It’s a good time to be in the plant-based meat business. Today, Impossible Foods, known for its very beef-like plant-based burger, announced that it closed a new $300 million funding round, bringing total venture investment in the company to more than three-quarters of a billion dollars. On April 29, Burger King said that it planned to start serving Impossible Whoppers nationwide. (The burger is already sold in more than 7,000 other restaurants–up from 70 just two years ago–and will be in retail stores later this year.) McDonald’s is serving a new vegan burger in Germany and a vegan Happy Meal in the U.K. Nestlé plans to start selling its own “Incredible Burger,” another realistic plant-based burger designed to be cooked from a raw patty, in Europe this spring, followed by the U.S. this fall. When Beyond Meat went public on May 2, its stock quickly soared.
“All of this is indicative of a public that is very, very excited about seeing meat produced from plants,” says Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on the industry. Investment keeps growing. “There is overwhelming interest from investors in both the plant-based meat and ‘clean meat’ spaces,” he says. Over the past decade, more than $2 billion has been invested in plant-based meat, and more than half of that occurred in 2017 and 2018. (A total of $16 billion has been invested in plant-based meat, egg, and dairy companies combined since 2009, according to a recent report from the nonprofit.) Some of that investment has come from the traditional meat industry, including Tyson Foods, and from food giants like Nestle.
The success is being driven by the evolution of the products, which now bear little relation to old-school veggie burgers. “This is fundamentally an issue of rethinking what a plant-based burger is,” says Friedrich. Impossible uses aplant-based version of heme, the same molecule that gives blood its taste. Beyond Meat, like Impossible, has amassive lab where scientists continually tweak the recipes for its productsto make them as realistic as possible. The target customers aren’t vegetarians anymore, but meat eaters who are interested in alternatives for health or animal welfare reasons, or because raising meat is a contributor to climate change. “The products are getting better and better, and that’s a factor in going from, ‘My products are for the billion-dollar vegetarian plant-based meat market,’ to, ‘My products are for the $200 billion everybody-who-eats-meat market,” he says. “And you really need to be in the latter category to have a successful fast food introduction.”It’s likely now that many more products will begin to come to market, both from startups and larger companies. Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest meat producers, plans to introduce plant-based meats this year. Most types of meat and seafood still don’t have realistic plant-based alternatives. “Over the next 10 years, we’re going to see a whole bunch of new brands, new products, and technologies that just didn’t exist five years ago,” says Andrew Ive, managing general partner of Big Idea Ventures, a venture firm that is launching a new accelerator later this year in New York City and Singapore to help bring some of those brands to market. As that change happens, he says, it will have a meaningful benefit for the environment. “It’s a big opportunity. And the great thing about it is that if we do our job right, and we deliver a lot of delicious foods that just happen to not have animal protein or animal byproducts in them, it has a really significant impact on climate.”
Recognize your brand’s excellence by applying to this year’s Brands That Matter Awards before the early-rate deadline, May 3.