With its rebranding as Beyond, the company’s strategic pivot is meant to underscore its clean plant protein bonafides, and to get investors and consumers back on board, after meat-lobby advocacy and disinformation campaigns painted the sector as ultra-processed and unhealthy. Last week, rumours surfaced in the media that Beyond was heading for bankruptcy, something the company vehemently denied. “We have not filed nor are we planning to file for bankruptcy. Go Beyond,” it said in a statement on X.

Alongside the name change, the company is also launching Beyond Ground, a simpler product made with four ingredients. It has also reformulated its flagship Beyond IV burger to cut saturated fat by 60% and sodium by 20%. “Our second quarter of 2025 required a deeper and fundamental reset of our company,” Beyond CEO Ethan Brown said in a May 2025 earnings call. “The necessity of this reset, however, does not reduce or diminish our commitment of enthusiasm for the future that awaits.”

Revenue down, misinformation up

The rebrand of Beyond Meat, once lauded as the vanguard of plant‑based innovation, comes as our food consumption culture and the market shift, making the once-promising investment a tougher pea to swallow. After its eye‑watering 2019 initial public offering and subsequent rise, the company now faces a 19.6% year‑over‑year drop in revenues. Its 2025 second-quarter net revenues were US$75 million,  well below the approximately US$82 million analysts had expected. With retail demand down – refrigerated sales by 17.2% and frozen by 8.1% – and investors responding with a stock price at a multiyear low, it’s clear the category is in need of a refresh. At the same time, the company also secured US$100 million in debt financing from Unprocessed Foods, a subsidiary of the Ahimsa Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to promoting plant-based eating. This funding is part of a broader investment push by Ahimsa and its affiliates, which have recently backed companies such as Simulate, Eat Just, Blackbird Foods and Wicked Kitchen.

According to Brown, misinformation has been a major driver in consumers’ move away from the company’s offerings. “While Beyond Meat can always and will always seek to improve our products, we believe the central issue impeding our return to sustained growth is perception. Or more accurately, misperception,” he said during the call. A meat-industry-backed public relations group called the Center for Consumer Freedom has been painting plant-based meats as ultra-processed, unhealthy and even scary, focusing on long ingredient lists and unfamiliar ingredient names. This messaging was then amplified by veterinary pharmaceutical giant Elanco. The rise of the carnivore movement, along with other politically charged trends toward more seemingly “natural” proteins and ongoing meat industry advocacy and disinformation campaigns, have all helped paint plant-based meat alternatives into a difficult corner.

Thus the stage is set for a dramatic overhaul, and Beyond Meat knows it. “If we look inward, our highest priority is driving operating and margin improvements. Externally, our highest priority is on dispelling misinformation and empowering the consumer to make informed decisions around our products,” Brown said.

Daring moves

Daring product shifts are often accompanied by daring company rebranding. In this case, Beyond’s branding reset and product strategy are not just survival tactics, but calculated attempts to redefine the company’s identity. “Going forward, we intend to increasingly use Beyond as the primary brand identifier,” Brown said, adding that the emphasis will instead be on providing high-quality plant protein rather than replicating animal meat. In addition to the name shift, Beyond is also planning to release a new simplified ground-protein product made from water, fava bean protein, potato protein and psyllium husk. The company also noted via social media that it will offer three pre-seasoned varieties, including Tuscan Tomato.

“Our limited test offering of Beyond Ground on our social channels last week represents an early foray beyond beef, pork and poultry replication and has been met with considerable enthusiasm, albeit within a very narrow consumer set,” Brown said. “In the coming months, we will provide additional details on our increased use of the brand mark Beyond, which will be implemented on a rolling basis.”

In July, Fast Company reported that the new ground-protein product would be available on Beyond’s website in August. As of publication of this article, it is not yet for sale.

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance writer covering animal rights and welfare and plant-based food topics. She is also the culture and disinformation correspondent for Sentient. 

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In 2016, New York’s Elmhurst Dairy closed its doors as the last remaining fluid-milk plant in the city. The following year, under the continued leadership of second-generation owner Henry Schwartz, the company rebranded as Elmhurst 1925, shifting its focus to plant-based milks. “Established 1925. Founded 2017” is now the proud tagline of the reinvented company, which has since experienced significant growth. 

“After 92 years in business, it was time to embrace a new model and look towards the future,” Schwartz said in a press release at the time, “to lead the plant-based revolution, and create clean label products that are just as delicious and nutritionally robust as dairy milk.”

Between 2010 and 2015, the U.S. dairy-milk market experienced a notable decline, with consumers quitting milk faster than in each of the previous six decades. Public awareness of the environmental impacts and animal welfare concerns associated with traditional dairy production, as well as health risks linked to dairy consumption, helped feed a burgeoning demand for plant-based milk alternatives. This market is projected to continue on a strong upward path, with an estimated compound annual growth rate of between 7.6% to 8.9% reaching more than US$40 billion by 2033/2034. 

 The company uses a proprietary process known as HydroRelease, developed over five years by food scientist Cheryl Mitchell. HydroRelease begins with whole nuts or grains and uses water to separate the nutritional components. These components are then recombined to form a milk-like liquid that retains the original nutritional profile of the source ingredient, without the need for the gums, stabilizers or emulsifiers commonly used in other plant-based milk products on the market. The process results in products with higher protein content and cleaner labels than many of their competitors.

Additionally, all Elmhurst 1925 products are non-GMO, gluten-free, vegan, dairy-free and kosher. “We do it naturally,” Mitchell says on the company’s website, “without adding junk.”

The move has paid off. Elmhurst 1925 has since experienced strong growth and within a few years of making the transition had more than tripled the number of stores where its products are sold. In January 2025, Elmhurst recorded US$35 million in annual revenue, up from $11 million in 2023.

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After Elmhurst made the switch from cows to nuts, the company rapidly diversified its offerings, creating milks from almonds, cashews, hazelnuts and walnuts. It continued to expand its range, launching milks and creamers made from oats, coconuts and pistachios.

Not all these experiments were successful – peanut milk and hemp creamer were trialled and discontinued – but the spirit of trying new things persisted, evolving beyond beverages into plant-based foods. In 2024, it launched a new oat- and hemp-based sour cream and a plant-based “chick’n” kit that allows consumers to create their own hemp-protein-based meat alternative at home. 

Elmhurst’s successful shift from dairy milk to plant-based foods reflects a significant pivot in an evolving marketplace. As consumer appetite for plant-based alternatives continues to rise, companies that meet that demand and demonstrate authentic commitment to the environment are likely to thrive. As Schwartz has said, “It’s about transforming with the times.”

Jessica Scott-Reid is a freelance journalist covering food, farming, animal and environmental topics for Canadian media. She is also a correspondent for Sentient, covering culture and misinformation.

