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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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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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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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.

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It’s part of a growing wave of cities around the world that have been signalling an understanding that food can’t be ignored when it comes to dealing with the climate crisis. (Livestock agriculture is responsible for 14.5% to 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.)  

The Plant Based Treaty now has 26 municipalities pledging to take the matter seriously. The treaty is non-binding, but as the Scottish capital Edinburgh stated when it signed on last year, it “represents a public acknowledgement that food production and consumption are key drivers of the climate crisis.” Other cities that have signed on include Los Angeles; Didim, Turkey; Kyotera, Uganda; Norwich, U.K., and 15 cities in India, where nearly four in 10 people identify as vegetarian, the highest rate in the world.  

The treaty is modelled after the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty – a global agreement to phase out oil and gas production. Among the Plant Based Treaty’s goals are halting deforestation attributed to animal agriculture, pushing for subsidies that incentivize a plant-based food system, and freeing up land to rewild and reforest the earth.  

“Rapidly reducing animal agriculture and shifting humanity to a plant-based diet is one of the best, easiest and fastest things we can do to save the planet,” NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus told USA Today in December. “It will also buffer food security in a time of increasing crop failures due to global heating. The world needs a Plant Based Treaty.” 

From handing out veggie hot dogs at climate conferences to lobbying politicians and universities, the group is gaining traction, garnering some 135,000 signatures to back its pledges. “Our theory of change is to create grassroots, bottom-up pressure on governments to negotiate a global treaty,” the group said in a video that outlined the gains made in 2023.  

Not all cities have followed up their public plant-based pledges with concrete actions. But Edinburgh has been a leader, unveiling earlier this year its “Plant Based Treaty action plan,” designed to shape diets through menu changes in schools, hospitals and nursing homes; carbon labels on food served at an Edinburgh university; and public education campaigns. Primary-school cafeterias already have one meat-free day a week in Edinburgh, and vegetarian or vegan options are available every day. There’s also been more emphasis on buying local fruits and vegetables, along with fostering community gardens.  

“I want to be clear that this does not seek to eliminate meat and dairy,” Edinburgh Council leader Cammy Day said in a statement earlier this year. “It’s not about removing freedom of choice, but about increasing availability and awareness of plant-based options.” 

For Amsterdam, which is aiming to see 60% of the protein in its residents’ diets plant-based by 2030, the motivation is explicit. “The consumption of more plant-based proteins is better for our health,” the motion expressing support for the treaty stated. “It is also better for our climate impact by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing land use and depletion of oceans.”   

And for those who use other barometers to measure change, there’s always McDonald’s, which last year started placing plant-based burgers above meat ones on their menus in the Netherlands. 

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On a Saturday morning last September, a line formed up Fulton Street, with many sitting patiently in folding chairs for hours in anticipation of the newest tenant: Slutty Vegan, a fast-food chain from Atlanta. It was the first location to open in the northeast, and a section of the street was closed for the occasion. Eater NY called it “sexy meatless chaos.” A jubilant crowd filed in behind a velvet rope to not only get a first taste of the menu made famous on social media, but to see the force at the centre of the enterprise, Pinky Cole.

“Slutty Vegan is no longer an Atlanta love story,” she told the crowd.

It’s been a rapid climb for the 35-year-old entrepreneur. Cole started in 2018 filling orders from a ghost kitchen, expanded to a food truck, then opened her first permanent location, all between July and October of that year. Today, she has raised US$25 million in series A investment and the business has been valued at $100 million. She also launched a foundation to seed entrepreneurs of colour, published a cookbook with Simon & Schuster (Eat Plants, B*tch) and signed a deal with Steve Madden footwear to launch a vegan sneaker.

