States federal government spends $38 billion every year subsidizing the meat and dairy industries. Research from 2015 shows this subsidization reduces the price of Big Macs from $13 to $5 and the price of a pound of hamburger meat from $30 to the $5 we see today.” Guess who pays for those subsidies in the end? That’s right! It’s us, the taxpayers. Not only are we incentivized to eat foods that make us sick and damage our environment, we are made to pay for it through taxes. Not only is this infuriating, it’s fiscally irresponsible. Not to mention it’s all in the service of a very below-average hamburger.

    Food system innovation is the silver lining

    There is a silver lining: investing in food system innovation. Per the U.N.E.P., despite livestock farming accounting for up to 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, agrifood tech funding accounts for only 4% of global climate investments.

    Public markets haven’t yet priced in the true negative costs of livestock meat production and the full positive potential of future food innovations. Now is the time to invest in what some might call a golden opportunity.

    Where there is inefficiency, there is disruption through innovation. Markets thrive on this, and eventually, the great solutions rise to the top and there is mass adoption across society. Think of how the horse and buggy gave way to the automobile, the film developing industry gave way to digital imaging and the landline gave way to the cell phone. Today’s smart protein industry is alight with innovation that makes animal factories look like the dark-age torture relics they are.

    Indeed, innovation for efficient protein diversification through plant-based foods, precision fermented proteins and cultivated meat is growing, and the benefits are many. With alternatives, society can meet the rising demand for protein from a growing, economically-mobile and urbanizing global population for a fraction of the health and environmental costs, as noted by the COP28 host nation the UAE’s Minister of the Environment Her Excellency Mariam Almheiri during the conference.  

    We can see the path to food systems change is already taking shape with pioneering startups hitting key milestones. Israel’s Aleph Farms, for example, has just received approval from the Israeli government for the public sale of cultivated beef. Their peers at Upside Foods and GOOD Meat received US regulatory approval for cultivated chicken in June of last year. In the past few weeks, several precision fermentation dairy companies have earned FDA self-affirmed GRAS status for their animal-free dairy proteins. Meanwhile, the plant-based industry continues to iterate and work to improve taste, ingredient quality and health credentials.

    It’s never been a better time to invest in the future of food, and it’s never been more important. Soon, Governments across the world are waking up to this reality. In the meantime, you and your financial portfolio could potentially benefit from the market’s assymetry.

    The post Society’s Burden: How Taxpayers Carry the Crushing Costs of Livestock Production appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • South Korea Establishes Framework for Regulatory Approval of Cultivated Meat, With Applications Expected Soon

    cultivated meat regulatory approval
    6 Mins Read

    South Korea has opened up the regulatory approval process for cultivated meat, after the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety established the framework for these applications.

    During the launch of the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum in October, Mirte Gosker, director of founding organisation the Good Food Institute (GFI) APAC, predicted that South Korea would be among the APAC countries next in line to develop regulatory frameworks for cultivated meat, with both countries “proactively seeking input from industry groups to craft clear and efficient safety review processes”.

    Four months on, that prophecy has come true, with South Korea now accepting applications for the regulatory approval of cultivated meat. Today, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety (MFDS) officially published the Standards for Recognition of Temporary Standards and Specifications for Food, etc. to “revitalise the food industry”.

    It has revised the framework and clarified the procedure for recognising food ingredients made from “cell and microbial culture” technology. This means that cultivated meat startups, which could previously only use these ingredients for R&D purposes, can now file dossiers to be allowed to sell these products in the country. So far, only Singapore, the US and Israel have approved the sale of cultivated meat.

    The latter came just last month, when Israeli’s health ministry granted clearance to local startup Aleph Farms, whose regulatory affairs chef Yifat Gavriel said: “2024 stands to be a landmark year for the advancement of regulatory pathways and commercialisation of cultivated meat.” It certainly is proving to be the case, if South Korea’s announcement is anything to go by.

    “Today’s announcement of a tangible path to market for cultivated meat companies is a welcome recognition of the important role that future foods will play as South Korea seeks to build a more secure and sustainable protein supply,” Sam Lawrence, vice president of policy for Asia at GFI, told Green Queen. “So far, the government has released an interim framework, which we expect to continue to develop and evolve over time.

