State of Sustainability Podcast

Solo Episode: Plant-Based Proteins — What Went Wrong and Where the Opportunity Still Lives

SAIF: Welcome back to another episode of the State of Sustainability.

Today we're talking about plant-based proteins. This was originally conceived as an episode on alternative proteins, but that category turned out to be far too broad — it includes everything from insect protein to lab-grown meat, and I wanted to do this particular space some justice. So we're narrowing to plant-based proteins specifically.

We're also going to use this episode as a lens for dissecting a sustainability technology innovation more broadly. Plant-based protein is an engineered product. It is technology. And the arc of its development — why it made sense, where things went wrong, and where the real opportunities still live — is a story worth understanding carefully.

The Hype Cycle

Plant-based proteins exploded onto the scene roughly seven to nine years ago. The two juggernauts that emerged were Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat. Both went through a very familiar tech boom cycle: they achieved liftoff from a crowded field of competitors, attracted extraordinary valuations, raised billions of dollars on public and private markets, and channelled that capital into product engineering and brand building.

Then the mood changed. Revenue began declining. Market share stagnated or contracted, particularly in North America. Share prices collapsed. Nasdaq delisting threats loomed. What had briefly looked like a transformative category now looked, to the casual observer, more or less dead.

This happened to other sustainability-adjacent brands at around the same time. Allbirds is another example — now apparently repositioning as an AI company, which is a story for another day. The pattern is consistent: a burst of capital and enthusiasm, followed by a sharp correction.

Why It Got So Hard to Win

The territory problem. Both Impossible and Beyond defined their competitive territory as the mainstream consumer meat market. They wanted to be in restaurants in place of the meat patty, and on grocery shelves in place of the frozen burger or sausage. They were not trying to win a premium niche. They were going after the everyday source of protein for the average meat eater.

At some point, they also started talking about capturing non-meat eaters. And here is where the logic started to fray. I was not eating meat during their hype cycle, and I still don't. I remember a conversation with a friend about exactly this: here is a product whose core value proposition is that it tastes and feels like meat. But we had already reconciled with not eating things that taste like meat. We had moved on. We were eating differently, valuing different things, glad to be away from ultra-processed foods. A product whose headline feature is meat-like taste and texture was not speaking to us at all. That whole customer segment, the existing non-meat eater, largely failed to materialise for these companies.

That left the meat eaters — and capturing them required winning on four dimensions simultaneously.

Taste. The product needed to be convincingly close to meat. My favourite burger restaurant when I ate meat used to be Patty & Bun. I tried their plant-based version out of curiosity, and it genuinely tasted much like I remembered the meat version. On taste and texture, I think the industry largely solved the engineering problem. The money that flowed in helped.

Price. This too improved dramatically. Data suggests plant-based meat is now cheaper in the UK than comparable conventional meat products at certain quality tiers. The economics followed the engineering, as you would expect with scale.

Brand. This is where the battle became unwinnable. Meat and dairy carry some of the most powerful product positioning in the world — not the product of years of marketing, but of millennia. The associations around meat: strength, sustenance, decadence, reward. The associations around dairy: growth, health, nourishment for children. Steve Jobs once pointed to the "Got Milk?" campaign as an example of brilliant brand thinking. It doesn't even need to show the product — just its absence. You cannot undo that kind of cultural embedding in two or three years with Instagram advertising. Getting parents to believe that a plant-based alternative is better for their child than what they grew up eating is not a problem that resolves on a tech-company timeline.

The trough of disillusionment. Beyond the brand problem, this category followed the classic technology hype cycle. Overenthusiastic adoption, overinvestment, overshoot of what the market was actually ready for, then a sharp correction. Revenue declined as the artificial prop of brand spending was withdrawn. Novelty-driven adoption faded. Share prices fell, and the knock-on effects compounded. Meatless Farm in the UK went into administration. The whole industry stepped back.

Where the Opportunities Actually Are

The category is not finished. But the players who win from here will look quite different from those who defined the first wave. Three areas stand out.

Sell to people already eating plant-based. If you are trying to disrupt entrenched meat branding, you are fighting uphill indefinitely. But if your customer is already a vegetarian or someone already transitioning to plant-based eating, you do not need to make the branding case at all. You just need to compete on quality and cost within the category they already inhabit.

This also means rethinking the product format. A plant-based burger or steak is explicitly designed to replicate meat — which means the customer has to have known the original to want the substitute. That is a strange positioning that alienates both confirmed plant eaters and unconvinced meat eaters simultaneously. Compare that to tempeh or seitan, which are growing steadily in UK grocery stores. People buying these are not people who would otherwise have bought beef mince. They're people who already eat plant-based and want variety. That is a much more natural fit.

Think geographically. The assumption that North America is the primary market was probably wrong from the start. Large parts of the developing world already have high rates of plant-based eating — not for environmental reasons, but for economic and cultural ones. India has a vast vegetarian population. Many consumers across South and Southeast Asia already eat primarily plant-based diets. Selling into those markets does not require a conversion narrative. It requires a competitive product. Growth rates for plant-based consumption in these markets are already strong. The pioneering companies mostly ignored them.

B2B over direct-to-consumer. This is perhaps the most underexplored opportunity. When my friend and I sketched out a business plan for an insect protein company years ago, we quickly realised that trying to sell insect protein directly to consumers was an implausible battle. The more tractable routes were fitness enthusiasts looking for maximum protein per calorie with minimal aesthetic concern, and animal feed, where the end consumer has no say in the matter whatsoever. My dog ate a fly the other day without any encouragement, which I take as supporting evidence.

The same logic applies to plant-based protein more broadly. Pea protein is already one of the fastest-growing ingredients in fitness supplements. Selling plant-based protein as a B2B ingredient — into snack bars, protein supplements, baked goods, animal feed — allows the technology company to focus on engineering and scale, and lets the downstream brand owner handle the consumer positioning problem. The engineering innovation is real and valuable. The branding problem is someone else's to solve.

Predictions

A fully plant-based world in the next 30 to 50 years seems implausible. As incomes rise globally, meat consumption tends to rise with them — this is a consistent pattern. The rate at which consumers in London, Paris, or Copenhagen switch from meat to plant-based is probably not sufficient to offset the number of people in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan moving toward meat as they become wealthier. On balance, I would expect more meat eaters entering the global market than leaving it.

Plant-based burgers and steaks will remain a fringe category. The counterproductive positioning — you need to have eaten meat to want the substitute — combined with the centuries-deep branding moat of meat, makes a mass-market breakthrough unlikely.

Where I am genuinely bullish: B2B applications, lower-order uses in processed and baked goods, protein supplements, and emerging market localisation. As the technology becomes more commoditised, local players in India, Brazil, or Southeast Asia will take the underlying engineering and apply it to products designed for local tastes and palates. That is probably where the real scale emerges over the next decade.

On pricing: engineered products can be driven down in cost through iteration and scale in ways that conventional animal protein cannot. There is only so much you can compress a chicken. That cost advantage will increasingly open up lower-income markets and commodity ingredient applications.

The players who win will not be the ones who managed to put a convincing plant-based patty on a restaurant menu. They will be the ones who found the right technology-to-market fit, sold into niches where plant-based already makes intuitive sense, and used the B2B channel to avoid fighting branding battles they were never going to win.

The trough is real, but it is not the end of the story.

If you enjoyed this episode and would like us to do more deep dives into sustainability technologies, please drop me a message on LinkedIn or email me at saif@altruistiq.com. Hit follow so you never miss the next episode, and if you have a technology you'd like us to look at, I'd love to hear the suggestion.

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