Cole has said that her Jamaican-born father, who was sentenced to life in prison the day she was born, encouraged her while he served time to have an entrepreneurial mindset. She had grown up mostly vegetarian thanks to her Rastafarian mom and went fully vegan nine years ago, saying that “it allowed me to be at my most optimal health.” After losing her first (vegetarian) restaurant in a fire, she eventually went after her dream of providing Atlanta’s west end with late-night vegan food options beyond salad and french fries.

“I knew if I named it ‘Pinky’s Vegan,’ nobody was coming,” Cole told the Baltimore Sun. “But if I named it Slutty Vegan, people would react.”

With burgers called Ménage à Trois, Super Slut and One Night Stand and the eponymous Slutty Fries, Cole has gone all-in on a radical update of what many call “SAD” (the standard American diet). Keeping some key principles of conventional fast food (speed, uniformity, brand familiarity, taste), Cole’s take is sex-positive, cholesterol free and resolute about making meatless comfort food accessible to the Black community. In many ways, Slutty Vegan synthesizes the tectonic shifts in American life since the origins of fast food (the civil rights movement, two waves of feminism, the environmental and animal rights movements). She is putting mainstream fast food on notice.

Cole is part of a new wave of vegan fast food proprietors who are looking to shake up the burgers-and-fries industry and a Black vegan food movement that includes two other start-ups that came on the scene in 2022: L.A.-based Hart House, founded by comedian Kevin Hart, and Vegan Wangs, founded in Atlanta by N’namdi Arinze. While big fast-food chains attempt to perform the balancing act of cutting beef emissions without cutting production (keeping consumers and ranchers happy), Cole and her peers are ditching it completely. The foundation of all their strategies: make the food undeniably tasty and as close as possible to what diners are used to.

Fast food’s existential crisis

It was in San Bernardino, California, the birthplace of fast food, that brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald first applied the principles of an assembly line to a commercial kitchen, calling it the Speedee Service System. In 1954, their busy restaurant caught the attention of Ray Kroc, a serial entrepreneur who saw the potential to scale the business to new heights. Kroc eventually manoeuvred the brothers out of the McDonald’s brand and expanded it into an international fast-food juggernaut.

The American roadside soon became adorned with golden arches and red-and-white buckets. By the end of the century, about a quarter of adults in the United States visited a fast-food restaurant on any given day. This new way of eating delivered on the promises of the post-war 1950s: prosperity, abundance, convenience and reliability. Today, the United States’ big-name quick-service restaurants (QSRs) are in more than 100 countries and expanding aggressively across India and China.

But over the last two decades, “the dark side of the all-American meal,” as Eric Schlosser, the author of Fast Food Nation, put it, has turned more consumers off meat. A sobering range of concerns, including deadly foodborne diseases, the horrors of abattoirs and the rainforest-clearing, climate-heating impacts of beef, have taken the lustre off fast food. One analysis showed that the CO2 emissions of a Quarter Pounder came to three kilograms per burger (compared to 0.12 kilos for a McPlant burger). That’s the equivalent of driving a car 16 kilometres. The 50 billion burgers Americans eat each year represent 50 billion mini carbon bombs in the U.S. alone.

With growing concerns about the high climate cost of commercial beef, fast-food brands have responded largely by coalescing around the “sustainable beef” movement while making bold net-zero pledges. McDonald’s, a signatory to the UN Race to Zero and a founding member of the Global Roundtable for Sustainable Beef, has a target of net-zero emissions by 2050. It’s also committed to reducing restaurant and office greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 36% by 2030 (from a 2015 baseline) and supply chain emissions intensity by 31% over the same period. Its latest progress report noted only a 2.9% reduction of office and retail emissions and a 7.8% reduction in supply chain emissions. Restaurant Brands International, whose portfolio includes Burger King, has also pledged to go net-zero by 2050.

