Caroline Cotto and Tim Dale from Food System Innovations

Elysabeth: I want to bring in from Food System Innovations, Tim Dale. Thanks for being here, and Caroline Cotto from NECTAR Research, which works in tandem with Food System Innovations.

You just think of when you walk into a restaurant, you never used to see options that were non-animal and now you have at least one or two. These are increasing in food services, university cafeterias, corporate cafeterias around the U.S. and also in restaurants. So large progress has been made, but I’d love to see sort of the slam dunk of what’s already acceptable come to the market quickly.

So when will we see this come to market? I think this is a Tim question, but it could be a Caroline question. When will we see this come to market and what will the retail price be? So how is it going to shake out for the consumer in that perspective?

Tim Dale: Yeah, there are already brands that are in the market today in retail and in food service locations. So this is something that exists already, which is great news. I think when we think about some of the barriers that have been slowing down the adoption for other alternatives, mainly price, taste and health benefits, we see that this plant-rich category has an opportunity to overcome those barriers and even sometimes do better than the animal analog.

So anecdotally, you know, we’ve worked with some of our brands in this space and we’ve heard that on a unit economic level, they are able to price it below the animal analog. We see that also in Europe as well, where white-label brands for Tesco and Little are coming significantly under the 100% animal version.

Elysabeth: The Good Food Institute always says it’s taste, price and convenience, but as I’ve mentioned on this show, I actually often think it’s just price, price, and price. When you can attract people with price, they’ll say, “Oh sure, I’ve always loved mixing mushrooms with my meat. I do that anyway on my plate, so I just love that blended product.” You got them there because of the price, so I just think this makes so much sense.

Caroline, back to you. I know you’ve done the NECTAR research, which is great, and you’re looking at consumer opinions, consumer willingness to adopt, etc. You touched on it before, but I want to go on a deeper dive on what their reaction was, what maybe the hurdles are, and your opinion, if you care about the consumer as much as you care about the producer. How does the meat industry feel about this?

Caroline Cotto: Yeah, all great questions. So overall, most people are really excited and that’s what our research shows. So we saw 74% of those surveyed said they were interested or extremely interested in the concept of plant-rich meat, which is already a great baseline to start with. I think we saw an increased interest from people who identify as omnivores, even over flexitarians. So it’s really opening up a potential for a new market to really get those people that consider themselves at their core to be meat eaters because it’s really a solution where they don’t have to sacrifice 100% and they can kind of have their meat and eat it too, for all puns intended.

We definitely saw that there was a clear conceptual preference as well for 50% blends. So 50% meat, 50% plant-based. I think it’s really easy to grasp what that is. Then they also want that 50% that’s plant-based to be often whole plant-based ingredients that they can recognize the name of right on the label. So things like mushrooms or broccoli or caramelized onions. They can conceptualize that versus something like mycelium or some soy protein isolate. So overall, super cool to see.

We actually saw burgers and nuggets, the plant-rich versions, were outperforming the 100% animal-based products in overall liking and that was often because the burgers actually had more juiciness and they had more beef and savory flavors coming through that’s amplified by the umami of things like mushrooms in that blended product. They also were reported as having a more natural look and kind of just appearing more delicious on the plate and the same with chicken nuggets. They were able to prioritize more savory chicken flavors and avoid a lot of weird aftertastes that consumers felt were in the animal product.

Overall, we saw plant-rich products outperforming 100% plant-based products in six of eight categories. So definitely some indication that omnivore consumers are willing to take that step to a middle ground, but maybe not willing to go 100% to the plant-based side.