When Tyson Foods, the largest industrial meat producer in the world, recently announced that it had taken a 5-percent share in Beyond Meat, a leader in the plant-based protein market, some animal-rights activists were enraged. They said Beyond Meat, which famously manufactures a pea-based burger that “bleeds,” had made a deal with the devil: “The blood of all the abused animals is on your hands,” wrote one critic. But in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Bruce Friedrich, executive director of the Good Food Institute, urged activists to rethink their stance. GFI collaborates with scientists, entrepreneurs, and investors to develop and promote plant-based alternatives to meat, milk and eggs. FERN’s Kristina Johnson called Friedrich to ask him about the future of plant-based proteins, and why getting more corporations like Tyson involved is a not only a good idea, but essential to countering factory-farmed meat and addressing climate change.
How much of the market do plant-based alternatives make up?
Plant-based meats make up about a quarter of 1 percent of the market in the U.S. and even less globally. Plant-based milk is almost 10 percent. People like Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Alphabet, Inc. (Google’s parent company), Bill Gates, Evan Williams (former Twitter CEO), and a lot of very smart investors suggest that the gap between those two is about to close. And when it does, plant-based meat goes from a $480-million-per-year industry to a $20-billion-a-year industry. We expect that to happen in short order.
What will it take to do that?
There is tremendous opportunity for both investment and research and development in this sphere. If we had this conversation just a few years ago, neither of us would be thinking of pea protein for its potential to be turned into plant-based milk or plant-based meat. But now pea protein is probably the hottest animal-product alternative. We have both Ripple, which is the darling of the plant-based milk market, and Beyond Meat, which is one of the darlings of the plant-based meat market. Both use a plant protein that wasn’t even contemplated a few years ago. In Europe, they’re working with another ingredient, lupine, which is used as a feed crop, like soy or canola, so it’s cheap. And it grows pretty much everywhere; you could have a field of lupine adjacent to your plant-based meat operation, cutting costs even more. We expect lupine to come to the U.S. very soon.
Why are we hearing ‘plant-based’ now instead of ‘vegan?’
Vegan comes with some baggage, whereas plant-based is simply a product descriptor. There has been a significant amount of research showing that once you label a product in terms of ethical preference, it becomes less appealing to people. One of the more famous examples was in a study earlier this year. When researchers told participants that jeans had been produced without child labor, the appeal of the jeans dropped. What our friends at the World Resources Institute found is that if you label something vegan, sales go down—even when it’s the exact same product. Whereas if you label the product “plant-based,” that’s just a descriptor, not an identity.
Is the goal to get people to stop eating meat altogether?
Our goal at GFI is to make products that people want to buy because the products are delicious, cost-competitive and convenient, not to convince people that they should go 100 percent plant-based. You find that roughly 80 or 90 percent of people who are consuming soy or almond milk are also consuming animal-based milk. They’re not making the choice based on ethics, they’re making the choice based on factors that everybody incorporates into their food choices: price, taste, convenience. We want to encourage people to do the same for plant-based meats. If the customer for plant-based meat is vegetarians and vegans, the sector is going to stay tiny.
So you have to make a product that is at least the same price as cheap meat and tastes the same or better. That sounds like a tough challenge.
I don’t think it’s a tough challenge. I think it’s just one that nobody has seriously taken up until recently. The most efficient meat is chicken. But it takes nine calories of chicken feed to get one calorie back out in the form of meat. Plants are exponentially more efficient. We just need to put some serious resources into research and development, with a goal of creating the best-tasting possible plant-based products and scale up. Once we do, plant-based will be cheaper than meat.
Why is it important to have the support of industrial meat companies like Tyson?
It was large corporations that pushed plant-based milk to 10 percent of the milk market. And almost none of that appeal had to do with climate, sustainability or animal concerns. They got there by appealing to consumers on the basis of concerns that 100 percent of consumers care about — price, taste and convenience. What I don’t think makes a tremendous amount of sense is attacking Tyson or Walmart for doing what we should be asking them to do, which is to produce more plant-based options and fewer animal-based options. To the degree that companies like Tyson, Walmart, and Cargill move toward plant-based options, it will make the global shift toward plant-based options significantly faster and easier, and we should be applauding it.
There are plenty of future-of-food predictions out there. How can we be sure that Tyson really thinks that plant-based is where the market is going, and not just covering its bases?
I imagine they have multiple reasons. They could simultaneously recognize that plant-based protein is “the future of food,” to quote Bill Gates. They might see plant-based protein as the solution to issues of climate change and sustainability, as Eric Schmidt said. And they could also be doing what’s smart for business by making sure they don’t have all their investments in one place. Regardless of why they’re doing it, they’re opening up connections and investment channels that wouldn’t exist if not for Tyson. We need these companies to get involved, regardless of their motivation.
How critical are plant-based alternatives to stemming the worst of climate change?
Chatham House, the foremost think tank in Europe, said in a report that it will be impossible for the governments of Europe to keep climate change under two degrees Celsius by 2050 [as they pledged under last year’s Paris agreement], unless animal-product consumption comes down significantly. On the issue of climate change, in particular, it’s worth remembering that the least-CO2-producing meat is chicken. And yet chicken produces 40 times as much CO2 per calorie of protein when compared to legumes like soy and peas. So the question is, do we simply tell people this and hope, for the first time in recorded history, that there is mass dietary change based on climate impact? Or do we put effort into creating less-harmful products that we can market to compete with the harmful products? GFI is focused on the latter option.
There has been a lot of attention on plant-based burgers. What product is next?
All of the ground meats will be the easiest, so chicken nuggets and fish sticks seem like natural and fairly easy meat-based products we can replicate with plant-based. But the R&D for plant-based is not even in its infancy—it’s in its gestation. We at GFI have seen some pretty encouraging plant-based machinery developments that lead us to believe it’s not too far off before everything in terms of animal-based meats will be replicated as plant-based. We’re going to see plant-based chicken breasts, pork chops and steaks in the fairly near future. I’m guessing that plant-based manufacturers won’t reconstruct the bone portion, but the consistency, taste, and appearance will be identical.