    What companies need to do and pay for regulatory approval in South Korea

    south korea cultivated meat
    Courtesy: Space F

    While no producer has applied for approval, the expectation is that several local startups are likely to do so within the next few weeks. The entire process is set to take up to 270 working days, meaning even if companies apply soon, it’s unlikely that any clearance will be given this year.

    Dossiers submitted to the MFDS must include safety verification data, including the name of the raw material, the origin of the cell, the manufacturing process, and international recognition and usage history. If the cells are derived from livestock, the application needs to provide information about the donor, such as country of origin, gender, age, and slaughter inspection certificate. For marine sources, data confirming the source of the donor must be submitted.

    Moreover, the filing requires companies to divulge information about the human safety impact of the raw material, which entails digestibility, any negative health reactions, allergy and toxin data, and a confirmation of the genetic stability between the raw material and final ingredient.

    The approval process will cost companies a cool ₩45M ($34,000). That is a hefty markup, especially given that not all countries charge a fee for the assessment of such novel food applications. Singapore and Israel, for example, have no fees attached to the process, for example.

    Australia and New Zealand’s joint regulator also doesn’t charge a fee by default, unless companies want the procedure to be fast-tracked or prioritised. Currently, Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) is considering an application from Vow Foods for its cultured quail. The startup filed its application in February 2023, and is now awaiting a second round of public consultation, which will be followed by a 60-day period for ministers to comment on the regulatory body’s decisions

    “Considering that the only risk assessment to be completed by FSANZ was done via fee and still took quite a while – who is going to go the free route?” one policy expert familiar with the application process in several countries told Green Queen, with the fees amounting to around AU$195,000 ($128,000). “In my mind, it is a de facto fee structure.”

    As for the US, UK and EU, neither country charges a direct fee for the application. However, there are other expenses involved. “There are peripheral costs,” explained the source. “We have to use third-party accredited labs for the analytics on the five non-consecutive batches required for the UK and EU. Those lab fees can add up to be several hundred thousand euros.”

    Lawrence added: “Regulatory agencies often operate on a cost-recovery basis and fee reductions are a point of discussion in many jurisdictions. It’s a known cost of doing business for companies operating in the future-foods space, but when GFI is asked for input by regulators, we consistently urge them to make their costs as low as possible, as higher costs can act as a barrier to innovation, particularly for startups.”

    Consumer survey shows importance of price parity for cultivated meat

    cultivated meat korea
    Courtesy: CellMEAT

    The development will be welcome news for South Korea’s cultivated meat companies, including TissenBioFarm, Simple Planet, Space F, SeaWith, CellMEAT, and Cellqua, among others. It will also interest Korean noodle giant Nongshim, which has invested $7.4M in food tech VC funding with a focus on cultivated meat, and CJ CheilJedang, which has teamed up with KCell Biosciences to build a cell culture facility in Busan. And last week, scientists at the Yonsei University showcased a hybrid rice variety with cultivated beef and cow fat cells as a proof of concept for more affordable beef with a smaller carbon footprint.

    It concludes a process that began in 2022, when the MFDS included official guidance for alternative protein in the country’s National Plan, covering the safety, manufacturing processes and regulatory approval of cultivated meat. A year ago, 28 industry stakeholders signed an MoU to advance the country’s cultivated meat industry, while a month later, the North Gyeongsang province opened a 2,309 sq m Cellular Agriculture Industry Support Center.

    The APAC Society for Cellular Agriculture, which co-founded the APAC Regulatory Coordination Forum with GFI APAC, conducted a 1,110-person survey in October, revealing that 90% of respondents were willing to try cultivated meat at least once (though only 5% indicated they’d eat it regularly). Moreover, 39% were supportive of cultivated meat being sold at supermarkets and restaurants (with 14- to 29-year-olds leading the way), and just 10% were opposed to its commercialisation.

    In fact, 19% of Koreans said they would prefer cultivated meat over plant proteins. But price remains a key purchase driver, important for 65% of citizens, followed by taste and texture (62%). While two-thirds of respondents spend up to ₩50,000 ($23-38) per week on meat products for the whole household, only 12% would part with ₩1,000-3,000 (75 cents to $2) more per 100g of cultivated meat. And just 6% would be willing to pay even more.

    Despite that, 57% and 25% said they’d eat cultivated pork and beef, respectively, if they’re cheaper than their conventional counterparts. This indicates that scaling up production to reach price parity with farmed meat is among the biggest hurdles for South Korea’s cultivated meat sector.