The second fast-food revolution – hold the beef

Plant Power Fast Food was one of the first vegan chains in North America when it opened in 2016. Co-founder and former CEO Jeff Harris, who admittedly had reservations about America’s fast-food habit but knew it wasn’t going away, wanted to be the answer to the question “Who can become the vegan McDonald’s?” Part of his strategy was to recruit talent from the fast-food establishment to manage the operational challenges of growth and to work toward price parity with McDonald’s. He also avoided the pitfalls of “crunchy granola vegetarian restaurants,” as he put it, by remaining loyal to the enduring components of fast-food menus. Today, Plant Power has 12 locations in California and Nevada.

In Canada, Odd Burger has ambitious plans to disrupt the status quo of fast food. Like Slutty Vegan, it had humble early days as a food truck. CEO and co-founder James McInnes wanted more, and in 2017, he opened Canada’s first vegan fast food restaurant, then built a manufacturing facility where the company controls much of its own supply chain and does research and development. In 2021, Odd Burger became the first vegan fast food company in the world to go public (trading on the TSX Venture as ODD). Odd Burger has at least nine locations, with more planned in Canada, and a deal with a Swiss-based investment firm to develop up to 50 locations in Florida and Europe.

McInnes, who came from the tech world, says his strategy is to compete on all fronts by developing smooth franchising operations for ease of growth, leveraging automation to achieve price parity and investing heavily in R&D to perfect taste. He also has the grassroots piece, enabling customers to become investors “so they feel they are part of something, not just buying the product.” For McInnes, the stakes are high. “McDonald’s is not going to save us anytime soon,” he says. “The world needs a fast-food chain that aligns with people’s vision and ethics.” In a small affirmation of how things can change, Odd Burger’s CFO, Ted Sehl, is a former McDonald’s Canada executive (and is now vegan).

Irrespective of what might motivate consumers to try it, vegan fast food boasts much lower emissions than the “sustainable beef” approach, which relies heavily on offsetting emissions rather than reducing them. A life-cycle assessment from the University of Michigan showed that a Beyond Burger (sold at A&W, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr. and others), as one example, produces 90% fewer GHGs compared to a beef burger. In a Good Food Institute report on the state of the plant-based-alternatives industry, Caroline Bushnell, VP of corporate engagement, said, “Alternative proteins are to meat production as renewables are to energy: the future.” But, she noted, investment is “pennies on the dollar compared with investment in electric vehicles and renewable energy.”

McDonald’s is not going to save us anytime soon. The world needs a fast-food chain that aligns with people’s vision and ethics.

—James McInnes, CEO, Odd Burger

Still, global plant-based meat sales passed US$5 billion in 2021, and these vegan chains are as growth-minded as they are planet-conscious. As Pinky Cole told The Washington Post, she believes Slutty Vegan will be “bigger than McDonald’s and Burger King and Chick-fil-A.” Next Level Burger, which operates nine locations in the U.S., announced a $20-million fundraising round in late 2022, a stepping stone to CEO Matthew de Gruyter’s goal of opening 1,000 locations. With global fast-food sales expected to increase by 50% to nearly US$1 trillion by 2028, conditions for these big ambitions are promising.

And while it’s uncertain this new wave will overtake McDonald’s and Burger King, the big chains are listening. The last few years have seen a round of flirtations with vegan options, with varying zeal. In February, McDonald’s rolled out McPlant nuggets in 1,400 German locations; however, it wrapped up a test run of the McPlant burger at 500 U.S. locations, with no firm plans of rolling it out nationally. While Burger King U.K. has set a target of a 50% meat-free menu by 2030 and has done fully plant-based pop-ups, other chains have tested plant-based menu items and have discontinued them altogether.

When this happens, however, gaps in the market are opened for disruptors like Cole and McInnes to move in and meet demand, often in vegan food deserts. Case in point: Arinze opened Vegan Wangs in Atlanta last summer when KFC took Beyond Meat chicken wings off the menu after a limited-run pilot.