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How the initiatives were born

In the Netherlands, which has led the protein split initiatives, the idea was born after roundtables between food-system advocacy groups and retailers were held to discuss what the country calls a “protein transition” – a food system shift aimed at reducing dependency on meat and other proteins sourced from livestock.

Examples of animal proteins used to calculate the splits include fish, dairy, meat and eggs. Plant proteins include beans, pulses, nuts and seeds, as well as meat and dairy alternatives.

Though discussions around eating less meat are often fraught and contentious, this particular idea came about collaboratively. “It was fully voluntary [and later] the government . . . included it in their own protein monitor and commissioned the publication of the first national protein split,” says Pablo Moleman of ProVeg, a Dutch non-governmental organization that advocates for a more plant-based food system. From there, the idea spread to other European NGOs and international retail outlets, he says.

Initial results of protein split initiatives are promising

The split initiatives appear to be working, at least for one major Dutch retailer, where meat sales have fallen. The supermarket, Jumbo, is the second-largest in the Netherlands and made headlines in March by ending discounts on fresh animal meat as part of efforts to flip its current protein split sales from 60% animal/40% plant to 60% plant/40% animal by 2030.

Other major supermarkets that have publicly committed to reaching 60% plant protein sales in the Netherlands by 2030 include Aldi, Dirk, Ekoplaza and Lidl, according to a government-commissioned protein split assessment published in March this year.

The emergence of the protein split initiative in the Netherlands is not surprising. Years of intensive farming, which made the country one of the world’s leading dairy and pork exporters, have also turned the country into a nitrogen pollution hot spot.

There are also rising concerns about public health, especially heart disease, as well as concern over diseases that spread from animals to humans. Active civil-society groups have been a factor, too, raising public awareness of intensive livestock production’s negative impact on the climate, air and water, says Florian Wall of Madre Brava, an NGO that advocates for sustainable food systems.

Earlier this year, a survey of Dutch consumers found that consumers’ highest motivation for eating less meat and dairy was health, followed by animal welfare and environmental concerns.

Other efforts to reduce the effects of intensive animal protein production include a Dutch-led search for alternative proteins, like lab-grown meats, and a recent government announcement that it aims to increase the consumption of plant proteins to 50% of the national diet by 2030.

Yet another factor pushing the Netherlands ahead of other countries is size. The small country has become a global hub for food production and innovation, growing lots of food on tiny plots that are, in some ways, the exact opposite of America’s vast agricultural lands. But being so innovative cuts both ways, Moleman says: the country has one of the highest livestock densities in the world, but also the highest per capita consumption of meat alternatives in Europe.

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It’s too soon to tell what impact the end of fresh meat discounts will have on Jumbo’s protein split, but since the summer of 2022, when major Dutch retailers first set their protein split targets, company data shows that previous efforts to boost plant sales have succeeded, says Moleman, whose NGO co-authored the Dutch protein split assessment.

Jumbo’s plant-boosting initiatives include the introduction of price parity between animal meats and the supermarket’s own brand of plant alternatives. This led to a jump of 15% in alternative sales and, during the full year 2023, a drop of 3% in conventional meat sales.

At Lidl’s Dutch supermarkets, the current split is 61% animal-sourced meat versus 39% plant sales, and the company is aiming for a similar flip to selling 60% plant proteins by 2030. As part of that effort, Lidl ran a test project that placed alt-meats next to animal meats, resulting in a 7.14% increase in plant-based sales, Moleman says. It also launched a minced-beef product that uses 40% pea protein, is 33% cheaper than pure ground beef and produces 37.5% less emissions.

Although Moleman says it is too soon for concrete emissions-reduction data, lowering animal protein sales is expected to be a priority, given that about 34% of indirect, or Scope 3, grocery emissions come from meat, and 17% from dairy. The drive to reduce sales from animal-sourced meat will likely accelerate as supermarkets’ own emission targets kick in, with a recent study by Madre Brava finding that the 15 largest European supermarket chains “have a target in place or will set one by the end of this year to reduce emissions from the food they sell.”

Even partial reductions of meat and dairy sales should have major climate impacts. Another Madre Brava study found that six major food providers could cut their meat-sales emissions by 40% if they replaced half their beef, pork and chicken with legumes, tofu and plant-based meat alternatives.

Now, more European supermarkets have begun publishing their own protein split initiatives, although not all are committing to specific targets. The broader European protein split uptake, Wall says, is driven by factors that include both the emergence of flexitarian consumers and emissions concerns. Just as in the Netherlands, he says, “campaigning by animal welfare and environmental groups . . . has helped create a growing segment of conscious consumers . . . looking to cut down on meat and dairy consumption.”

Forward-looking retailers see the shift to selling fewer animal-based products as a way to meet their climate goals. As French retail giant Carrefour told Madre Brava, “a shift from animal proteins to vegetal proteins will be necessary to achieve our Scope 3 [emissions] targets.”

How the U.K. is doing with its reduction goals

In the U.K., where participating grocery chains tend to include fewer products in their protein splits, Lidl’s latest data shows it is selling about 15% plant-based protein foods and about 7% dairy alternatives. The U.K. chain Sainsbury’s annual data shows that about 15% of protein sales are plants, while the dairy split is 7% plant-based. Tesco’s latest disclosure shows a similar plant/animal split of 11% plant/89% animal-sourced and a dairy split of 7% plant versus 93% meat and other animal-sourced food.

Because of the different measurement systems, it’s difficult to compare the effectiveness of the Dutch and U.K. splits. Although there are no individual protein split targets, several U.K. retailers have signed up to a World Wildlife Fund commitment, called the WWF Basket, that includes an “ambition . . . for retailers to work towards a 50-50 split between sales of plant and animal proteins by 2030.”

Is there any hope for something similar in the United States?

To a U.S. consumer, these initiatives might sound a bit like hopeful fan fiction; one more example of the way Europe is so far ahead of the United States when it comes to combatting climate change through addressing food systems.

Wall says that although they lag behind Europe, cities like New York, with its university and healthcare company–backed Plant-Powered Carbon Challenge, are blazing a trail.

He holds out hope, too, that European protein split leaders – which own U.S. brands like Giant and Stop & Shop – might bring “inspiration from what’s happening in Europe” to their locations in the United States.

Culture wars over meat inevitably make these kinds of transitions harder, Moleman says, adding that the Netherlands has its own share of polarization around meat and livestock. But that makes it all the more important for supermarkets to be involved, he argues.

Protein split initiatives have had some challenges, Moleman says. They often work better when major retailers publicly commit together, mainly because being the one to renege in that situation would be bad publicity. Government support for plant-based goals and broader behaviour change are important too, he says, as well as improvements in the quality and availability of meat alternatives. Finally, he adds, there are some relatively painless options supermarkets can take, such as removing egg yolks from salad dressing and reducing the meat content of ready meals and adding more plants.

“It is important to realize that the extreme opposition represents a very small but vocal minority, and we should not worry too much about convincing them. There is a much larger group of people that are on the fence; they are not very keen on alternative proteins or on changing their diets, but they broadly support measures to improve planetary and human health,” he says.