    “Hybrid products and scaling up production are key factors to achieve price parity – and it is at the forefront on many of the companies’ agenda either today or in the near future,” Calisa Lim, project manager at APAC-SCA, told Green Queen at the time. “We need combined synergies and efforts through investors, contract manufacturers, established stakeholders, startups, and government bodies to facilitate a thriving ecosystem for cultivated meat and seafood in South Korea.”

    “GFI’s scientists and policy experts have offered our input to regulators during the consultation processes, and will continue to provide feedback to ensure the framework is effective and incorporates global best practices,” added Lawrence. “The agency is inviting companies to submit applications during this interim period, which we take as a positive sign that regulators are keen to get the local sector moving.”

    The post South Korea Establishes Framework for Regulatory Approval of Cultivated Meat, With Applications Expected Soon appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • 70/30 Food Tech Closes $700K Seed Extension & Launches Research Lab for Mycelium Protein

    70 30 food tech
    5 Mins Read

    Singapore-based 70/30 Food Tech has closed a $700,000 seed extension round, which has helped it launch a research lab to develop mycelium-based protein products, starting with shredded chicken.

    70/30 Food Tech’s latest fundraiser saw participation from existing seed investors as well as Better Bite Ventures. The round has facilitated the opening of a Mycelium Research Lab to advance the startup’s R&D into fungi-based proteins.

    “We believe that mycelium-based sustainable protein products can be a gateway to broader consumer adoption in Asia, especially given the familiarity and positive perception of fungi in the region,” said Better Bite Ventures founding partner Michal Klar. “We liked 70/30 Food Tech’s product pipeline and unique go-to-market strategy.”

    Founded in 2020 by Eve Samyuktha and Mike Huang, F&B consultants working in China’s plant-based sector, the company makes vegan ready meals using its biomass-fermented mycelium chicken. In 2021 alone, as part of its test launch, it shifted 25,000 of these meals.

    Now, to scale up and expand further, 70/30 Food Tech has launched its new research lab in Bangalore, a city known as India’s tech hub. “We chose Bangalore not only for the R&D, but also are aiming India as one of our markets for future products,” Samyuktha told Green Queen. “The per capita consumption of meat in India is significantly low compared to [the] rest of Asia. However, there is a rising demand for poultry and we want to be on the brink of it and offer exciting solutions.”

    She added: “Having the lab in Bangalore is super cost-effective compared to Singapore, so the iterations and runs are larger in number.”

    Using mycelium to offer Asians cost-effective alternative proteins

    mycelium chicken
    Courtesy: 70/30 Food Tech

    The company began its initial pilot-scale experiments in biomass fermentation in 2021 at the Shanghai Academy of Agricultural Sciences, with the primary aim of developing affordable alternative protein solutions. Having surveyed several B2B consumers – for whom it makes mushroom- and soy-based proteins, including the Chinese restaurant chain Guaka – the startup concluded that price is a key aspect of protein diversification.

    “Achieving cost-efficiency is crucial and food businesses in China and other parts of Asia will likely be interested in products that can offer competitive pricing compared to animal-based products and this, in turn, can attract a larger market share and drive adoption,” said Doris Lee, CEO of GFIC, GFIC, the independent partner organisation of the Good Food Institute APAC.

    A report by alternative protein think tank Food Frontier last year found China to be the most favourable market for plant-based food, although India was on the other end of the list. But across Southeast Asia, high price was a key barrier for these foods. Analysis by Asymmetrics Research also found that in China, many middle-income consumers are cutting back their impulse spending and looking for better-value products. Pork and beef prices have fallen, toughening the challenge for plant-based brands trying to sell to foodservice, which is a cost-sensitive approach.

    Moreover, a recent study has shown that mycelium production can be done on a large scale and with lower costs, developing a protein that can grow in a relatively short period – days instead of the months or years it takes to grow animal-derived or even plant-based food. With greater investment in resources and infrastructure to cut production costs and educate consumers on mycelium as a potential dietary staple, the authors argue that the fungi ingredient could be a solution for global hunger and food insecurity.

    While manufacturing costs are currently under wraps, 70/30 Food Tech will likely be looking to reach price parity with conventional chicken – already one of the cheapest meat products you can buy – sooner rather than later.

    70/30 Food Tech to replace existing offering with mycelium chicken

    vegan ready meals
    Courtesy: 70/30 Food Tech

    The mycelium study above also extolled the fungi root’s nutritional and environmental benefits. This is important for 70/30 Food Tech too, with Samyuktha noting that the startup is working to get its mycelium certified as a carbon-neutral food – a process that requires extensive data collection.