If they do succeed, we may be witnessing a second fast-food revolution. In the 1950s, the assembly-line model was the big disruptor, then became the industry standard. This time, it might be Slutty Vegan and Odd Burger setting the trends. The planet would certainly benefit. And if they flip the industry on its head, Cole and McInnes deserve to be in business-school textbooks beside Ray Kroc and the other founding fathers of fast food. What they have over the big guys is not easy to recreate in a corporate board room. As Cole says, “There’s nothing new about burgers and fries … it’s the intention behind it.”

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In his 22 years as a New York City police officer, Adams had a weakness for late-night drive-throughs, burgers and chicken wings. The comfort food was a warm respite from the darkness of his job. Then came the back pain and sore feet. In 2016, as the slightly overweight borough president of Brooklyn, he woke up one morning with stomach pains and blurred vision. The diagnosis: Adams had developed type 2 diabetes. High blood sugar had damaged the blood vessels behind his eyes. The doctor said he’d be on meds for the rest of his life.

But Adams had been trained to analyze crime scenes. Yes, diabetes ran in his family. But what if the fault was his diet? Adams began exploring the potential of plant-based foods. Soon he was swapping smoked sausages for sliced avocados. His vision cleared up, and he says his diabetes went into remission.

Before long he gained the energy to help the whole city discover plant-based foods. Working with the NYC mayor’s office, the school board and health authorities, Adams has championed farmers’ markets in “food desert” communities; banned hot dogs from school lunches; campaigned for “Meatless Mondays” in hospitals, schools and prisons; and created a plant-based medicine pilot in a local hospital.

Encouraged by these successes, Adams announced he would run for mayor of NYC as a greenish blue-collar candidate. After beating former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and a long list of candidates for the Democratic nomination last July, Adams won a landslide victory over Republican talk-show host Curtis Sliwa in November. On January 1, he took office as the second Black and first vegan mayor of America’s largest city. (Although reports have surfaced that the mayor actually eats fish.)

We have to turn our economy around … with a blue-collar green-jobs initiative.

—Eric Adams, mayor of New York City

He campaigned throughout 2021 on a broad progressive agenda, ranging from accelerating the creation of affordable housing to broadening New Yorkers’ access to fresher, healthier foods. On the climate file, he issued a 17-point plan, promising to invest in green infrastructure (including waterfront wind turbines and community solar); upgrade the resiliency of the built environment, especially in flood-prone areas; focus on green transportation by building 250 kilometres of new bus lanes and 500 kilometres of bike lanes; and boost the parks department budget by 60% to ensure every resident can walk to a park in under 10 minutes. In December, New York joined a growing list of cities banning natural gas hookups in new buildings, mandating that most new developments go electric.

Naturally, Adams’s program also included promoting urban farming and decreasing the procurement of meat by city agencies in favour of more “plant-forward” options. “By choosing to eat more plant-based foods,” he says, “we can create a more sustainable and equitable food system that’s better for our planet, our city and ourselves.”

On January 31, Adams announced a team of environmental experts who will lead the agencies that will look to put his climate policies in motion.

Still, some New York voters worry that Adams’s focus on economic development – and his friendship with real estate developers – may erode his green agenda. Studying his political record, The New York Times found instances where Adams “appears to have violated city campaign-finance law by failing to report that developers and others have raised money for him.”

In his victory speech, however, Adams artfully linked health, environment and economy. “We have to turn our economy around by reaching our hand out to the business world to grow the companies we have here while attracting new emerging industries – life sciences and cybersecurity, and with a blue-collar green-jobs initiative that boosts our economy while making our city more resilient. Every job we create in corporate America must be a pathway and pipeline to the inner city.”

It’s certainly a recipe worth trying.

A version of this story appeared in the winter issue of Corporate Knights magazine.

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Early numbers suggest noteworthy increases in the purchase of plant-based foods during the pandemic. New vegan products are being brought to market almost weekly. And advancements in cultured “clean” meat may soon result in mass production.

