Plant Based Fail: The Empty Promise Of Animal Meat Displacement

It has been a rough couple of weeks in the media for the plant-based meat category. The major black eye came from a BusinessWeek cover story by Deena Shanker with the painful title, “Fake Meat Was Supposed to Save the World. It Became Just Another Fad” and subtitle, “Beyond MeatBYND and Impossible Foods wanted to upend the world’s $1 trillion meat industry. But plant-based meat is turning out to be a flop.”

Ouch.

The reaction from the vegan echo chamber was swift and childish.

Impossible Foods resorted to calling the article “another opinion piece” and oddly relied on Reddit users to defend the company, taking out a full-page ad in the New York TimesNYT. Such an exorbitant and useless spend seems especially ill-timed given this week’s news of the company cutting 20 percent of its workers.

Meanwhile, social media exploded with various forms of outrage aimed at the Bloomberg reporter who wrote the piece, Deena Shanker. This common response is known as “shooting the messenger”, and at times crossed over into vicious attacks.

But lost in these knee-jerk reactions is the grim reality that the main promise of plant-based meat – that these products will displace animal meat – is unfulfilled and will likely remain so into the future.

We can keep arguing over whether sales of plant-based meats are going up or down, or whether these products are healthy or not, of even if the meat lobby is paying Bloomberg to publish stories to bash the category. (This conspiracy theory was floated more than once on social media, including in a comment on Impossible Foods’ LinkedIn post.)

At the end of the day, the only relevant question is this: Are meat eaters substituting plant-based meats for animal meats in any significant way?

Lying With Statistics

To date, we have no relevant data to indicate displacement is happening.

Too many people are blindly assuming that any sales of plant-based meats other than to vegans and vegetarians must mean that animal meats are being displaced. But this is not necessarily true. Even if we assume that a significant portion of purchasers are “flexitarian” – people who only sometimes eat meat – we still don’t know exactly what foods these consumers are displacing, or even if they’re displacing anything.

This story in Wired sums up the challenge well:

“Figuring out whether plant-based meats are replacing beef isn’t something you can tell from share prices or total retail sales. Instead, we have to rely on data from surveys and analyses of supermarket shopping carts. The evidence we do have suggests the Great Displacement isn’t happening (yet).”

So where are the claims of displacement coming from? Mostly, from the industry itself. In 2019, Impossible Foods claimed that over 95% of people who order their burger regularly consume animal products, and in that same article, Beyond Meat cited purchase data from a large retailer showing that more than 90% of consumers who purchased the Beyond Burger also purchased animal meat. 

More recently, a 2022 analysis published in Nature purported to show that about 86% of purchasers of plant-based meat buyers also bought ground meat, and that about 2.79% purchased plant-based meats exclusively. Some have misrepresented this data on social media to “prove” that the category is not relegated to only vegans and vegetarians, and hence the critical media outlets have it all wrong.

However, all these sources rely on household panel data, which tells us what households are purchasing overall, not individual consumers. So it’s entirely possible and quite likely that one member of the household is eating plant-based meat while others are eating animal meat. Thus the stats can sound impressive, but tell us nothing about displacement.

Moreover, that same Nature study found that purchasing plant-based meats for the first time does not deter meat demand among those households. Study co-author Jayson Lusk confirmed all of this to me via email: “We're finding very little evidence of displacement,” he said.

Similarly, Dan Blaustein-Rejto, director of food and agriculture at the Breakthrough Institute, told Wired last year: “There’s relatively little evidence that plant-based meat alternatives are currently displacing conventional meat.” He also said the data suggests that most people are using plant-based meats as an extra source of protein rather than a direct replacement for meat.

In other words, it’s entirely possible that flexitarian purchases of plant-based meats are simply topping their (already vegetarian) pasta with some Impossible meatballs or Beyond sausages. We simply do not have the data to show us otherwise.

(I emailed both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat to ask for a source for the claim that their products are displacing animal meat but did not hear back from either company.)

Selling More of Everything

Another response to the critiques has been, but just wait, it’s still early days! However, in the long term there is no viable economic path for displacement of animal meat because the goal of capitalism is always to sell more, not less.

There is zero economic incentive for the gatekeepers between food manufacturers and consumers— retailers and restaurants — to displace animal meat with plant-based meats. To the contrary, the goal is to simply sell more of anything and everything, especially in the highly competitive and low-margin world of food sales.

Retailers don’t want plant-based meats to displace animal meats. So while grocery chains may allow some very limited shelf space in the fresh meat department for the likes of Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, animal meat is always going to be the main attraction simply because it’s a winning strategy.

Beyond Meat, (followed by Impossible Foods), made a Big Deal early on about having its products placed in the fresh meat department, not in frozen, and certainly not in what CEO Ethan Brown called the “penalty box”, meaning where other vegetarian and vegan products tend to be sold in a separate section, often in produce where only the most dedicated fans are likely to find it.

In early days, most new brands will pay retailers expensive slotting fees to obtain shelf space. But this practice is not sustainable over time, and brands must prove themselves through actual sales to remain on shelf.

(I asked both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods if they pay slotting fees and got no reply. This article in BusinessNews postulates that the two brands are likely paying slotting fees.)

Retailers are a critical gatekeeper to how products are sold and merchandised and they are not about to do anything that interferes with profits from selling meat.

Similarly, fast food chains, which both Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have been targeting, are not interested in displacing animal meat. Most restaurants are only including a vegetarian option to avoid the “veto vote”, which is what happens when one member of a group cannot eat at a given restaurant because they are vegetarian. QSR Magazine, which covers fast food, explains how to “overrule the veto vote”:

“As customers demand more complex menus, healthier options, and increased convenience, brands have to work harder to eliminate possible veto votes. It’s a common scenario nowadays to find groups of diners that vary in tastes; a vegan may dine with a meat-lover.”

That’s why restaurants tend to maintain at least one vegetarian option to ensure they get the entire group’s business. In this very typical scenario, not only is the plant-based option not being displaced, but an entire group of meat eaters is also now giving the restaurant its business, so more meat is being sold because of the plant-based option.

It’s high time for the entire sector to take a giant reality pill and stop making claims that are not substantiated by real world evidence.  

Wild Claims and Predictions

The plant-based meat sector has put a massive target on its back by making outlandish predictions since the early days of when then-start-ups Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat took to using PR, instead of waiting for actual sales, to hype themselves to investors through the media.

For example, Pat Brown, founder (and former CEO) of Impossible Foods, many times repeated his fantasy that the meat industry will be “obsolete” by 2035. For example, he claimed in 2020 that “plant-based products are going to completely replace the animal-based products in the food world within the next 15 years. That’s our mission.”

That’s some magical thinking right there.

Beyond Meat’s Ethan Brown has also had his share of bold statements. For example, in 2019 (the year of the company’s record-setting IPO) Brown claimed that his products “would simultaneously help solve heart disease, diabetes, cancer, climate change, natural resource depletion and animal welfare.”

That’s quite a list of deliverables.

Such audacious and unsubstantiated claims are then amplified by animal rights groups and other vegan nonprofits such as the Good Food Institute, which celebrated Beyond Meat’s IPO with over-the-top rhetoric about phantom meat eaters switching over to plant-based meats, without any evidence to back up their dubious claims: “Breakthroughs in food science have seen these companies winning the affections of carnivores with delicious products that are indistinguishable from real meat.”

The data simply does not support any of these claims. And hoping for “better tasting products” and “more time” is continued magical thinking. The problems related to conventional meat production are not caused by lack of great tasting or even cheaper alternatives. The causes are inherently political, and only political solutions will make a difference.

This article was originally published at Forbes.