At the same time, Moleman warns, plant-based advocates should avoid falling into the trap of becoming culture warriors themselves. “It is crucial that the plant-based movement comes out of its progressive bubble and reaches out to people on the fence.”

Grocery stores, then, are in a unique position to get people eating more plants. Outside of the “progressive bubble,” supermarkets can be a “crucial partner,” Moleman says, one that can “reach almost the whole of society.”

This article was originally published by Sentient. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style.

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Agriculture emits around 16 gigatons of greenhouse gases a year – about a third of the world’s total emissions. Animal farming alone is responsible for 19% of all emissions, according to a 2021 study (although estimates vary). Simply shifting diets to be less heavy on meat and dairy could reduce food-related emissions by 49%. And yet very limited progress has been made on the issue as most politicians steer clear of critiquing the carbon footprint of, well, steers.

Wading into this hot-button arena is an institution that has generally kept quiet on this front: a new paper by the World Bank lays out a roadmap for how the world can substantially reduce the emissions from food systems partly by redirecting the subsidies given to the meat and dairy industries.

“The narrative is clear: to protect our planet, we need to transform the way we produce and consume food,” writes Axel van Trotsenburg, a senior managing director for development policy and partnerships at the World Bank, in a forward to the paper.

The paper’s authors say that reallocating subsidies for meat and dairy toward lower-carbon plant-based alternatives is the most cost-effective way for high-income countries to reduce demand for meat and dairy products that are harming the planet.

Alternative burger companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have struggled to bring the price of their products down close to what consumers pay for actual meat. But such a shift in subsidies could potentially reverse that, making plant-based products the cheaper option.

“The full cost pricing of animal-sourced food to reflect its true planetary costs would make low-emission food options more competitive,” the report says.

The food system must be fixed because it is making the planet ill.

In the United States, the government provides US$38 billion a year in subsidies to meat and dairy. In 2021, the Canadian government allocated $1.7 billion in subsidies for animal agriculture.

The paper says the annual investments needed to transition food systems will also need to increase 18 times, to US$260 billion, to cut emissions in half by 2030 and keep the world on track to be net-zero by 2050. It recommends that high-income countries do more to help the food industry use renewable energy and give more financial and technical support to lower-income countries to help them adopt the same changes.

Benefits of a sustainable food system

In addition to cutting emissions, the health, economic and environmental benefits from such a transition could amount to US$4.3 trillion in 2030. The costs of the transformation are estimated to be less than half the amount the world currently spends on agricultural subsidies, the paper says.

The report also included chicken as a lower-emissions alternative to other types of meats, but climate advocates say this might send the wrong message. “I know there are different kinds of calculations between different kinds of meats,” Sini Eräjää, Greenpeace’s EU food campaigner, told Climate Home News, “[but] first and foremost, we need to change to more plant-based diets.”

The World Bank released the paper while countries party to the Paris Agreement are working to update their climate plans. But governments don’t need to wait until the plans are due in 2025 to start taking action.

“The food system must be fixed because it is making the planet ill and is a big slice of the climate change pie,” the report says. “There is action that can be taken now to make agrifood a bigger contributor to overcoming climate change and healing the planet. These actions are readily available and affordable.

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While demand for beef, chicken and pork are on the rise on the continent, Africans consumed just 9.6 kilograms of meat per capita from 2020 to 2022 compared to North Americans’ 78.6 kilos. Grains like millet and maize form the backbone of African cuisine, but they merely hint at the continent’s diverse culinary landscape. Take Nigeria, where okra, fufu (made from yam or cassava) and vibrant leafy greens like ewedu and spinach grace daily meals. In Ethiopia, teff injera, a gluten-free flatbread, pairs with lentil-based stews (wats) bursting with vegetables, while Kenyan ugali (cornmeal porridge) is served with sukuma wiki greens and indigenous fruits like tamarind and baobab. These food cultures, intricately connected with geography, climate and tradition, showcase the ingenuity and adaptability of African communities.

Deep cultural and spiritual threads are woven into the fabric of plant-based diets in many African nations. Abstaining from certain foods serves as ritual cleansing, ancestor veneration or a way to strengthen community bonds. It underscores the profound connection between food, faith and cultural identity in many African communities. Understanding these nuances is crucial as Africa’s food systems evolve. 

Parallel to this, in the United States, African American women have emerged as leading voices in the vegan movement, illustrating a profound and transformative cultural shift. A 2015 Harris Poll survey found that 8% of Black respondents were vegetarian or vegan, while that was true for just 3% of the overall population. This movement is not merely a dietary trend but a significant cultural renaissance, echoing a broader historical narrative in which African American dietary customs, shaped under the harsh conditions of slavery, resulted in soul food that originally comprised scraps from the slave owners’ tables, fried to make them more palatable. 

Today African American women are also leading a wave of plant-based start-ups and restaurants, such as Samantha Edwards’s New Breed Meats, with offerings like plant-based jerk chicken. More than just a dietary trend, Afro-veganism and African American veganism are vibrant movements that celebrate a plant-based diet’s cultural depth, ecological wisdom and culinary creativity. These movements are not just about choosing plant-based foods but about reclaiming and redefining African American food traditions.

Moreover, these dietary shifts are intertwined with broader discussions about food sovereignty, access to healthy foods in Black neighbourhoods and the environmental impact of food choices. Afro-veganism and African American veganism advocate for a more equitable food system that honours the planet and its people.

The challenges of expanding the plant-based economy in Africa – ranging from fragile infrastructure and food spoilage to deep-seated cultural preferences for animal protein – have spurred innovative solutions from local entrepreneurs. Among these, VeggieVictory stands out as a pioneering force. As Nigeria’s first vegan restaurant and plant-based food tech business, VeggieVictory is influencing the societal narrative around meat consumption, showcasing that plant-based foods can fulfill both nutritional and cultural needs.

With that in mind, the founder of VeggieVictory, Hakeem Jimo, helped spearhead ProVeg International’s expansion into Nigeria last year. As the director of ProVeg Nigeria, Jimo said he’s hoping to “transform the food system to help people transition to healthier, more climate-friendly diets.”

Nigeria isn’t the only African nation experiencing a shift. South Africa also has a ProVeg office, and The Plant Powered Show in Cape Town has quickly become one of the most successful food and lifestyle events on the South African exhibition calendar. All further evidencing the growing appetite for plant-based consumer choices. 

The people who will benefit most from this transition are those in the Global South for whom land pressures from animal agriculture have forced them to leave their land.

 

– Hakeem Jimo, director of ProVeg Nigeria

As the continent evolves, so will its plant-based story, offering unique contributions to the global conversation on food, sustainability and cultural identity. With this evolution comes a web of opportunities and challenges. Increased global demand for plant-based products could empower local farmers, create new jobs and generate economic prosperity. Yet navigating this shift equitably is paramount. 