These technological innovations mean that meat can be created for those who wish to consume it without needing to kill animals. Diverse investors, including Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Leonardo DiCaprio and leaders of major agribusinesses, recognize the opportunity to more efficiently and sustainably produce products. As a result, we will see a serious decline — if not the complete elimination — of industrial animal agriculture.

Given its significant contributions to climate change and the depth and breadth of the animal suffering it causes, the demise of factory farming will have many social benefits. New humane jobs will be created in urban areas developing food, undoubtedly. But what will happen to rural economies and to farmed animals?

Fewer but happier animals

The end of factory farming will lay the foundation for a rural resurgence and the development of more just and sustainable communities. And there will be fewer but healthier and happier animals not destined for slaughterhouses.

1. There will be a revival and reshaping of family farms.

Factory farming has led to a steep and continuous decline in the number of family farms. In contrast to the rigid corporatized and mechanized status quo, the end of industrial animal agriculture will be a boon for family farming and a meaningful chance to diversify.

Canada is already a world leader in pulse proteins that include lentils and chickpeas. There will be new demand for organic and veganic farming, more plant-based crops and the ingredients needed for the new lab-created products. Some consumers may still want meat from dead animals, so small-scale animal farming may find a market.

Boutique dining tourism that brings people onto farms and face-to-face with food cultivation could also thrive. Ideally, the well-being of the migrant workers who make so much fruit and vegetable farming possible will be taken much more seriously, too. This is sorely needed.

2. Green care will be expanded.

The term green care isn’t well known yet, but it makes sense: it refers to a range of organized and formal beneficial interactions with nature. Animal-assisted therapy, therapeutic horticulture and care farms are all examples of green care.

Farms can be re-imagined as places for children’s and adults’ learning, health care and job training. This will both provide valuable services and generate new green and humane jobs of different kinds in rural communities.

Some of these farms already exist, and normally involve out-of-pocket fees in countries like Canada. The removal of factory farms from the rural economy will create new opportunities to more deliberately and thoughtfully expand green care, regulate it and integrate it with existing education, health care and One Health programs akin to what is being done in northern Europe. This would make it more accessible, diverse and equitable.

3. Farm animals will be raised for pleasure.

Many people already work and interact with horses for leisure, sport, companionship and sheer joy. Some similar opportunities exist for farmed animals like chickens, rabbits, goats, pigs, cattle and sheep.

Sub-cultures can celebrate and showcase heritage breeds, for example, and the beauty of these animals — without the subsequent death sentence.

More farms may also become non-profit sanctuaries where animals can flourish without any expectations.

4. Some rural spaces will be rewilded.

As British writer George Monbiot and others have argued, there are many environmental reasons to allow some areas to regenerate and be repopulated with native plant and animal species.

Known as rewilding, it could allow for certain carefully planned opportunities for expanded recreation and learning in the country (hiking, birding) and some modest, strategic eco-tourism, including Indigenous-led initiatives and partnerships.

But definitively returning some land to other species is one small way to begin to make amends for the immense damage we have done to animal families, cultures and habitats.

Sustainable, vibrant spaces

In contrast to today’s large, windowless facilities that intensively confine hundreds of millions of animals indoors and litter Canada’s rural landscapes, rural regions would become more sustainable and vibrant spaces for humans and animals to thrive and co-exist.

Rather than harming rural economies, the end of factory farming is an invitation to revive reciprocal practices as well as develop compelling new possibilities rooted in interspecies respect. It is a clear opportunity to create new income sources and humane jobs for diverse people.

After factory farming, we will all be better off.

