Leading meat substitute producers, Quorn, announced yesterday the investment of £7 million in a new Global Innovation Centre, stating their intentions of creating “A high tech British powerhouse and maintaining Quorn’s innovation leadership in the meat-free industry. In a press release dated 23 July, their motivation is explained as a need to stay ahead of fast-moving trends and developments: “Around the world the meat-free category is growing rapidly, typically between 10% and 20%, and even a developed market like the UK is up 15%.”
Quorn is a meat substitute product based in the UK, and available for consumer purchase in 19 countries primarily around Europe. Their vision statement says, “Quorn Foods is an international food business with a vision to create better protein for you and the planet, addressing global health and sustainability issues.” This new expansion is part of Quorn’s continued global growth of 12% in 2018 and will see a state of the art facility at their headquarters in the North East of England. Work on this new facility will begin this summer and it plans to develop core protein fermentation and innovations to create new products to keep up with market trends such as “bleeding” meat substitutes.
The company created more than 100 jobs in 2017 and have published like-for-like sales totalling £112m for the first half of 2018, up 12% on the same period in 2017. Chief Executive Kevin Brennan yesterday made a bold statement about his outlook for the future: “With category momentum we are confident we can become a $1bn business in under 10 years.”