Currently, land distribution is often skewed toward smallholder farms, which are vital for rural livelihoods and national food security. Research from the non-profit Grain and the International Land Coalition highlights how large-scale land acquisitions by corporate entities are increasingly prevalent, particularly in regions primed to expand plant-based crop production. These acquisitions often prioritize export markets and can undermine the economic and social fabric of rural communities. To counteract these potential disparities, policies and frameworks that prioritize equitable land distribution, support for smallholder farmers and sustainable agricultural practices are crucial. 

“The people who will benefit most from this transition are those in the Global South for whom land pressures from animal agriculture have forced them to leave their land,” ProVeg Nigeria’s Jimo said in a statement. The group is pushing for a national strategy that implements “a better food system by encouraging food innovation, particularly in the plant-based egg, milk and protein spaces.”

“It’s all about the numbers,” Jimo said. “Nigeria is set to become the world’s third most populous country in the next couple of decades. But time is not on our side. To truly address climate change and health epidemics, we need to shift our diets today.

Shilpa Tiwari is CEO of No Women No Spice, an organic spice company, and Isenzo Group, a sustainability strategy firm. 

Check back here as we roll out our Plant Power package this week, along with the release of the 2024 Spring issue of Corporate Knights.

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The online reaction was swift, with stats, charts, links and memes filling replies from all sides. While overwhelming scientific findings consider agriculture, particularly livestock farming, a significant source of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, conflicting measurements, marketing and misinformation have been making the facts more difficult to decipher. And it appears the meat industry has been capitalizing on all the confusion.

Ever since the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) first dropped a bombshell report on the “enormous” ecological impact of livestock farming back in 2006, the trillion-dollar global meat industry has been on the defensive. The report concluded that cars and coal plants weren’t the only ones spewing out planet-warming greenhouse gases: cattle-rearing was also a top contributor to the climate crisis. The backlash was intense, with FAO staffers recently revealing that pressure from Big Ag led to their work being censored and undermined. 

Two decades later, the meat and dairy industries have spent millions on counter-research and marketing, including creating an “MBA” for beef industry advocates. The world’s biggest meat-packers have announced net-zero targets, as the industry tries to reassure the public that despite the urgency of the climate emergency, there’s no need to cut back on our burgers and steaks. Even beef can be part of a balanced planet-friendly diet, they claim. 

In one of the latest attempts to quell consumer demand for more sustainable protein, Tyson Foods, America’s largest beef exporter, launched a “climate-friendly” product line, Brazen Beef, under the slogan “Better beef, better planet.” With the help of US$61 million in grants from the US Department of Agriculture, cattle are enrolled in Tyson Foods’ “Climate-Smart Beef Program,” according to the product website, “for emission reduction from pasture to production.” As Tyson’s VP of fresh meats marketing told Progressive Grocer magazine, “We are trying to be upbeat and different, with something that speaks definitively to [millennial and Gen Z consumers].”

And Tyson isn’t the only one banking on planet-friendly meat to keep consumers coming back to the butcher. Walmart Canada stocks 2.5 million pounds of beef patties certified by the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef. Nestlé is paying ranchers for regenerative grazing practices that get sold as carbon credits. General Mills makes a regenerative-beef protein bar that it claims offsets 80% of its greenhouse gas emissions through regenerating soil practices.”

The practice of branding meat as climate-friendly isn’t new. Many of Canadian meat giant Maple Leaf Foods’ products have carried a “carbon zero” label since 2019, when it declared itself to be the “world’s first major carbon neutral food company.” Its Greenfield Natural Meat pork products are cleverly marketed as part of a “low carb(on) diet,” including “planet-based” bacon.

But while these multinationals have made apparent efforts to reduce their environmental impact – from limiting deforestation in their tropical supply chains to retrofitting plants with LED lighting, and even restoring a few thousand acres of grasslands – there is no indication they have reduced production of the products at the heart of the climate quagmire. And as emissions from the world’s 20 largest publicly listed meat and dairy companies keep ticking upwards while global meat consumption swells, some major meat producers and retailers are playing with the metrics that measure them – and lobbying governments to help them make climate-friendly claims that have the appearance of adding up. 

Skewering the stats 

In the air-conditioned corridors of Dubai’s COP28 climate summit in December, a record-breaking number of meat and dairy delegates descended to soft-sell a new way of measuring their sector’s contribution to the climate crisis. The livestock industry is responsible for nearly a third of heat-trapping methane (the world’s second-biggest driver of climate change). To date, the UN and global governments have been measuring “global warming potential” (GWP) over a 100-year time frame using a metric called GWP100. Since methane breaks down in the atmosphere much sooner than carbon dioxide, which will warm the planet for centuries, an additional metric known as GWP* was proposed by Oxford University scientists in 2016 that factors in methane’s potent short-term impacts, taking 2016 methane emissions as baseline. With one caveat: it was never intended to be used as the sole way to measure animal emissions. But the meat and dairy industry is eating it up. 

“Imagine a house is on fire, and someone is actively pouring gas on the fire. They then pour a little less gas and want credit for doing so, despite still feeding the fire. Perhaps they claim they are now ‘fire neutral,’” writes University of California, Davis, researcher Caspar Donnison, co-author of a study published in Environmental Research Letters in December on the use of GWP* in climate-neutral livestock research. “That is more or less what some influential supporters of the livestock industry have done.”

A report by Changing Markets, a U.K.-based foundation, found that, using 2021 as the baseline, Tyson could “use GWP* to claim that a 30% reduction in emissions by 2030 means it is removing 82.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent from the atmosphere a year, yet calculations using GWP100 suggest it would still be emitting 58.5 million tonnes annually – similar to the annual emissions of Peru.”

Nusa Urbancic, director of the Changing Markets Foundation, said that using 2021 as the baseline means “GWP* will penalise poor countries that are expanding livestock production from a low base while rewarding the world’s biggest industrial livestock producers with millions of heads of cattle.” 

In the case of Tyson’s Brazen Beef, the metrics have yet to be made public. How Tyson got to the claim of “the first climate friendly beef with 10% greenhouse gas reduction” – becoming the first meat company to use the USDA-backed climate-friendly label – remains unclear. “In order to claim a 10% reduction, you need to establish scientifically a baseline that everyone agrees is the common amount that beef produces,” New York University environmental scientist Matthew Hayek explains. “There doesn’t seem to be any data that the company itself, or the government who it created that certification in conjunction with, is able to provide.” 

Corporate Knights reached out to the USDA and Brazen’s certifier, Where Food Comes From, but reps directed us back to Brazen Beef to elaborate “if they choose.” Tyson Foods did not respond. 

Either way, Brazen has critics raising the question: should a burger that still generates 90% of the emissions of a regular burger be allowed to call itself climate-friendly? 

