Every week, Plant-based Business Expert Elysabeth Alfano breaks down the headlines with her review and analysis in the Plantbased Business Minute. Elysabeth is the founder of Plant Powered Consulting, the host of the Plantbased Business Hour and the Consulting Managing Director, vegconomist, North America. She doesn’t use a teleprompter.
Here is the Plantbased Business Minute for the week ending February 12, 2021.
It’s like milk; but made for humans. Like it, love it, hate it, Oatly has knocked it out of the park. They spent about $5.5 Million on a Super Bowl ad which was basically a re-run of a 2014 YouTube ad which was banned in Sweden due to the pressure from the Swedish dairy lobby. They came out with their CEO, Toni Petersson, in a field singing, “Wow, no cow. No, no, no.”
It may or may not be for you but who the heck cares. All of social media is talking about it as is USA Today, all the way down to Fox Business News and mainstream media. Plus, the brand followed up with t-shirts for haters that say, “I totally hated that Oatly commercial.” Even the haters are wearing their brand.
My business bottom line: marketing is not about being like everybody else. Marketing is about knowing who you are and being great at it. Oatly does it again.
First animal-free ribeye steak
Guess who else does it again? Aleph Farms is back in the news. This time for working with the Israeli Institute of Technology, Technion. Together they are building (printing) 3D, thick, juicy, rib-eye steaks. That’s right, they’re taking cells from animals and not the animals themselves to actually build a thick steak.
My business bottom line here is – do not look for cellular agriculture to be some sort of freaky thing in the future. It is here and now. Look for it in I’ll say the next ten years to find actual meaningful distribution of same. If you can invest, the time is now.
VFC arrives to disrupt fast food
It’s a very exciting time for that and for vegan fried chicken. The sales director for VFC, which only launched about eight weeks ago, Stewart McGuckin explained that, as a former brand manager of Nestle Confectionary, he would usually go into sales meetings and have to pitch. Now he doesn’t even have to do that. He has walked into sales meetings recently with two of the largest U.K retailers and they didn’t even want to hear the sales pitch. They just said, “When can you get this to us?”
My business bottom line there is: oh, burgers are so 2019. Look for plant-based steak, ribs, bacon, seafood, and chicken to come to market.
As a new section to the Plantbased Business Minute, here is my food for thought for this week: If all of plant-based business is soaring, why is meat consumption still growing?
Come find me on LinkedIn so that we can have that conversation.
This has been the Plantbased Business minute. Wow, no cow. No, no, no. I can’t stop singing it…
If you would like a deeper dive into plant-based business, please subscribe to the Plantbased Business Hour wherever you get your podcasts. And if you are a small plant-based business or a large meat and dairy company and you are looking to navigate the plant-based landscape, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. My team and I at Plant Powered Consulting are here to help you with media, marketing, communications strategy and so much more.
Elysabeth Alfano is the founder of Plant Powered Consulting, host of the Plantbased Business Hour and the Consulting Managing Director, vegconomist, North America.
