Have we reached peak vegan?

By Louise Palmer-Masterton, founder of Cambridge and London plant-based restaurant business Stem & Glory.

A furore kicked off recently when Bloomberg published a story about Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat titled: “Fake meat was supposed to save the world. It became just another fad.”

Impossible Foods, of course, fought back claiming that the article misrepresented facts, and was a hate opinion piece against plant-based meat, and in particular Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat, the two largest players in the USA.

One of my LinkedIn associates posted an image of the Bloomberg article juxtaposed alongside an article from the Daily Mail from December 2000 that claimed that “the Internet may just be a passing fad, as millions give up on it”.

I believe the same was said of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. It’s almost like we spend our energy pretending something isn’t happening, in the hope that will stop it happening!

This reminds me of the well-known ‘three stages of acceptance’ generally wrongly attributed to Mahatma Ghandi, which nevertheless gives insight into human societal behaviour. When disruption comes along, or anything that upsets the status quo, there seems to be a succession of three stages.

Firstly, whatever it is gets dismissed and ridiculed, then if it doesn’t go away, it is attacked, then, well, I’ll come on to that in a minute.

So it would appear that plant-based meat, in particular, has passed the being ridiculed and dismissed phase (this was in my own upbringing - vegans and vegetarians were viewed as odd and Sosmix was never going to catch on), and is well and truly into the being attacked phase.

Both Plant-Based News and Vegconomist published counter articles to the Bloomberg piece, with Vegconomist reporting that the Bloomberg article was “rife with one-sided anecdotes and editorialised framing” and “scarce of any data to support its position”.

The Vegconomist article also pointed out the the Bloomberg article had completely ignored the explosion in plant-based meat outside of the US, both in terms of new brands entering the space, and in terms of consumer take-up.

Plant-based News reported that in fact the global plant-based meat category has expanded to a $7billion global market in just 10 years, and Impossible had achieved record sales every year since it first launched, including in 2022.

Impossible Foods also pointed out: “It’s not just vegans and vegetarians buying our products, either, more than 90 per cent of individuals purchasing Impossible say they also eat meat — a clear indication that our product is attracting meat eaters and flexitarians.”

This definitely concurs with our own experience at Stem & Glory. The majority of our customers are not vegan. Most are meat eaters and flexitarians enjoying vegan food. And they are growing in number. Plant-based catering is also on the rise, both in corporate and private settings.

Stem & Glory focuses on natural and unprocessed plant-based ingredients, but we do have a plant-based meat burger on our menu, and guess what - it’s one of our best sellers at all three of our sites.

It makes sense to me how businesses whose business model involves meat and dairy, whether as a producer or restaurateur, find this shift towards plant-based food generally a bit challenging. When change is unwelcome, humans do dismiss, then ridicule and then attack.

Marco Pierre White seems to have the right idea. He has embraced the idea of plant-based meat with a collaboration with Redefine Meat and their very realistic 3D-printed vegan steaks. Pierre White has acknowledged publicly that the world needs to eat less meat, and that “Redefine Meat’s products give you all the sustainability and health benefits of plant-based without the compromise on taste and texture”.

As plant-based meat becomes more and more realistic, more and more chefs will be working with it, and more and more diners will choose it.

Pierre White gives good prominence to vegan dishes on his Steakhouse Bar & Grill menu - with four choices of starter, main and dessert, with two of the mains being made with plant-based meat. Giving good choices, and well executed vegan dishes is definitely the way to nudge diners to choose plant-based more often.

The third stage in the three stages of resistance to disruption? Well, firstly they are ridiculed and dismissed, secondly they are attacked, then finally - they win.

So, no, we have not reached peak vegan. In reality it is just starting to tip into the mainstream. We can expect exponential growth from here.

Thanks to Vegconomist and Plant-based News.