Regenerative reset

In the face of mounting pressure to get a handle on food systems’ enormous emissions, Big Ag, Big Food and Big Meat have all been leaning into climate-smart agriculture, aka regenerative agriculture or carbon farming, to save the day. Big Meat, in particular, has a hefty amount of emissions to draw down, and they’re hoping to sequester as much as they can into the soil, particularly the rich soil under ranch grasslands. Whether it’s Burger King investing in grassland projects or Maple Leaf, Nestlé and Brazil’s JBS (the world’s biggest meat-packer) buying carbon offsets from farmers that are paid to shift to regenerative practices, bucolic images of animals grazing in the open air are being used to lull conscious consumers into believing that buying meat can be beneficial for the planet.

But quantifying just how much carbon is drawn into the soil when every company uses different definitions of “regenerative” has been messy and the subject of heated debate, with some meat advocates claiming that grass-fed beef, in particular, has little to no effect on climate change. 

Then scientists in the Netherlands, the U.K. and Sweden began looking into it. In a mic-dropping study released in November, the researchers concluded that there is no plausible way for the global livestock industry to ever sequester enough carbon to offset its planet-warming emissions. In order to counter annual methane emissions from ruminants such as cattle, the authors explain, 135 gigatonnes (billion tonnes) of carbon would have to be returned to soils – a colossal challenge, equivalent to all the carbon lost as a result of agriculture over the last 12,000 years. Their conclusion: “The claim that ruminant systems can have a negative annual GHG balance via soil C-sequestration is overly optimistic and could be misleading.” 

Don’t have a cow offset

Grasslands aside, for most meat and dairy companies, claiming carbon neutrality and getting to net-zero is still largely a matter of basic omission. To call itself carbon neutral, including its Greenfield Natural Meat line, Maple Leaf (which does not sell beef) says it “eliminated, reduced and neutralized” its Scope 1, 2 and a portion of Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions. The problem is that Scope 3 emissions (those from raw materials, feed and ingredients it buys and emissions associated with packaging and distribution) account for about 88% of Maple Leaf’s total emissions, according to the company. That includes emissions from animals and meat purchased from suppliers. “In 2023, we purchased carbon offset credits from 16 projects that neutralized approximately 7% of our Scope 3 emissions,” Maple Leaf spokespeople tell Corporate Knights – specifically for products that carry the “carbon zero” marketing label. As NYU’s Hayek points out, the Scope 3 emissions that Maple Leaf doesn’t include are “the largest slice of their supply chain.”

According to a report by the Freedom Food Alliance (FFA) released this winter, Maple Leaf isn’t alone. “Over 90% of most major meat and dairy companies’ emissions – representing Scope 3 third party supply chain emissions – are mostly omitted from their climate goals.” That includes those of meatpacking giant JBS, who, according to the report, “continues to make ‘net zero by 2040’ statements despite the National Advertising Review Board advising to discontinue this misleading claim,” along with marketing phrases like “Bacon, chicken wings and steak with net zero emissions. It’s possible.” In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, alleging that the company made deceptive statements in presentations, ads and on its website regarding its climate commitments. JBS denied the allegations.

The smoke and mirrors use of “net-zero” is just one of the tactics Big Meat uses to “deny, derail, delay, deflect and distract” meaningful discussion, as the FFA lays out. Meanwhile, the meat industry’s efforts have been focused not only on boosting their own products, but also on turning consumers away from plant-based meat alternatives. During the pandemic, brands like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods surged in popularity. Touted as more sustainable and ethical, their sales soared. But by 2022 the narrative had shifted. Skepticism grew as critiques around the “ultra-processed” ingredients in plant-based options gained traction. 

Full-page ads were taken out in major newspapers by a PR company working for the meat industry, which also ran Super Bowl spots in select markets, all to turn people off foreign-sounding ingredients in “synthetic” meat. The tactics used to dissuade consumers from turning to alternatives worked to complement the meat industry’s move to market its products as climate-friendly. 

Rhetoric and marketing play a major role in the rebranding of meat as climate-friendly, explains Jason Hannan, editor of the book Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial. “One of the most important contributions of environmental scientists and activists has been to introduce critical terms like ‘global warming,’ ‘climate change,’ ‘sustainability,’ ‘tipping points’ and ‘net-zero’ into our public vocabulary,” he says. “These terms have shaped how we assess governments and industries for their responsibility in our environmental and climate crises.” He notes that “carbon-neutral meat” has become a key term that the industry has appropriated to provide the veneer of environmental responsibility: “It’s like painting a gas station green and claiming it’s environmentally friendly.”

Over in Europe, lawmakers voted in January to outlaw the use of terms such as “climate neutral” for products that use carbon offsets, like, say, Maple Leaf’s bacon (which is not available in Europe). A few weeks later, the European Commission recommended ambitious new greenhouse gas emissions cuts. It had, however, quietly dropped a call for agriculture to curb non-CO2 emissions by at least 30%, compared to 2015, by 2040. All references to livestock farming, methane and a recommendation that Europeans eat less meat had also been taken off the table as a concession to protesting farmers. 

It’s another indication that the meat industry has turned climate change into red-meat politics.

Adria Vasil is the managing editor of Corporate Knights. 

Jessica Scott-Reid writes about animal welfare and plant-based food. 

This story is part of our Spring 2024 Plant Power package.

The post Cooking the books: The magical math of ‘climate-friendly’ meat appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Nine years after Muchnick created NotCo, a start-up launched in Chile with a mission to use technology to move the needle on sustainability, the trajectory is pointing upwards. NotCo’s line of plant-based milk, mayo, chicken, beef, ice cream and dulce de leche spread has paved the way for partnerships with Starbucks, Burger King, Papa Johns, Mars and, most recently, The Kraft Heinz Company, for which NotCo helped devise a plant-based version of its iconic mac and cheese. 

So far, NotCo has raised US$430 million and has some 500 employees spread across North and South America, almost half working in science development. “It’s an insane amount of money,” says Muchnick, NotCo’s CEO and co-founder, during a call from New York City, where the company’s corporate headquarters are now located. 

“The mission is not only to create products that appeal to the mass market that are better for you and better for the planet,” he says. “It’s to make sure that we’re holding hands with other companies that are trying to do that as well.” 

NotCo’s secret weapon has been an artificial intelligence dubbed Giuseppe, after Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian artist known for paintings of human faces using fruits and vegetables. The algorithm mines the molecular and chemical properties of more than 300,000 plants for combinations that can mimic the components of animal-based foods and replace them. Bamboo fibre and pea protein to make burgers. Peach concentrate and corn to copy chicken nuggets. And a cocktail of chickpeas, sunflower oil and lemon juice to create a spread that tastes like mayo. 