Kendra Coulter, Chancellor’s Chair for Research Excellence; Chair of the Labour Studies Department; Member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists; Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, Brock University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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With trend spotters declaring “plant-based” everything the hottest food craze of 2018, all while North Americans eat more protein than ever, the market for “alt meat” is undeniably blowing up – and a growing handful of San Francisco Bay area startups with a taste for food have been leading the charge. They’re not serving up the dry soy burgers and chick’n strips of yore. No, buzzy companies like Beyond Meat (now at a growing number of Canadian restaurants), Impossible Foods and Memphis Meats are spending millions on high tech labs staffed with food scientists, biochemists and physicists to replicate “the architecture of meat,” as Beyond Meat’s CEO Ethan Brown put it. They’re running burgers under MRIs, replicating flavour molecules, splicing genes and, in the case of cellular agriculture companies like Memphis Meat, they’re brewing actual “clean” meatballs, milk, even leather in bioreactors.

Okay, so not all of that will sit well with the whole grain set, but it’s certainly caught the meat industry’s attention.

No doubt meat has needed a radical makeover. The industry’s been slammed for being a bigger climate change driver than all the cars, trucks and planes on the planet combined (not good when global meat consumption is expected to double by 2050, thanks to growing demand from developing economies). What’s more, it requires tremendous amounts of water, land and other resources, as well as controversial antibiotics and other drugs. Not to mention, industrial meat farming has spent the better part of a decade under heavy fire from animal welfare group exposes. It’s all left a bad taste in consumers’ mouths, and, as one of the globe’s largest meat processors, Cargill, put it, “[Millennials] are driving calls to do things differently.”

The thing is, until recently, fake meat, well, it’s kind of sucked. While an April study by Mintel found that an impressive 53 per cent mostly omnivorous Canadians say that they eat plant-based meat alternatives like veggie burgers and hot dogs (with one in five Canadians eating mock meat a few times a week), only 16 per cent say those alternatives “taste as good as meat.” To win over skeptics, Mintel’s associate director of food and drink, Joel Gregoire, says the makers of meat alternatives will have to bridge the taste and texture gap between their products and actual meat.

It’s a gap that’s rapidly closing thanks to this new wave of alt meat innovations emerging south of the border. Globally, the market for plant-based meat is expected to reach $4.6 billion (U.S.) in 2018 and climb to $6.3 billion by 2023. One agro-biz financier, Rabobank, has warned animal protein companies to seize the opportunity “or they will turn into threats.” So far, the world’s largest meat companies are wisely getting in on the action. Chicken processing giant Tyson Foods has snatched up a five per cent stake in one leading “bleeding” veggie burger maker, Beyond Meat. It, along with Cargill, also secured a minority investment in Memphis Meats, the San Francisco startup growing clean beef, chicken and duck meat from animal cells. Cargill, by the way, sold its last two remaining feed yards last year, to, in part, “explore plant-based protein, fish and insects.”

Not to be outdone, Canada’s largest packaged meat provider, Maple Leaf Farms, has purchased two popular plant-based protein companies, Field Roast and Lightlife Foods, boldly noting, “This acquisition advances Maple Leaf’s vision to be the most sustainable protein company on earth, including a core strategy to diversify into plant-based protein.”

Maple Leaf Foods CEO Michael McCain has acknowledged that the food industry is “pivoting towards a crisis,” ceding that the planet’s limited resources can’t sustain current dietary trends for a growing population. McCain told the Globe’s Report on Business magazine that while consumers want to ingest more protein, “they want more choice in the proteins they consume [and] the majority of that growth in North America will come from plant-based proteins, not animal proteins.” It seems Maple Leaf is effectively pulling a Patagonia, encouraging its customers to buy less of its products – its meat products anyway. Said McCain, “We’re the only meat company in the world that is overtly expressing the objective for consumers to eat meat in moderation.”

There’s no denying investing in slaughter-free products is a smart way to bank some good PR and to warm relations with most animal welfare orgs. Though some vegans have accused their favourite plant protein brands of selling out and sleeping with enemy, Mercy for Animal’s communications director, Kenny Torrella, doesn’t see it that way. “[These meat companies] see the writing on the wall. There’s more and more awareness about the unsustainability of our high meat consumption both in Canada and the U.S. Rather than being disrupted by it, they want to be part of the disruption.”