    “Our feedstock is byproducts of other food manufacturers that would be generally regarded as waste, but safe for food reuse,” she explained. “Data required will involve the entire supply chain of the mycelium production, including cost of transportation, how we isolate and extract the parent strains to the downstream processing, storage and packing.”

    The study, which was authored by employees of US mycelium meat leader Meati, revealed that mycelium can take on different desired tasting notes through biochemistry and flavour chemistry, while being high in protein with all essential amino acids and micronutrients. It has been shown to lower LDL cholesterol too, with the potential to reduce food waste by valorising the sidestream and be produced in a cost-effective manner.

    “Nutritionally, I am excited to say that not only the amino acid profiles are similar to meat, but certain amino acids are significantly higher compared to chicken,” said Samyuktha. Additionally, biomass fermentation allows companies to eschew the extrusion process commonly used for soy protein, while the use of specially mutated fungi strains and bioreactor process designs allows 70/30 Food Tech to follow a close-to-market commercialisation approach.

    “The first pilot run successfully gave us the texture of shredded chicken,” the founder said, before adding: “The key challenge is the downstream processing and ‘odour’ removal, which has been very time consuming.” But it’s not just chicken – or meat, for that matter – that’s in the works. “We are dabbling with a possible fatty substitute for traditional cow-milk butter.”

    With retail a capital-intensive channel, the focus remains on B2B solutions, where 70/30 Food Tech wants to replace its current offering with its mycelium-based mushroom-soy blend, pending regulatory approval.

    The startup was Asia’s first mycelium protein company, while last year, Shanghai-based CellX expanded into the sector too. It’s an industry that has seen a flurry of innovations and developments in the last year. This includes Meati’s launch of a D2C marketplace, chicken nuggets and mycelium jerky SKUs, Esencia Foods‘ whole-cut seafood analogues, Better Nature‘s soybean mycelium chicken, Libre Foods‘ whole-cut chicken breast, and Bolder Foods‘ cheese alternatives.

    Plus, investors have shown heightened interest in the sector, with MyForest Foods bagging a $15M Series A extension in June and Infinite Roots securing $58M in Series B funding last month.

    The post 70/30 Food Tech Closes $700K Seed Extension & Launches Research Lab for Mycelium Protein appeared first on Green Queen.

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  • Beyond Meat IV: Meatier, Healthier & Costlier Plant-Based Burgers

    beyond burger
    9 Mins Read

    Californian plant-based giant Beyond Meat has unveiled its first product reformulation in three years, with the Beyond IV burger and beef now featuring avocado oil, fava beans and lentils. It’s a more nutritious product, but it’s also more expensive.

    Beyond Meat is reformulating its mince and burger SKUs to match consumer demands for better-tasting and healthier plant-based meats, which will roll out in the US this spring.

    Fuelled by the fourth generation of its core beef platform, the new Beyond Burger and Beef will replace the existing iterations on retail shelves, and their launch is headlined by improved nutritional credentials. There’s less saturated fat, less sodium, more calcium, more potassium, and slightly more protein.

    The El Segundo-based company has now bid adieu to canola and coconut oils, replacing them with avocado oil. Plus, it has added fava beans and red lentils to its ingredient list, marginally shortening the ingredient list from 18 to 17. All this plays into key consumer concerns and demands: research has shown that people want better-tasting vegan burgers that are also better for their health.

    Beyond Meat’s revamp comes with the backdrop of heightened criticism around the additives, ‘unnatural’ ingredients and ultra-processing used in meat alternatives. To ensure that its claims live up to scrutiny, the company worked with medical and nutrition experts in a multi-year research effort to improve its offerings and meet guidelines set by national health bodies and experts.

    “We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished with Beyond IV as it marks our most significant renovation and step forward to date,” Shira Zackai, the company’s chief communication officer, told Green Queen. “As part of Beyond Meat’s rapid and relentless approach to innovation, we’re always working to advance the taste and nutrition of our products.”

    Beyond Meat IV means more nutritious plant-based beef

    beyond burger nutrition
    Courtesy: Beyond Meat | Graphic by Green Queen

    In the last year, brand strategies for plant-based meat have shifted drastically. There’s a bigger focus on health than ever before, in direct response to consumer attitudes and concerns about vegan alternatives. In August, with its first marketing campaign in years, Beyond Meat opted to subtly push back against targeted attacks from meat industry lobby groups, shining a light on the farmers who grow its ingredients.