In the plant-based explosion, it’s difficult to identify what moment the movement is in. In 2022, Euromonitor, a market research company, reported that global retail sales of plant-based meat, seafood, milk, yogurt and cheese had reached $28 billion (all amounts in U.S. dollars). Impressive, but, as the Good Food Institute noted, that amount represents “a tiny fraction of the multi-trillion dollar market for conventional animal products.” While dairy replacement is booming, profits at certain companies have faltered, and plant-based meat has stumbled in North America, amid a backlash over its processed nature and price point. A growing population, and growing incomes, means that global production of meat continues to climb, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. In 2023, it was up slightly, 0.8%, from the previous year, despite more awareness of the environmental impact of massive livestock production.

The first two years in NotCo [we were] tasting shitty stuff, to be honest. And telling the algorithm why we didn’t want it.

 

– Matías Muchnick, CEO and co-founder, NotCo

Indeed, the food industry has become the common denominator for every major environmental hurdle facing humankind, Muchnick says, from deforestation to land use, water scarcity and ocean depletion. “That is a problem that we need to fix. But we cannot charge that problem to the consumer and make shitty products. We need to make incredible products.” 

Which brings us back to Giuseppe. Muchnick likes to say it has been around since “before AI was trendy.” The seed of his own interest sprouted in 2010, as a keen finance intern trying to harness the power of AI to create a better-performing mutual fund. Soon after, he launched his first start-up: a Latin American version of the Fitbit, which flopped. But conversations with friends brought him to a broader topic, that had to do with existential survival. The food system, he noted, was broken. Studying at University of California, Berkeley, at a time when capital was rushing over to Crispr, the gene-editing technology, he saw the potential for a food system overhaul. 

“Why are we investing more in the aspirin than not getting the headaches?” he asks. He needed partners to disrupt the system, and he found that in Karim Pichara, who along with Pablo Zamora co-founded NotCo. Pichara is an astrophysicist who had developed algorithms for astronomers to understand the composition of a star. They decided to look at food in a similar way. “If we have an understanding of the complexity of food, then we will have the tools to extract value from it,” Muchnick says. 

The process involved trolling terabytes of data and overlapping enough information so that Giuseppe could understand what food actually is. Then came the human variable. It’s one thing to be able to identify that blue cheese and cacao beans share 73 molecules of flavour, Muchnick says; it’s another for the machine to understand that despite those similarities, the products have nothing to do with each other. There’s also a great deal of trial and error. Adding a whole strawberry to a mock chicken recipe might jeopardize the texture and colour of it, but extracting a particular molecule could be of use. 

“The first two years in NotCo [we were] tasting shitty stuff, to be honest,” Muchnick says. “And telling the algorithm why we didn’t want it.” Once they had the secret sauce, they started rolling out their own line of products in 2017 to prove to the market that what they were proposing could work. Their first product, NotMayo, secured 8% of the market share in Chile’s largest grocer in its first eight months, Muchnick says. Now, their NotBurger holds 6% of the total market share of burgers in Argentina, one of the world’s biggest beef-eating nations, and in Chile, he says. 

Mercedes Gómez, a photographer and artist in Buenos Aires, has noticed that change. The 32-year-old has not eaten meat in 13 years. She credits NotCo for creating branding that appeals to a broad audience and paving the way for other plant-based brands in Argentina, and earning them real estate in grocery stores. “They really opened the door,” says Gómez, who shies away from the NotBurger, because “it tastes too much like beef,” but is a fan of NotChicken and always has NotCream Cheese in her fridge. “I know a lot of people that aren’t going to give up beef, but they’re opting for more plant-based [foods] thanks to [NotCo],” she says – in some cases for other reasons.

That’s what prompted 29-year-old Emilia Mac Donagh, an anthropologist who lives in La Plata, southeast of Buenos Aires, to give NotCo products a try. The meat-eater needed to eat less sodium for health reasons and found that NotCo products allowed her to do that. She started with NotMayo, which she says tastes as good as any other mayo. “They allowed me to eat things that I had stopped eating,” she says.

This kind of reaction has translated into financial votes of confidence. In 2021, NotCo secured a financing round of $235 million that pushed its valuation to $1.5 billion, securing “unicorn” status. It recently opened a research and development centre in San Francisco in partnership with Kraft Heinz.

NotCo’s success has also made it a magnet of another kind. In Chile, the country where it launched, it has been the subject of a legal battle with dairy farmers who alleged that the company violated competition rules by using the word “milk” in its products. The first court ruled in favour of the farmers. An appeals court ruled in favour of NotCo. This comes amid a wave of similar disputes. Oatly, the Swedish dairy-alternative start-up, recently won a four-year court fight to be able to use the term “post milk generation” in its advertising in the U.K., while in France, the battle still brews over using terms like “steak,” “fillet” and “ham” to describe plant-based products. Last year, the country’s top court rejected the idea that there is confusion between the terms “steak” and “veggie steak,” but the French government has since issued a decree banning the use of 21 meat-related terms for plant products manufactured in France. Similar bans exist in Italy and several U.S. states. In the case of NotCo, the company armed its defence with a market research study that found that 99% of consumers understood that NotMilk is, well, not dairy milk. The decision has been appealed and is now heading up to Chile’s Supreme Court.

It’s not the only challenge that the plant-based sector is facing. The media, it can be said, is quick to declare the arrival – and the death – of new trends. Such is the case with some segments of the plant-based market, particularly plant burgers, which are seeing a slump after an explosive start a few years ago. The Good Food Institute’s 2022 State of the Industry Report, the most recent available, recorded a 7% increase in overall plant-based revenue in the United States from the previous year, but unit growth was down 8% for plant-based meat.

If we have an understanding of the complexity of food, then we will have the tools to extract value from it.

 

– Matías Muchnick, CEO and co-founder, NotCo

Muchnick says it’s important to be specific. The sector is growing in Latin America and Europe. In North America, dairy substitutes are also growing.

For NotCo, Muchnick says the key to growth is in collaborations. And he and his team have demonstrated an ability to build them. They partnered with Starbucks in Argentina, for example, to create a version of NotMilk that would foam in cold drinks. Burger King in Chile wanted a NotBurger that had the taste profile of a Whopper. 

In a November press release that launched its plant-based mac and cheese, Kraft Heinz noted the challenges facing the plant-based sector as a whole, and mac and cheese in particular. “Less than thirty percent of plant-based mac & cheese buyers are repeating purchase as taste and texture remain their largest pain points,” the release said. That’s why the fifth-largest food and drink company in the world says it reached out to NotCo: it has a “proven track record in creating mouthwatering plant-based foods.” 

In other words, NotCo has become the “garage of innovation,” Muchnick says, and is already fielding requests to apply its algorithm to other sectors, including personal care products and pet food. 

“We are beyond food, which is pretty crazy,” he says. 

Natalie Alcoba is Buenos Aires-based writer and associate editor with Corporate Knights.

Check back here as we roll out our Plant Power package this week, along with the release of the 2024 Spring issue of Corporate Knights.

