Disinterested public, cold distribution, unprofitable companies. Today, when the so-called “plant-based meat” is taking the stage, many do not even remember it anymore. But until a few years ago, it was the producers of “plant-based meat”, the plant-based alternative products to meat, who claimed to want to revolutionise the food market. A claim that, bit by bit, is failing poorly. And so, while the pioneering companies go into receivership, market surveys say that the room for manoeuvre for plant-based meat is simply not there.
The market verdict
The news reports signs of crisis all round. In the UK, for example, VBites, which has been producing vegan alternatives to animal protein since 1993, has just announced that it has gone into receivership. The company, whose crisis comes six months after that of Meatless Farm, can at least attribute its troubles to Brexit, which has undermined its foreign trade links.
But it is the whole industry that has slipped into a very narrow tunnel. This is revealed by the latest market survey by the Mintec research centre: companies in the sector, far from being profitable, are lowering their prices in order to empty their warehouses, while food retail is reducing its distribution space in favour of other types of product (such as meat-vegetable hybrids). “Never believed that vegetable products were better for health or the future”, comments expert Julian Mellentin on Twitter.
According to him, the plant-based meat bubble was “a bad investment on an epic scale, the result of a decade of cheap money raised by tech and finance companies that didn’t understand the consumer or food culture and, what’s more, were impervious to correct information”.
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