According to innova market insights, almost 40% of Americans are consuming plant-based products.
It is not surprising that plant-based food consumers are not limited to the vegetarian and vegan segments, but rather the flexitarian segment is appropriating this category for the most part, as consumers are interested in reducing their consumption of meat and care more about the quality, origin, and impact on the environment of their food.
Plant-based category techniques, technology and ingredients have evolved, thus every aspect that exists nowadays were not even possible to imagine a few years ago, giving a spectrum of the category speed growth.
Therefore, plant-based industries have to be at the forefront of technologies, to continue to resemble alternatives but in addition to this, seeking to overcome the benefits concerning vitamins and minerals to help body health.
The ingredients’ variety used in plant-based products is broad, for example, the development of products from fungi that provides fluffiness and texture to artificial meat; substances that provide the gelling capacity; molecules produced by microbes so that the vegetable cheese behaves like real cheese; or lipids capable of reducing the amount of sugar and improving the texture and performance to make them similar in taste, appearance, smell to the real ones, providing them and even improving the benefits of animal proteins.
Therefore, plant-based industries have to be at the forefront of technologies, seeking to overcome the benefits of vitamins and minerals for the human body.
Today, the industry is closer to mimicking animal food, as the percentage of consumers who want to make that leap change keeps growing while looking for something healthy, sustainable, and not only similar or equal to animal products but improved.
Being part of the plant-based world is a great opportunity, whereas you must be able to overcome parity challenges and improving the variety of alternative products and customizing them to target the needs of final consumers.
Let’s have a great conversation about the challenges facing the plant-based category, join us on August 3rd for the webinar “Better than meat, better than dairy” where we will discuss the future of the category with speakers such as Miyoko Schimmer (Miyoko’s Creamery) and Seth Tibbott (Tofurky).
Register here: https://bit.ly/3j6H0i7