The post How AI is helping NotCo cook up a plant-based takeover of Big Food appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In the early days of the pandemic, when pet adoptions were on the rise, he started fostering a cat. That cat quickly became two cats, and then he added another two cats. Eventually, he was fostering eight cats in his apartment. 

“And then I thought, ‘Wow, I can’t keep doubling this or this is going to be a problem. But how do I help more?’” says Bryson, who founded Unata, a software platform that connects grocers and consumers and was acquired by Instacart in 2018. “I think I just have this addiction to wanting to scale up and do more and try to have a larger impact than what I did yesterday.” 

That need to do more led him to launch Toronto-based New School Foods – an alternative seafood start-up that’s looking to offer whole plant-based fillets of salmon. The potential for alternative seafood is huge, as scientists say that wild-catch and aquaculture won’t be able to meet the world’s growing appetite for seafood. Global demand for fish products is expected to grow by 14% by 2030 compared to 2020 levels, while the United Nations says that 90% of fish stocks are being harvested at unsustainable levels or are maxed out. Wild salmon stocks alone are on the verge of collapse in the United Kingdom, British Columbia and California, and fish farms are rife with antibiotics and disease.

Bryson’s company, which plans to launch its product in restaurants this summer, is a smallish fish in a growing pond. Alternative seafood – which includes fish and mollusks that are plant-based, lab-grown and fermented – is a nascent industry that could make up a significant chunk of future seafood demand. But key for these start-ups will be avoiding some of the pitfalls experienced by plant-based meat companies in recent years. Since the original hype around their launch, plant-based burger companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods have seen their stocks plummet and sales plateau. And the (plant-based) bleeding hasn’t really stopped, as last year unit sales dropped 8%. 

Alternative seafood gets us beyond the burger and the nugget – and into future food 2.0.

 

– Marissa Bronfman, founder and executive director of Future Ocean Foods

Bryson and other innovators are cautiously optimistic that things will be different for them and that it’s only a matter of time before a tidal wave of plant-based seafood washes up on our shores. 

“Alternative seafood gets us beyond the burger and the nugget – and into future food 2.0,” says vegan impact investor Marissa Bronfman, the founder and executive director of Future Ocean Foods, an alternative seafood association launched last fall and headquartered in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with, to date, 36 companies in 14 countries. “It also gets us outside of North America. More than three billion people around the world look to seafood as their primary protein source. The potential is enormous.”

A plant-based pioneer goes fishy

New innovators are entering the alternative fish space, but it’s also attracting familiar faces from the plant-based protein world. In 2020, Yves Potvin, of Yves Veggie Cuisine fame, started a Richmond, B.C.–based alternative seafood venture called Konscious Foods that makes plant-based sushi and poke bowls. Konscious Foods closed a $26-million seed funding round last year, attracting investments from Protein Industries Canada (an industry-led not-for-profit that invests in Canadian plant-protein start-ups) and now has products in the freezer aisles of 4,500 retailers across North America, including Whole Foods. 

Potvin has said that to grow and scale, plant-based products must be nutritious, affordable, convenient and taste good. With Konscious Foods, he’s managed to figure out how he can make a decent product and keep the price comparable to traditional sushi. “One of the biggest challenges in [the] plant-based [industry] is that the products are often 20 to 50% more expensive, so not only do consumers have to sacrifice on taste and the texture, they have to spend more money,” Potvin told AgFunderNews. “We are the first in the marketplace at the same price [as conventional seafood products]. So we’re ticking all the right boxes.”

The taste–price equation

Surveys show that taste and price have been big barriers to selling consumers on plant-based products. While the taste of these products has come a long way in recent years, burgers from companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods are still far more expensive than beef burgers. Observers say it’s only a matter of time before these prices come down as more people buy the products, but investors are growing anxious. 

Plant-based seafood might have an advantage on its price point over the alternative meats as fish typically is more expensive than many meats. A number of the start-ups in this area are also making products that mimic higher-quality cuts and types of fish and seafood. “How do we compete on price? We compete on price by going after these ultra-premium fish and cuts and looking to see if we can get there first before extending the technology down further along the price curve,” says Casey Silver, a senior analyst at McKinsey & Company who co-authored a recent report that outlined some of alternative seafood’s challenges and advantages. 

Some observers question whether this focus on high-end cuts, however, may pose problems for the scalability of the industry and its ability to fill the growing demand for cheaper seafood in the broader market. But Silver says this is simply a way to prove the technology before moving on to other cuts and types of fish. “This is a way to get everything as far down that price curve as we can before needing to go up against the tilapias and white fishes, which isn’t to say other companies aren’t doing that, because they are.”

Alternative seafood also has a much wider range of products it can emulate than the land animals that are typically farmed. This is both an opportunity and a challenge, as an alternative for each individual type of seafood with its own taste profile will need to be carefully crafted and fine-tuned so that consumers accept it. 

New School Foods’ alternative salmon fillet, which was developed in partnership with researchers at Toronto Metropolitan University, will make its debut at restaurants before hitting the retail market. Bryson says he wants to win over chefs before consumers. “I think we need to earn the . . . respect of chefs before we can convince people we are worthy of being on their dinner plate,” he says.

But is it healthy?

While studies have shown that plant-based burgers are healthier than beef burgers, some consumers have been scared away by the long ingredient lists on their labels and the idea that plant-based prepared foods are “ultra-processed.” Advocates concede that, no, plant-based burgers are not health products, but they are, for the most part, healthier than meat. 

Bryson says the salmon fillet product that New School Foods is making will be inherently healthier than a traditional piece of salmon because of the mercury, microplastics and other contaminants present in real fish. New School Foods also plans to include some of the nutritional benefits, such as omega-3 fats, that are in real salmon. 

Swimming upstream

Investments in the alternative seafood sector grew 92% from 2021 to 2022, according to Future Ocean Foods. Retail sales have grown steadily in North America, and some big food companies, such as Cargill and Nestlé, have dipped their toes into the space. Despite the growth, investors have been cautious about putting their money into the alternative seafood space after what happened with plant-based meat. But there is optimism that it’s only a matter of time before alternative proteins flourish. From 2021 to 2022, alternative seafood saw a 42% growth in retail sales in the United States.      

It remains to be seen whether the alternative seafood sector, and the broader plant-based protein industry, will come to dominate the market. But if the world is going to feed 10 billion people by 2050, and do so sustainably, there might be no other option.

“This is a huge task, requiring enormous amounts of public and private capital,” Bronfman says. “We have brilliant people all over the world creating meaningful solutions to problems, but they need more support.”

Alex Robinson is deputy editor at Corporate Knights. 

Check back here as we roll out our Plant Power package this week, along with the release of the 2024 Spring issue of Corporate Knights.

The post Will alternative seafood sink or swim? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Scientists have been sounding the alarm that we need to do more and quickly to help curtail global warming’s catastrophic impacts, pointing out that coal, cars and cattle are top greenhouse gas emitters. The good news is that growth in clean energy was twice that of fossil fuels from 2019 to 2023, and global sales of electric cars surged 31% in 2023 from the year prior. But the world keeps eating more meat, with forecasts estimating that we’ll be consuming 50% more by 2050. 