    However, it quickly changed tact two months later, with a new marketing drive honing in on its steak product, which was certified as ‘heart-healthy’ by the American Heart Association (AHA). It has continued that rhetoric, as has its biggest rival, Impossible Foods.

    “There is a considerable gap between the strong health credentials of our products and a broader counternarrative that is now afoot, and this gap appears to have widened,” Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown said in its Q2 earnings call. “This change in perception is not without encouragement from interest groups, who have succeeded in seeding doubt and fear around the ingredients and processes we use to create our and other plant-based meats.”

    In retrospect, this served as a precursor to today’s announcement. Behind the scenes, Beyond Meat has been intent on answering critics of plant-based meat, and the belief is that its newest products are its strongest response yet. The Beyond Burger IV is an upgrade on the existing one on multiple counts: there’s 60% less saturated fat (2g per serving), 30% less sodium (310mg), 20% more calcium (120mg), and 12% higher potassium content (370mg).

    Plus, the new Beyond Beef has 21g of protein, a gram more than its predecessor. This, by the way, is higher than most 80/20 beef products on the market. The company claims the saturated fat content is 75% lower than standard 80/20 beef too.

    “The development of the new products occurred within an ecosystem of leading medical and nutrition experts, and were designed to meet the standards of national health organisations to create a product that delivers the taste, satisfaction, and utility of 80/20 beef – yet is demonstrably healthier,” said Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown.

    The company has been able to do so by rejigging its ingredient list. Gone are the canola and coconut oils – the former is a seed oil that has high amounts of linoleic acid, which has been linked to inflammation and related diseases, while the latter is a fat infamous for its high saturated fat content. With avocado oil, there’s less saturated fat, less linoleic acid, and more monounsaturated fat (also known as one of the healthier fats). The new products have 8g of the latter, versus 6g in the 3.0 versions.

    Half of Americans found plant-based meats to be healthy in 2020, but that dipped to 38% in 2022. The loss in faith has since continued, with a Mintel survey from last year showing that nutrition is the second-biggest reason (35%) for Americans’ reticence to try meat alternatives. Yet another poll revealed that health is the major factor behind Americans eating meatless diets, with six in 10 choosing it.

    Beyond Meat’s beef is now recognised by the American Diabetes Association’s evidence-based nutritional guidelines for its Better Choices for Life programme, and now features Good Housekeeping’s Nutritionist Approved Emblem. Unlike its steak, the ground beef and burger aren’t yet certified by the AHA, but they have been included in a catalogue of ‘heart-healthy’ recipes by its Heart-Check initiative.

    All this will no doubt appeal to a country where one citizen dies from cardiovascular disease every 33 seconds, over a third are clinically obese, and over 11% suffer from type 2 diabetes.

    beyond meat ingredients
    Courtesy: Beyond Meat

    Beyond Meat leans into the whole-food trend, but there’s a snag

    The other major additions to Beyond Meat’s mince and burger are fava beans and red lentils. The company joins a raft of others incorporating whole foods into their plant-based offerings, playing into a trend connected to the increased consciousness around health and ultra-processed foods.

    Among different protein sources, those originating from whole plants experienced the sharpest rise in consumption among Americans between 2022 and 2023, with 28% eating them ‘somewhat’ or ‘much more’. These foods also had the second-lowest drop (11%) in intake, behind plant-based meat and seafood analogues (10%).

    There is a lot of misconception about ultra-processing and plant-based meats, with consumers linking the former with healthfulness to explain their dismay about the latter. This outlook chimes with “concerns some people have around foods that are new – often called food neophobia“, Churchill Fellow Jenny Chapman told Green Queen earlier this month. “Some [marketing] campaigns really hone in on this, by using words like ‘fake’ and ‘unnatural’ to describe plant-based meats (which are safe, nutritious foods).”

    With fava bean, pea protein and avocado oil, Beyond Meat is aiming to appeal to people looking for clean-label foods. Research by ingredients supplier Ingredion has found that 78% of consumers would spend more money on products with ‘natural’ or ‘all-natural’ packaging claims.