Adds Torrella, “Ultimately, for major meat and food companies, their bottom line is making money.”

And analysts note there’s plenty more money to be made. The market for alternative meat could claim up to a third of the protein market by 2054, according to Lux Research, as more “flexitarians” and “reducetarians” moderate their meat intake. No wonder Walmart is asking its suppliers to make more meat-free fare and, Nestle, the world’s largest food and beverage company, snatched up Sweet Earth to start selling its Benevolent Bacon and Harmless Ham.

Even so, not everyone’s embracing the tectonic shifts afoot. American cattle ranchers have made it clear they have a major beef with plant-based and lab-grown meats. Back in February, the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association filed a petition with the U.S. Department of Agriculture requesting that the feds establish labelling requirements that outlaw “products not derived directly from animals raised and slaughtered” from using terms like “beef” and “meat.”

Missouri lawmakers have already introduced a meat industry-friendly bill that “prohibits misrepresenting a product as meat that is not derived from harvested production livestock or poultry.” They’re particularly threatened by lab-grown meat, which could be on shelves by the end of 2018, if vegan mayo maker Just delivers on its promise to be selling a cultured avian product, or maybe lab-grown foie gras, by then. (That would place it years ahead of cellular ag competitors like Memphis Meats, Israeli startup SuperMeat and even Finless Foods’ much-anticipated fish fillets.) Just is also vowing to be one of the first clean meat firms to culture that meat without pints upon pints of controversial fetal bovine serum, the “miracle juice” behind most lab-grown meat.

Whichever cultured meat hits Americans’ shelves first, since it would be classified as a “novel” food in Canada, it’ll need Health Canada’s approval before it’s permitted on menus here. Ditto for Impossible Food’s “bleeding” wheat and potato protein burger, which gets its deceptively meaty taste and aroma from a genetically modified yeast protein, yet to be cleared by Canadian authorities.

Which begs the question, are all these new options a tad too processed? Mintel’s survey found that 21 per cent of Canadians already think so. But it depends how you look at it, says Alison Rabschnuk, with D.C.-based Good Food Institute, Mercy for Animals’ burgeoning sister nonprofit that incubates and promotes plant-based and clean meat innovation around the globe. “If you’re chicken on a farm you’re typically pumped full of antibiotics because you’re in such crowded conditions and you’ve been genetically modified to grow to the point where…you can barely stand on your two legs. That to us is what processed food really looks like.”

Adds Rabschnuk, “It’s really up to the consumer to decide what they can bear.”

Either way, if new-wave alternatives to traditional meat are as tasty as the special sauce-laden Beyond Burger selling out at that downtown Toronto eatery, Bill Gates is likely right in calling it “the future of food.”

Homegrown: Canadian Prairies feeding pea protein craze

For years, fake meat mostly got its protein from one crop: soy. Now, a second-generation plant protein source is on the rise: yellow peas. Beyond Meat’s burgers, Sophie’s Kitchen’s vegan scallops and Good Catch’s upcoming fish-free tuna all fold pea concentrates and isolates into their recipes – as do a growing array of high protein snacks, powders and pet foods. And as the world’s largest producer of yellow peas, Canadian pea farmers are poised to cash in on the trend. Much of those peas currently get processed into protein concentrates in China, but the race is on to build capacity locally.

Last September, Avatar director and environmental advocate James Cameron showed up in rural Saskatchewan to announce that his company, Verdient Foods, is building North America’s largest pea protein plant southwest of Saskatoon. Manitoba and Alberta are getting new processing plants, too. The push for more Canadian peas couldn’t come any sooner for Prairie farmers left holding the bag ever since their top customer, India, slapped a 50 per cent tariff on yellow peas earlier this year. More silver linings: Since yellow peas aren’t genetically modified, they should stir up less controversy than alt meat’s old soy standby.

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