And that’s a problem that wealthy nations in particular need to get a handle on, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. A 2020 study conducted by the University of Michigan found that if Americans cut their meat consumption in half by 2030 and shifted to more plant-based alternatives, the country would cut the equivalent annual emissions to taking 47.5 million cars off the road.

But even climate-concerned politicians tend to stay away from the issue with a 10-foot pole. It’s a touchy topic. People get defensive when it’s suggested that we change the way we eat – especially when meat industry groups are stoking the flames with disinformation campaigns. Australian academics surveyed 150 news articles in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand and found that “industry frequently framed [red meat] reduction as part of a ‘Vegan Agenda’” and “an infringement on personal choice and traditional values.” The researchers concluded that all that polarization “may diminish the extent to which political leaders will prioritise this in policy agendas.”

The meat and dairy industries are clearly sweating bullets. They’re lobbying for bans on the use of terms such as “milk” and “steak” on plant-based products (even cauliflower steaks are off the table in Italy, along with lab-grown prosciutto). They’re also funding ads that portray plant-based foods as unhealthy, unnatural and ultra-processed, as a new report from Freedom Food Alliance chronicles. And it’s working. In Europe, a 17-country survey released in February found that more than half of respondents are avoiding plant-based meat because it’s “ultra-processed.” 

The media has been quick to announce that the plant-based bubble has burst, that plant-based meat has “lost its sizzle.” Of course, the media loves to declare things “dead.” And yes, Silicon Valley equally loves a good overhyped product, perhaps overestimating just how much people would spend for two plant-based burgers (hint: $8 for two Beyond Meat patties proved to be too much for many consumers).

Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, both of which have taken a hit on the nose with investors over the last couple of years, have been taking notes. In February, Beyond Meat unveiled a new and improved burger now made with avocado oil, 20% less sodium and protein from brown rice and red lentils. “The new products . . . were designed to meet the standard of the national health organizations [including the American Heart Association’s Heart-Check program] to create a product that delivers the taste satisfaction and utility of 80/20 beef – yet is demonstrably healthier,” said Beyond Meat’s founder and CEO, Ethan Brown.

Some governments are taking notice. Last year, Denmark launched the world’s first national plant-based action plan that will include subsidy schemes and advice for plant-based start-ups. Germany announced US$41 million in funding for alternative proteins. Twenty-six cities, including Amsterdam, Los Angeles and Edinburgh, have endorsed a Plant Based Treaty. And over the last five years, the Government of Canada has invested more than $300 million into Protein Industries Canada, an industry-led, not-for-profit “innovation cluster” focused on growing Canada into a plant-based protein powerhouse while reducing our greenhouse gas emissions associated with food.

As a recent UN report on alternatives to conventional meat noted, livestock production is fuelling Earth’s triple environmental crisis: the climate emergency, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste. But there is an enormous economic opportunity underfoot. Already, plant-based foods, including legumes and tofu, provide 57% of protein that humans consume globally, according to the UN. Sales of alternative meat, seafood and dairy products reached US$28 billion globally in 2022. Entrepreneurs and researchers around the world are using technology – from AI to 3D-printed plant-based salmon fillets – to innovate the future of food. 

Canada is a world leader in growing some of the legumes used to make plant-based proteins and is home to the world’s largest pea protein plant, in Manitoba, with new facilities in the works. And we’re adding that protein to bread, pasta – you name it. A 2024 report by the Smart Prosperity Institute says that the plant-based meat sector could contribute $25 billion to the country’s gross domestic product over the next decade. 

If you prefer to keep things simple, Canada is a leading grower of lentils and chickpeas, too.

While the plant-based sector faces challenges, industry observers at Euromonitor say that “the current slowdown in growth does not signify the death of this category.” Instead, they describe this moment as the “end of the beginning” as market expectations recalibrate to match reality. 

As the number of meat reducers, or “reducatarians,” continues to grow globally, will we finally eat our veggies to save the planet? 

This story is part of our Spring 2024 Plant Power package.

The post We need to talk about meat appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Food accounts for 20% of the Big Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions – parking it in third spot, greenhouse gas–wise, behind the city’s traffic jams and drafty old buildings. “But all food is not created equal,” said Mayor Eric Adams in a press release. “The vast majority of food that is contributing to the emissions crisis lies in meat and dairy products.”

Under former mayor Bill de Blasio, NYC committed to cutting the city government’s food-related emissions by 25% by 2030. This April, Adams raised that target to 33%. In doing so, he said, “We have to talk about beef” – a comment that The New York Times called “an unusually frank admission from a national political leader that Americans will have to eat differently if they want to rein in climate change.”

The beef industry tops environmentalists’ hit lists due to its high carbon footprint, links to deforestation and, of course, the everyday methane from the back end of cattle.

As Adams declared war on both carbon and beef, the (mostly) vegan mayor also announced that New York will start tracking the carbon footprint of household food consumption. Adams is working with C40 Cities, a network of 96 cities collaborating on urgent climate action. Some 14 cities, including London, Paris, Montreal and Toronto, are already tracking the footprint of food, with the shared goal of producing a “planetary health diet” for all by 2030.

New York schools already serve vegan meals on “Plant Powered Fridays” (cheese sandwiches are available on request), and hospital patients now receive plant-centric foods as the default option at the city’s public hospitals. The city is urging the private, institutional and non-profit sectors to follow its lead through a “voluntary challenge” to reduce their food-based emissions by 25% by 2030.

Naturally, Adams’s announcement bent some people out of shape. “My personal purchasing choices are NOT up for approval by politicians, banks or anyone else,” said one anonymous correspondent at NYC news site Gothamist. “Pay with cash!”

But the plant-based cause is getting support from at least one everyday hero. Actor Robert Downey Jr., who plays Iron Man/Tony Stark in Marvel movies, is a vegan on a mission to find a no-compromise beef substitute. “If plant-based foods are going to make a real impact on sustainability, we need an approach that’s both delicious and nutritious,” he said in a statement last year. His philanthropic and venture capital arm, the California-based FootPrint Coalition, supports promising climate solutions, from building software to green hydrogen. Recently it invested in Chunk Foods, an Israeli start-up that ferments soy, wheat and micro-organisms to produce a 25-gram portion that has the colour, texture and apparently the taste of real steak. It’s currently being piloted in New York restaurants.

The three-year-old company is using its recent US$15-million capital raise to build a production plant capable of making “millions of steaks per year,” says Chunk founder Amos Golan. But his “steaks” have already been tested in New York City restaurants. “There was unanimous praise,” claims a FootPrint executive. “The product hits all the marks.”

The post Will the city famous for its striploin give up its steak? appeared first on Corporate Knights.