This website uses cookies primarily for visitor analytics. Certain pages will ask you to fill in contact details to receive additional information. On these pages you have the option of having the site log your details for future visits. Indicating you want the site to remember your details will place a cookie on your device. To view our full cookie policy, please click here. You can also view it at any time by going to our Contact Us page.

Close

The future of plant-based meat explored

03 July 2021

IDTechEx has recently released Plant-Based Meat 2021-2031, a market research and business intelligence report exploring the technical and industry factors that are shaping the emerging plant-based meat market. 

Sales of plant-based meat have grown sharply in recent years, buoyed by the Covid-19 pandemic disrupting meat supply chains and putting increasing scrutiny on the conventional meat industry. 

Investments into the plant-based meat industry have also risen, with the industry raising over $1.4 billion in 2020. There is optimism that these trends will continue into 2021 and beyond, with plant-based meat looking increasingly set to disrupt the $1 trillion global meat industry.
 
Until recently, Plant-based meat has primarily been targeted at vegetarians. The most recent generation of plant-based meat products, such as the Beyond Burger and Impossible Burger have targeted the 95% of consumers who eat meat but are looking to cut down consumption for health or environmental reasons. These consumers are less likely to sacrifice product quality and, as such, plant-based meat companies have increasingly invested into product R&D to create new plant-based meat products that are almost exact replicas of the real thing.
 
R&D has been accelerated by advances in production technology, such as the twin-screw extrusion technology pioneered by Gardein in the early 2000s, and companies are increasingly looking to emerging technologies to help develop the next generation of plant-based products. Chilean start-up NotCo is employing AI technology to find optimized combinations of ingredients, Israeli company Redefine Meat is using 3D printing technology to create structured plant-based meat products like steaks, and California-based Eat Just used high-throughput screening techniques to find combinations of plant proteins that suit different foods, such as the company’s mung bean-based egg substitute.
 
The industry does still face challenges. Plant-based meat products generally remain more expensive than their meat counterparts, with cost reduction being a priority for the industry. Further work into optimising product quality is also necessary, particularly regarding plant-based analogs to structured meat products such as steaks and chicken breasts. Finally, the industry has faced resistance from the conventional meat industry, which has pushed regulators to place restrictions on the labelling of plant-based meat products, such as the recently proposed EU ban which threatened to ban producers of vegan dairy analogs from using milk cartons and yogurt pots to package their products, before it was dropped in May 2021.
 
The IDTechEx report also discusses the consumer and regulatory factors involved in shaping the plant-based meat market, as well as the key players in the industry and the investments raised. Finally, the report contains a ten-year region-based market forecast for the future of the plant-based meat industry, predicting that the global plant-based meat market will be worth over $29 billion by 2031.

For more information on this report, please visit www.IDTechEx.com/PlantMeat 


Contact Details and Archive...

Print this page | E-mail this page