The future of plant-based foods

With its initial positioning of a vegetarian/vegan option having quickly to shifted to that of an animal protein alternative targeting the growing number of ‘flexitarian’ diners, in recent times the plant-based category has undergone a consolidation as end-users go for clean label over ‘numbers’ and quality wins out.

Delaware North Australia Culinary Director Markus Werner echoes the views of many chefs when he says, “Initially I put a lot of effort into researching the plant based category, I brought in products from 20 different companies and all my executive chefs from our larger venues came together and we had a tasting session. My takeout was that you might come across a couple of sensational products where you can’t taste the difference from regular meat and in fact it might even taste better than a poor quality meat, and that’s great. But you want to be sure of the quality.

“What’s most concerning for me is that food should be good for your body, and whenever I see a plant-based protein and I can’t understand the ingredients because they’re long lists of numbers, or have lots of artificial additives, I’m not interested. I don’t want to implement something and find in five years’ time that it’s worse for you than eating a piece of steak. Some of the plant-based products I’ve seen have enormous amounts of sugar or salt or different types of fat. We settled on a brand which is all-natural and has great flavours – because if it’s not good it’s not going on my menu.”

It's this attitude, shared by many chefs with which Foodservice Rep has spoken, which has helped drive a contraction of the market, as many players whose products were laden with additives or failed the ‘can’t tell the difference from meat’ taste test have shut up shop. The remaining ones are primarily those whose product quality has stood up to the rigorous demands of the market.

Major players have weathered the storm

Executive Chef David White of Simplot Australia, which offers an extensive range of plant-based products under the Edgell brand, prefers to describe what’s happened to the market as a consolidation rather than a contraction, but acknowledges that many competitors couldn’t cut it on the quality front.

“In any new market opportunity where everyone can see the potential for growth, you get a lot of initial investment. The thing about plant proteins was that if you have the equipment to process formed meat then you can see process plant based proteins – so there was a low entry cost for many businesses to get involved in that space. What may have let some of them down was that they couldn’t scale up the marketing and sales side to get their product over the line – the bigger players are able to do that and weather the storm. In our case we’re selling under the Edgell brand which is a long established and reputable brand and foodservice professionals have said ‘I trust Edgell so I’ll give this product a try’.

“That works initially, but of course you need the quality to be up there to keep them coming back. I think when plant based first took off there were products which got a lot of media attention but now they’re not as new and cutting edge as they seemed, so it comes back to trust, reliability, supply chain consistency and above all quality. Plant based is no longer a novelty, it’s become mainstream – when I look back to the start of our four year journey in this category, I could see at the start plant based becoming mainstream in two years and that’s pretty much how it played out.

“Because we didn’t rush into the plant based space, we had the luxury of looking at what other people were developing and then asking ourselves, where do we want to be? We realised the product needed to be neutral tasting rather than a lot which were on the market with very strong grainy taste and cereal notes.

“If you’re cooking a Thai green curry you should be able to put our product in there and there should be no flavour difference – whereas some other products have strong flavours and the chef needs to compensate by changing the recipe.

“Texture also needed to be familiar and comparable with animal protein, again to assist in swapping out with the animal protein in a recipe. We also decided to package in individually quick frozen pieces so you can take as much or as little as you want out of the freezer – that also gives you effective portion control and minimal wastage.

“The other standpoint we took early on was we wanted our products to be ingredients. Initially plant based was all about burger patties, but we said ‘what if someone wants to make a casserole or a bolognese or a soup?’ So we developed plant based mince, meatballs, beef strips, chicken pieces - things people cook with - and then that flavour neutrality comes into play because you can swap them out with animal protein, which has been great for markets like health and aged care where they have standardised menus because they can just change it over with no retesting.

“And the last one for us was the recognition that people were taking a close look at the ingredients list of some plant based products and asking, what is all this stuff? So our final driver was clean label. If you look at our plant based chicken pieces the ingredients are soy, water and spices. There’s nothing scary in there, nothing people don't recognise, it’s taste neutral, it’s portionable – and those practicality points we brought came from entering the market not too early. We took a cautious approach and it’s played out well in the longterm.

“To the point around the market shrinking, my feeling is it was artificially large to begin with and now it’s consolidated back to normality – I feel it will level out and then grow again. The fact is we need to feed the planet and these proteins are sustainable and more cost-effective than animal protein over the longer term. I actually believe that in 15-20 years’ time meat will be something we only eat occasionally – it’s going to move away from the everyday, as its cost continues to rise whereas plant proteins come down to the point where everyone regards them as a cheap, good quality, affordable protein and an everyday ingredient choice.

“We’re now seeing more clearly what the future of the category is going to be – more and more clean label, with basic ingredients that people recognise, and lots of different textures to the point where we can say, this product tastes like rump, this one like sirloin, this one like eye fillet. What we’ve learnt as the technology has progressed is that blending certain plant proteins gives you different textures – when you blend pea protein, soy protein and a little wheat you can get a texture like sirloin. That level of control is already here. So you're going to buy one plant based product for stewing, another for steak and another because it has the texture of chicken breast. You’ll actually be able to have that level of choice and ability to modify your menu accordingly.”