    It’s important to note that there’s no agreed definition for what constitutes a ‘clean-label’ food, though the common understanding is that it means there are fewer ingredients and fewer ultra-processed elements. The 17-ingredient Beyond Beef and Burger IV don’t suggest they meet the former criterion, but the removal of ‘expeller-pressed canola oil’ and ‘refined coconut oil’ indicates they could fit the latter.

    Backing up this claim is a Clean Label Project certification, the first such accreditation for plant-based meat – although the initiative is more focused on screening products for environmental toxins and ingredient quality.

    However, there is one drawback with the inclusion of fava beans: it makes Beyond Meat products more susceptible to allergies. Estimates suggest that around 4% of the world’s population have favism, a genetic disorder characterised by allergy-like reactions to these beans. The company did not respond to Green Queen’s query about whether the inclusion of fava beans raised any internal concerns about allergies.

    beyond meat
    Courtesy: Beyond Meat | Graphic by Green Queen

    Avocado oil pits flavour against cost

    Using avocado oil doesn’t just come with health gains – it opens up more culinary attributes too. This is important: flavour is by far the biggest deterrent and attraction for alt-meat consumption. This is illustrated by an international survey from 2022, which suggested that plant-based meat’s taste and texture are as important as their conventional counterparts for over 75% of consumers. And remember that Mintel poll from above? Nutrition was second on the list to flavour, which drives 48% of consumers away from these products.

    But by using this fat, Beyond Meat is hitting the taste vertical, with the neutral flavour and smoother mouthfeel allowing it to “unlock an even meatier, beefy flavour” for the new products. Plus, given avocado oil has a higher smoke point of any fat (270°C/521°F, versus 230°C/446°F for canola oil, on average), the new Beyond Beef is designed to sizzle and barbecue better.

    If you’re worried about the change in ingredients meaning a change in your beloved Beyond Burger’s flavour, fret not. A 93-person taste test last September indicated that consumers preferred the meatier taste and texture of the new vegan beef. And at last month’s FoodFluence conference in Edinburgh, 29 out of 31 registered dietitians said they enjoyed the taste of the new Beyond Burger, found it healthful, and would recommend it.

    “We are excited to be adding more nutrient-dense plant-based ingredients including red lentil and faba
    bean protein in the Beyond IV platform,” Zackai told Green Queen. “The interplay of the proteins with the avocado oil allowed us to deliver our meatiest product yet while significantly advancing the nutritional benefits.”

    Moreover, according to its latest life-cycle assessment, the Beyond Burger 3.0 generates 90% fewer GHG emissions, requires 37% non-renewable energy, uses 97% less land and consumes 97% less water than a conventional 80/20 quarter-pound beef patty produced in the US. But the reformulation doesn’t necessarily signal a shift in Beyond Beef’s environmental credentials. “While more research is still needed, we don’t expect there to be a significant change,” he said.

    beyond meat stock
    Courtesy: Beyond Meat

    Okay, taste? Check. Nutrition? Check. Sustainability? Check. Price? Well.

    We’re in an era of increased cost of living, and people are looking for wallet-friendly food. In the UK, inflation has bitten plant-based meats already. While Beyond Meat’s yearly accounts are due next week, the company’s previous financials have shown that it struggled last year, with a 26.5% sales fall in Q3 (over already declining sales in the previous quarter) forcing it to abandon its target of becoming cashflow-positive, lay off more staff, and cut back its full-year forecast.

    There was always going to be one major issue with avocado oil – for all its benefits, it’s significantly more expensive. So, Beyond Meat had to make a decision: absorb the added costs, or pass them on to the consumer. “As avocado oil is a more premium ingredient, the new platform will be priced to reflect that,” revealed Zackai. “However, based on the significant nutritional benefits and elevated taste profile of these new products, we feel confident in the value we will be providing to consumers relative to their cost.”

    So, it’ll be interesting to see whether consumers really are willing to pay more for healthier, tastier meat alternatives. The new products are initially exclusive to retail, and their foodservice path remains unclear. “It will be available at all retailers where the Beyond Burger and Beyond Beef are currently sold, replacing the previous version in grocery stores,” confirmed Zackai. “We are excited to get these products into the market and clearly communicate these benefits to consumers, so they can make a choice that not only tastes great, but is substantially better for them and the planet.”

    Could platform IV be a catalyst for the year 2024 for Beyond Meat?

    The post Beyond Meat IV: Meatier, Healthier & Costlier Plant-Based Burgers appeared first on Green Queen.

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